WARNING: The following film is thought provoking and true. Watch at your own discretion. You will not look at your country the same. Try to remain calm. Do not over-react, just watch, think, then do. I am not advocating anything. I am simply informing.
Aug 22, 2009
Aug 15, 2009
Transparency in Government
On the campaign trail BHO promised "transparency in US Government". On the surface we see on THIS WEBSITE the precise accounting of every dollar spent by the government. Good start. Kudos, BHO. But when we scratch beneath the service slightly we see a different story. For exam
ple, read this news story from Propublica.com:
"Back in July, a software company named Smartronix [1] landed an $18 million contract to build a Web site where taxpayers could easily track billions in federal stimulus money. It was just another part of the Obama administration’s ongoing effort to bring transparency to stimulus spending, we were told.
But it seems the drive for transparency doesn’t cover the contract itself.
After weeks of prodding by ProPublica and other organizations, the General Services Administration released copies of the contract and related documents that are so heavily blacked out they are virtually worthless.
Don’t believe us? Take a look. [2]
ProPublica sought the contract under the Freedom of Information Act to find out what kind of site Smartronix planned to build and to assess whether it justified the cost, which Republican critics of the stimulus plan called “unreal.” [3]
Ed Pound, the director of communications for the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, defended the redactions as “legitimate.” The Web site Smartronix is to build will replace Recovery.gov [4], the existing stimulus Web portal run by the transparency board.
“I’m not concerned about whether journalists are concerned about this,” Pound said. “We have been very transparent.”
The GSA declined to comment, but said in its response to ProPublica’s FOIA request that such redactions were allowed if material “involves substantial risk of competitive injury” to a contractor.
But the blacked-out information includes material that seems harmless to the company, such as the names and backgrounds of key personnel [2] and the number of visitors expected [5] by the site during traffic spikes.
Some sections of the contract were redacted in their entirety. They include:
In all, 25 pages of a 59-page technical proposal — the main document in the package — were redacted completely. Of the remaining pages, 14 had half or more of their content blacked out.
The secrecy drew criticism from government transparency watchdogs.
Lucy Dalglish, executive director of Washington, D.C.-based Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press [6], noted that information labeled “contractor proposed deliverables [7]” had been completely redacted.
“I think it’s on the one hand funny, but on the other hand frightening,” said Dalglish. “How are you going to keep these people’s feet to the fire? You can’t evaluate whether or not they delivered on the contract unless you know what they promised to deliver. That’s just nuts.”
Dave Levinthal, a spokesman for the Center for Responsive Politics [8], agreed. “It’s difficult to make an accurate comparison with any other potential services when you can’t even see what the rates are for different types of programming services and job functions,” he said. “Sure, you get the overall number, but could there be a better deal out there? We don’t know.”
A spokeswoman for Smartronix, headquartered in Maryland, confirmed that the company was given the chance to propose redactions in the documents, as allowed by the Freedom of Information Act.
However, Charles Davis, executive director of the National Freedom of Information Coalition [9], faulted the GSA for allowing the documents to be redacted so extensively.
“The government should have come back at the redaction and said, ‘Oh, for the love of God, nobody can tell anything from what you’ve redacted here,’” said Davis. “If you’re going to create a system designed ostensibly to provide greater transparency around a piece of the federal government, it would certainly be a great start to provide some transparency in the contract itself.”
Clay Johnson, the director of the Sunlight Labs [10] project at the Sunlight Foundation [11], called the level of redaction in the documents remarkable.
“I think the people have a right to know what their money is being spent on,” he said. “We still don’t really know what the government’s buying here, other than that it’s a Web site.”
The criticism from the Sunlight Foundation is notable. Smartronix says in its proposal that it has “engaged the Sunlight Foundation as advisers on government transparency [12],” adding that the foundation “is willing to advise Team Smartronix on transparency [2].”
Johnson disputed that characterization. He said that while he had spoken with one of Smartronix’s subcontractors and agreed to have Sunlight listed as an adviser, he had never spoken with anyone from the company itself and isn’t involved in the contract.
“We’re willing to advise anybody on transparency,” said Johnson.
ProPublica has filed an appeal with the GSA, arguing that the redactions were excessive and requesting that more of the information in the Smartronix documents be released. We’ll let you know what it says."
This is no joke! The following are screen shots from the contract obtained by freedom of information act.
How's that for change you can believe in? I say keep the change.
ple, read this news story from Propublica.com:"Back in July, a software company named Smartronix [1] landed an $18 million contract to build a Web site where taxpayers could easily track billions in federal stimulus money. It was just another part of the Obama administration’s ongoing effort to bring transparency to stimulus spending, we were told.
But it seems the drive for transparency doesn’t cover the contract itself.
After weeks of prodding by ProPublica and other organizations, the General Services Administration released copies of the contract and related documents that are so heavily blacked out they are virtually worthless.
Don’t believe us? Take a look. [2]
ProPublica sought the contract under the Freedom of Information Act to find out what kind of site Smartronix planned to build and to assess whether it justified the cost, which Republican critics of the stimulus plan called “unreal.” [3]
Ed Pound, the director of communications for the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, defended the redactions as “legitimate.” The Web site Smartronix is to build will replace Recovery.gov [4], the existing stimulus Web portal run by the transparency board.
“I’m not concerned about whether journalists are concerned about this,” Pound said. “We have been very transparent.”
The GSA declined to comment, but said in its response to ProPublica’s FOIA request that such redactions were allowed if material “involves substantial risk of competitive injury” to a contractor.
But the blacked-out information includes material that seems harmless to the company, such as the names and backgrounds of key personnel [2] and the number of visitors expected [5] by the site during traffic spikes.
Some sections of the contract were redacted in their entirety. They include:
- the project’s management structure [17];
- something called the “Strategic Advisory Council [18]”;
- quality assurance [19] procedures;
- five pages on user experience [20];
- site navigation [21];
- four unidentified pages [22] on which everything, even section headings, have been redacted;
- every single piece of information in the document’s pricing table [23], including function, vendor, model, part ID, detail and quantity;
- the contract’s warranty agreement [24].
In all, 25 pages of a 59-page technical proposal — the main document in the package — were redacted completely. Of the remaining pages, 14 had half or more of their content blacked out.
Lucy Dalglish, executive director of Washington, D.C.-based Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press [6], noted that information labeled “contractor proposed deliverables [7]” had been completely redacted.
“I think it’s on the one hand funny, but on the other hand frightening,” said Dalglish. “How are you going to keep these people’s feet to the fire? You can’t evaluate whether or not they delivered on the contract unless you know what they promised to deliver. That’s just nuts.”
Dave Levinthal, a spokesman for the Center for Responsive Politics [8], agreed. “It’s difficult to make an accurate comparison with any other potential services when you can’t even see what the rates are for different types of programming services and job functions,” he said. “Sure, you get the overall number, but could there be a better deal out there? We don’t know.”
A spokeswoman for Smartronix, headquartered in Maryland, confirmed that the company was given the chance to propose redactions in the documents, as allowed by the Freedom of Information Act.
However, Charles Davis, executive director of the National Freedom of Information Coalition [9], faulted the GSA for allowing the documents to be redacted so extensively.
“The government should have come back at the redaction and said, ‘Oh, for the love of God, nobody can tell anything from what you’ve redacted here,’” said Davis. “If you’re going to create a system designed ostensibly to provide greater transparency around a piece of the federal government, it would certainly be a great start to provide some transparency in the contract itself.”
Clay Johnson, the director of the Sunlight Labs [10] project at the Sunlight Foundation [11], called the level of redaction in the documents remarkable.
“I think the people have a right to know what their money is being spent on,” he said. “We still don’t really know what the government’s buying here, other than that it’s a Web site.”
The criticism from the Sunlight Foundation is notable. Smartronix says in its proposal that it has “engaged the Sunlight Foundation as advisers on government transparency [12],” adding that the foundation “is willing to advise Team Smartronix on transparency [2].”
Johnson disputed that characterization. He said that while he had spoken with one of Smartronix’s subcontractors and agreed to have Sunlight listed as an adviser, he had never spoken with anyone from the company itself and isn’t involved in the contract.
“We’re willing to advise anybody on transparency,” said Johnson.
ProPublica has filed an appeal with the GSA, arguing that the redactions were excessive and requesting that more of the information in the Smartronix documents be released. We’ll let you know what it says."
This is no joke! The following are screen shots from the contract obtained by freedom of information act.
How's that for change you can believe in? I say keep the change.
Aug 12, 2009
How much is your life worth?
What is the worth of a human life? Read this article from Human events and see where American health care is going under government run health care:
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=33100
I have printed this article by Newt Gingrich below:
How much is one additional year of your life worth?
Or one more year of life for your father or your wife? For your child?
In Great Britain, the government has settled on a number: $45,000.
That’s how much a government commission with the Orwellian acronym NICE has decided British government-run health care will pay for one additional year of life for a British subject.
Think it could never happen here? Then you need to pay closer attention to what Washington is planning for your health care.
British Government Bureaucrats Literally Decide if Your Life is Worth Living
The British single-payer bureaucrats arrived at the price of an additional year of life in the same way they decide how much health care all British people will get, through a formula called “quality-adjusted life years.”
That means that if you’re sick in Great Britain, government bureaucrats literally decide if your life is worth living and, if so, how much longer and at what cost.
If it’s more than $45,000, you’re out of luck.
A Well-Connected White House Advocate for Allocating Health Care Based on Perceived Societal Worth
In the highest levels of the Obama Administration there is a theory of how to ration health care that is troublingly reminiscent of the British system of “quality-adjusted life years.”
Dr. Ezekial Emanuel is a key health care advisor to President Obama and the brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. Earlier this year, Dr. Emanuel wrote an article that advocated what he called “the complete lives system” as a method for rationing health care. You can read it here.
The system advocated by Dr. Emanuel would allocate health care based on the government’s perception of the societal worth of the patients. Accordingly, the very young and the very old would receive less care since the former have received less societal investment and the latter have less left to contribute.
“Forstall[ing] the Concern that Disproportionate Amounts of Resources Will be Directed to Young People with Poor Prognosis”
“The Complete Lives System” would also consider the prognosis of the individual.
Quoting Dr. Emanuel: “A young person with a poor prognosis has had few life-years but lacks the potential to live a complete life. Considering prognosis forestalls the concern that disproportionately large amounts of resources will be directed to young people with poor prognosis.”
When fully implemented, Dr. Emanuel’s system, in his words, “produces a priority curve on which individuals aged between roughly 15 and 40 years get the most substantial chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated.”
“Chances that are attenuated” is a nice way of saying the young and the old are considered less worthy of health care and, under this system, will get less.
Once Government Becomes the Provider of Health Care, Personal Decisions Become Public Decisions
The point is not that a health care rationing system like the one favored by Dr. Emmanuel will be implemented in the United States tomorrow.
The point is that, as in the British system, once government becomes the single payer or even the main payer of health care, what were once intensely personal decisions become public decisions. And as costs rise, government will look for ways to contain them.
The inevitable result of this pressure to control costs will be rationing, whether it occurs during this administration or the next. At some point, the government will be forced to deny care to those who don’t meet the latest “quality-adjusted life years” cost-benefit analysis.
So the decision on what treatment to pursue that once would have been made by you and your doctor is now made for you by a bureaucrat using a formula -- a formula to literally determine if your life is worth saving.
The Camel’s Nose Under the Tent of Health Care Rationing
Societies don’t arrive at this point overnight.
British health care was nationalized soon after World War II, but NICE, the health care rationing agency, wasn’t created until the late 1990s as a way to control costs.
Today NICE routinely denies Britons life-prolonging drugs that are deemed not “cost effective” -- drugs that are widely prescribed in America to treat cancer, Alzheimer’s disease and other serious conditions.
The result, studies show, is that Great Britain’s cancer survival rates are among the worst in Europe and lag behind the United States.
In America, Rationing Begins with Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER)
In our country, the road to dehumanizing, bureaucratic health care rationing begins with something called comparative effectiveness research (CER). It sounds completely innocent. In practice, CER means comparing different treatments for diseases to see which works best. And what doctor or patient would object to that, right?
The problem is that, in the context of a government-run health care system, comparative effectiveness research becomes a way to find a cheaper, one-size-fits-all approach to medicine that will limit health care choices for patients.
But don’t just take my word for it. Congressional Democrats included $1.1 billion in the Stimulus Bill for CER. Report language explaining the bill noted that the treatments found to be “more expensive” as result of the research “will no longer be prescribed” and that “guidelines” should be developed to manage doctors.
Congressional Democrats also killed several amendments to the current health care bill that would have prevented CER from being used to ration care. (To learn more about the common-sense amendments to the bill that have been blocked, click here).
The Government Has Determined You Must Take the Blue Pill
President Obama innocuously described the intended result of comparative effectiveness research like this: “If there’s a blue pill and a red pill, and the blue pill is half the price of the red pill and works just as well, why not pay half price for the thing that’s going to make you well?”
Listen to what the President is saying here. He’s saying that the government is capable of determining which pill works best for you and should therefore only pay for that pill.
But this one-size-fits-all approach goes against everything modern medicine is learning about the genetics of the human body. Different individuals and members of different ethnic and age groups respond differently to treatments. More and more, treatment of diseases like cancer is highly individualized and based on a genetic analysis of both the patient and her disease. Science is leading us in one direction and the administration and the Congress are taking us in the other.
What if you get sick and your doctor says you need the red pill, but the government has determined that the blue pill is what works best for its budget? In a single payer health world, what do you do then?
Creating a Commission to do the Dirty Work
Government bureaucrats limiting health care choices is terribly unpopular of course, which is why politicians use terms like “comparative effectiveness research” instead of “rationing.”
Another method Washington uses to avoid complicity in health care rationing is the creation of government boards or commissions -- like Britain’s NICE -- to do the job for them.
President Obama has expressed his support for using the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC), a commission created to advise Congress on Medicare, to achieve cost savings under health care reform.
Because the commission’s decisions could only be over-ridden by a joint resolution of Congress, it would be virtually unaccountable to the people -- and nervous members of Congress could blame the commission for unpopular decisions.
Combine this kind of a commission with the “complete lives system” advocated by White House health care advisor Dr. Ezekial Emanuel and you end up with a government rationing board literally determining which Americans should live and which should die.
Just Trust the Government
Supporters of government-run health care dismiss these worries as alarmist. They argue that because their big government health care bill doesn’t overtly call for rationing, it is somehow illegitimate to talk about this danger.
But it is always legitimate to consider the long-term consequences of a government program. By refusing to have an honest debate of this issue -- to explore honestly the consequences of the “painful choices” that all supporters of government health care say must be made -- their argument boils down to nothing more than this:
Trust the government.
Trust the politicians who are passing 1000-page bills they haven’t read.
Trust the leaders who are demonizing the citizens seeking to express their disagreement by calling them “un-American.”
Trust the advisors who advocate sacrificing the weak and the old and then hide in the shadows.
Trust the government to know what’s best for the most intimate, most personal part of you and your family’s life: your health.
Go ask a British citizen if it’s worth it.
To just shut up and trust the government.
Newt Gingrich
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=33100
I have printed this article by Newt Gingrich below:
How much is one additional year of your life worth?
Or one more year of life for your father or your wife? For your child?
In Great Britain, the government has settled on a number: $45,000.
That’s how much a government commission with the Orwellian acronym NICE has decided British government-run health care will pay for one additional year of life for a British subject.
Think it could never happen here? Then you need to pay closer attention to what Washington is planning for your health care.
British Government Bureaucrats Literally Decide if Your Life is Worth Living
The British single-payer bureaucrats arrived at the price of an additional year of life in the same way they decide how much health care all British people will get, through a formula called “quality-adjusted life years.”
That means that if you’re sick in Great Britain, government bureaucrats literally decide if your life is worth living and, if so, how much longer and at what cost.
If it’s more than $45,000, you’re out of luck.
A Well-Connected White House Advocate for Allocating Health Care Based on Perceived Societal Worth
In the highest levels of the Obama Administration there is a theory of how to ration health care that is troublingly reminiscent of the British system of “quality-adjusted life years.”
Dr. Ezekial Emanuel is a key health care advisor to President Obama and the brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. Earlier this year, Dr. Emanuel wrote an article that advocated what he called “the complete lives system” as a method for rationing health care. You can read it here.
The system advocated by Dr. Emanuel would allocate health care based on the government’s perception of the societal worth of the patients. Accordingly, the very young and the very old would receive less care since the former have received less societal investment and the latter have less left to contribute.
“Forstall[ing] the Concern that Disproportionate Amounts of Resources Will be Directed to Young People with Poor Prognosis”
“The Complete Lives System” would also consider the prognosis of the individual.
Quoting Dr. Emanuel: “A young person with a poor prognosis has had few life-years but lacks the potential to live a complete life. Considering prognosis forestalls the concern that disproportionately large amounts of resources will be directed to young people with poor prognosis.”
When fully implemented, Dr. Emanuel’s system, in his words, “produces a priority curve on which individuals aged between roughly 15 and 40 years get the most substantial chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated.”
“Chances that are attenuated” is a nice way of saying the young and the old are considered less worthy of health care and, under this system, will get less.
Once Government Becomes the Provider of Health Care, Personal Decisions Become Public Decisions
The point is not that a health care rationing system like the one favored by Dr. Emmanuel will be implemented in the United States tomorrow.
The point is that, as in the British system, once government becomes the single payer or even the main payer of health care, what were once intensely personal decisions become public decisions. And as costs rise, government will look for ways to contain them.
The inevitable result of this pressure to control costs will be rationing, whether it occurs during this administration or the next. At some point, the government will be forced to deny care to those who don’t meet the latest “quality-adjusted life years” cost-benefit analysis.
So the decision on what treatment to pursue that once would have been made by you and your doctor is now made for you by a bureaucrat using a formula -- a formula to literally determine if your life is worth saving.
The Camel’s Nose Under the Tent of Health Care Rationing
Societies don’t arrive at this point overnight.
British health care was nationalized soon after World War II, but NICE, the health care rationing agency, wasn’t created until the late 1990s as a way to control costs.
Today NICE routinely denies Britons life-prolonging drugs that are deemed not “cost effective” -- drugs that are widely prescribed in America to treat cancer, Alzheimer’s disease and other serious conditions.
The result, studies show, is that Great Britain’s cancer survival rates are among the worst in Europe and lag behind the United States.
In America, Rationing Begins with Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER)
In our country, the road to dehumanizing, bureaucratic health care rationing begins with something called comparative effectiveness research (CER). It sounds completely innocent. In practice, CER means comparing different treatments for diseases to see which works best. And what doctor or patient would object to that, right?
The problem is that, in the context of a government-run health care system, comparative effectiveness research becomes a way to find a cheaper, one-size-fits-all approach to medicine that will limit health care choices for patients.
But don’t just take my word for it. Congressional Democrats included $1.1 billion in the Stimulus Bill for CER. Report language explaining the bill noted that the treatments found to be “more expensive” as result of the research “will no longer be prescribed” and that “guidelines” should be developed to manage doctors.
Congressional Democrats also killed several amendments to the current health care bill that would have prevented CER from being used to ration care. (To learn more about the common-sense amendments to the bill that have been blocked, click here).
The Government Has Determined You Must Take the Blue Pill
President Obama innocuously described the intended result of comparative effectiveness research like this: “If there’s a blue pill and a red pill, and the blue pill is half the price of the red pill and works just as well, why not pay half price for the thing that’s going to make you well?”
Listen to what the President is saying here. He’s saying that the government is capable of determining which pill works best for you and should therefore only pay for that pill.
But this one-size-fits-all approach goes against everything modern medicine is learning about the genetics of the human body. Different individuals and members of different ethnic and age groups respond differently to treatments. More and more, treatment of diseases like cancer is highly individualized and based on a genetic analysis of both the patient and her disease. Science is leading us in one direction and the administration and the Congress are taking us in the other.
What if you get sick and your doctor says you need the red pill, but the government has determined that the blue pill is what works best for its budget? In a single payer health world, what do you do then?
Creating a Commission to do the Dirty Work
Government bureaucrats limiting health care choices is terribly unpopular of course, which is why politicians use terms like “comparative effectiveness research” instead of “rationing.”
Another method Washington uses to avoid complicity in health care rationing is the creation of government boards or commissions -- like Britain’s NICE -- to do the job for them.
President Obama has expressed his support for using the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC), a commission created to advise Congress on Medicare, to achieve cost savings under health care reform.
Because the commission’s decisions could only be over-ridden by a joint resolution of Congress, it would be virtually unaccountable to the people -- and nervous members of Congress could blame the commission for unpopular decisions.
Combine this kind of a commission with the “complete lives system” advocated by White House health care advisor Dr. Ezekial Emanuel and you end up with a government rationing board literally determining which Americans should live and which should die.
Just Trust the Government
Supporters of government-run health care dismiss these worries as alarmist. They argue that because their big government health care bill doesn’t overtly call for rationing, it is somehow illegitimate to talk about this danger.
But it is always legitimate to consider the long-term consequences of a government program. By refusing to have an honest debate of this issue -- to explore honestly the consequences of the “painful choices” that all supporters of government health care say must be made -- their argument boils down to nothing more than this:
Trust the government.
Trust the politicians who are passing 1000-page bills they haven’t read.
Trust the leaders who are demonizing the citizens seeking to express their disagreement by calling them “un-American.”
Trust the advisors who advocate sacrificing the weak and the old and then hide in the shadows.
Trust the government to know what’s best for the most intimate, most personal part of you and your family’s life: your health.
Go ask a British citizen if it’s worth it.
To just shut up and trust the government.
Newt Gingrich
Aug 10, 2009
Words forbidden in Newspeak:
This would be ridiculous and funny if it were not true. The masters of political correctness are at it again:
Jun 17, 2009
Health Care companies do not really care.
In this age of hypocrisy and duplicity, is it any wonder we are a sick nation? We see contradictions on every hand. On one hand we want to preserve life by abolishing the death penalty. On the other we want to abort life through the third trimester in the mother's womb. On one hand we protest against drunk drivers. On the other hand we sell liquor like water in the desert and even go to absurd extreme of drive in liquor stores.
Now I find an article from the Scientific American stating that HMOs are invested heavily in tobbacco companies. Read for yourself here and comment.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/60-second-science/post.cfm?id=health-insurers-want-you-to-keep-sm-2009-06-03&sc=WR_20090609
Now I find an article from the Scientific American stating that HMOs are invested heavily in tobbacco companies. Read for yourself here and comment.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/60-second-science/post.cfm?id=health-insurers-want-you-to-keep-sm-2009-06-03&sc=WR_20090609
May 1, 2009
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
