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Maine demands that pro-marriage group reveal donor names

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ABC News reports.

Excerpt:

Maine’s ethics panel fined a national anti-gay marriage group more than $50,000 on Wednesday and ordered it to reveal the donors who backed its efforts to repeal the state’s gay marriage law.

The Maine Commission on Governmental Ethics and Election Practices found that the National Organization for Marriage violated campaign finance laws by failing to properly register as a ballot question committee and file financial reports in the 2009 referendum that struck down gay marriage. Same-sex unions were legalized by voters in 2012.

The commission also ruled that the organization must file a campaign finance report, which would force it to disclose the names of its donors. The National Organization for Marriage has fought for years to keep its donor list secret, saying doing so would put its contributors at risk for harassment and intimidation.

[…]”We didn’t create a scheme, we tried to follow the law,” Brian Brown, president of the Washington, D.C.-based organization, told the four-member panel on Wednesday.

Brown, who served as executive director of the National Organization for Marriage in 2009, was one of three members of the committee that led the Stand for Marriage Maine PAC.

Commissioners said his dual role and the fact that the national group controlled a majority of the PAC’s funds was problematic for its argument that the funds weren’t raised to influence the Maine campaign.

The group says that it’s being targeted because of its stance on gay marriage and that groups on the other side of the issue — such as the Human Rights Campaign — followed the same guidelines.

State investigators said that its examination of the National Organization for Marriage actions was brought by a specific complaint and that the organization could have sought a similar investigation into the Human Rights Campaign.

John Eastman, a National Organization for Marriage lawyer, said that it intends to file a complaint against HRC in addition to filing an appeal.

The Human Rights Campaign mentioned in the article called the Family Research Council a “hate group”. The FRC was the target of an act of domestic terrorism by a gay activist who also thought that the Family Research Council was a “hate group”. The Human Rights Campaign was also implicated in the IRS leak of NOM donors.

What will gay activists do with the list of donor names? Ask Brendan Eich what they will do with it.

News

Catholic doctors in the UK advised to emigrate

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From The Tablet. (H/T Jay Richards)

Excerpt:

Catholic doctors who follow church teaching on sexual ethics cannot work as gynaecologists in Britain, the Catholic Medical Association (CMA) conference was told.

Charlie O’Donnell, a consultant in emergency and intensive care medicine, said the best advice he could give to an “orthodox” Catholic wishing to specialise in obstetrics and gynaecology would be to “emigrate”.

Dr O’Donnell told the conference at Ealing Abbey, west London, on 17 May that a Catholic training to be a consultant in obstetrics and gynaecology would soon find he or she had conscientious objections to such tasks as prescribing artificial contraceptives, giving unmarried couples fertility treatment or Viagra to gay couples.

He said that supervising consultants do not have the backup to allow trainees to opt out if they have moral objections to such work. However, conscientious objection to abortion is allowed because of specific provision in the 1967 Abortion Act.

“To be a sound Catholic regarding sexual ethics it is not possible to train as a consultant obstetrician and gynaecologist but this is not because of discrimination against Catholics. There is a total conflict of culture of what is good sex, a dichotomy of belief between what we as Christians believe is good overall for the individual and what secular society believes,” said Dr O’Donnell.

Last week the president of the CMA, Dr Robert Hardie sought clarification concerning reports that doctors and nurses with conscientious objections would be barred from obtaining a diploma from the Faculty of Sexual and Reproductive Health (FSRH). Medical staff normally need the diploma to work in sexual and reproductive healthcare.

The Catholic Church is an interesting case. Although some Catholics are economically conservative, by and large Catholics tend to vote for bigger government, higher taxes and more regulations. Many now think that the point of their religion is to help the poor, and there is generally less emphasis on truth, theology and apologetics than in Protestantism. Well, what happens when lay Catholics begin to think their faith is about spreading the wealth around? They vote for secular politicians who promise to do that. As the secular government grows larger and larger, there is less room for faith commitments in the public square. The very Catholics who voted for Labour and the Liberal Democrats to “help the poor” are the ones running into problems now. I wonder if they have learned their lesson.

News

VA socialized medicine: bonuses awarded as customers died on waiting lists

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In the private sector, bonuses are paid to people who can offer customers the best products and services at the lowest price. That’s how a firm like Apple or Amazon makes a profit. By pleasing customers. But government-run firms make money a different way – by killing customers.

Stephen Moore explains in Investors Business Daily.

Excerpt:

The Veterans Affairs Department health care scandal has deepened in recent days, with new revelations of incompetent management and misplaced spending priorities, including millions of dollars paid out in bonuses at the very hospitals where services were the worst.

[…]Freedom of Information Act requests by Illinois-based watchdog group Open the Books reveal that the VA spent millions on bonuses during the last three years at Hines.

Worse, in 2013, only about one-in-four of Hines’ 4,230 employees were those providing the actual primary care: doctors (309) or nurses (about 800), Open the Books found.

Five veterans died waiting for care at Hines.

As far back as 1999, the VA had found systemic quality-of-care problems at Hines with little done to correct them. A VA study concluded that “Hines has the most inefficient physical plant for inpatient care and the most significant compliance issues with patient privacy.”

In 2005, a VA study rated Chicago the worst regional office in the country. Now the man in charge at Hines, Murawsky, has been elevated to oversight of the entire VA system.

Democrats have been trying to say that the problem is that they were not able to spend even more money, because the national debt at 17.5 trillion is not high enough.

Moore notes that the problem is misspending:

The revelations of bonuses suggest that misspending may be the biggest problem.

The VA’s own budget numbers indicate a more-than doubling of the agency’s expenditures to $57 billion from $28 billion since 2003. The patient load is up only about one-third over the decade.

So the VA has more money than ever per patient, even after adjusting for inflation.

As far as mismanagement, the problem of “performance” bonuses at the VA appears to have been systemic. An Open the Books investigation has found:

  • One in five employees at the Phoenix VA received bonuses in 2013, with some receiving extra pay of $5,000 or more. The total bonus payouts were $337,885.
  • As many as 40 veterans may have died awaiting care at this hospital system and about 1,300 waited more than six months for care.
  • In 2013, Phoenix VA Director Sharon Helman received the No. 1 bonus out of 3,170 employees (at Phoenix): $9,345. The number of avoidable deaths was higher than at nearly any other hospital.
  • In Chicago, $1 billion in salaries were supplemented with $4 million in bonuses over a three-year period.
  • At the seven most troubled VA facilities, almost $9 million in bonuses were paid out to 13,000 employees.

This might remind you of the National Health Service’s “Liverpool Care Pathway” program, in which doctors were awarded bonuses for freeing up hospital beds by transferring patients to terminal care.

Paul Krugman approves

Supporters of more government-run health care like Paul Krugman had previously praised the VA system as “huge policy success story, which offers important lessons for future health reform.”

Ben Shapiro has a full quote from Krugman:

Paul Krugman in 2011 wrote of the VA’s “huge success story”:

Multiple surveys have found the VHA providing better care than most Americans receive, even as the agency has held cost increases well below those facing Medicare and private insurers…the VHA is an integrated system, which provides health care as well as paying for it. So it’s free from the perverse incentives created when doctors and hospitals profit from expensive tests and procedures, whether or not those procedures actually make medical sense.

Krugman added, “Yes, this is ‘socialized medicine’…But it works, and suggests what it will take to solve the troubles of US health care more broadly.”

This is what people on the left wanted. The VA system is even WORSE than single-payer. At least in a single-payer system, only the payment is government-run. But the VA system is completely government-run. And the outcomes we are seeing in the system is exactly what you would expect when the people running the system are paid regardless of whether the customer is served. Or whether the customer even lives! At least in the private sector system, you have to serve the customer to make money – otherwise they will take their money to a competitor. Not so in the VA system, and that’s the problem. They don’t have to make a profit to survive, so they don’t care about winning business from customers in a competitive market.