Claims And Issues

Claims and Issues -- Author's Note: Commercial Advertising Not Authorized and Not Linked.

 

**Author's Note:  If you have reached this blog through a list that carries advertising, your computer may or may not be put at risk either through the list or through the advertising.  I do not accept or authorize any commercial advertising of any kind on any list or post.  Hyperlinks are offered here as a courtesy to my readers.  In this digital age, readers may have come to expect hyperlinks.  Rather than posting notices with each and every hyperlink that may be cited on this blog, please note this:  If you choose to use any of the hyperlinks offered here, be advised that these links to third-party sites offering online access are strictly under their exclusive control.  Placing commercial advertisements with or near any of my web log posts is prohibited.  Further, I do not recommend any products or services advertised with or near any of my posts or any list of my posts, nor do I accept any payments of any kind for any links displayed on this blog.** 

 

"BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT": O.J. SIMPSON vs. MICHAEL COHEN AT TRIAL.

Some of Michael Cohen's trial testimony may prove unbelievable to the jury, but not for the reasons you may have heard.  His testimony raises two issues in my mind.  The first issue is the degree of Michael Cohen's credibility as a witness in this trial.  The second question is the effect of Michael Cohen's testimony on reaching a verdict.

          Much ado has been made about, well, one telephone call on I believe it was October 24, 2016.  On the transcript, the big brouhaha sure doesn't seem like much more than one telephone call and the witness handled it well on cross-examination last Thursday.  On the air, cable media freaked out, and in print, columnists wrote like they needed oxygen.  The emotions brought out by Todd Blanche's cross-examination of Michael Cohen over one telephone call seemingly erupted and captured the attention of columnists and cable media.

          They do not seem to have been reading the trial transcripts.  Kudos to the New York State Court System for posting them so that anyone with online access can read them, and a big thanks to the Washington Post for making them truly accessible and even searchable.  I have been reading the daily trial transcripts on the Washington Post website, and I have read all of Michael Cohen's testimony.

          Michael Cohen comes across mostly as unbelievable in the transcripts.  I did not think this would be my reaction, but after reading the transcripts, it is.

          The prosecution understandably rehearsed his witness testimony with Mr. Cohen, but in his case the preparation must have been very extensive, so much so that he actually testified that he remembered just about every phone call, every text, and every EMail that he sent or received over the course of years, so long as the Assistant D.A. asked him about it.  Nobody remembers those things from years ago, and some of us do not even remember what we said or wrote last week.  So Mr. Cohen's recollection of them all is incredible, unbelievable, unconvincing from reading the trial transcript.  It is true that Todd Blanche's cross-examination was long and tedious.  It was so meandering it became infuriating many times.  But perhaps a long cross-examination of Michael Cohen was appropriate here, given the long recitation of calls, texts, and EMails during the Prosecution's direct examination of Cohen.

          That said, Michael Cohen's testimony was credible in corroborating other witnesses and documentary evidence on important points.  He corroborated the plan directed by the defendant to pay witnesses to keep quiet at a critical point in the 2016 presidential election, and then to lie about it in order to cover it up, not just in their records but also in what they said about it publicly.

          The talking heads and opinion artists had a different reaction to all that of course.  Their big takeaway at first was they were impressed that Michael Cohen handled himself well because he did not erupt, forgetting that this jury has seen Michael Cohen only when he took the witness stand in this trial.  They had nothing to compare his performance with, unlike the pundits who were impressed by his controlled demeanor.

          Until the one phone call of October 24th.  Then their hormones apparently woke up.  They responded now with emotion to the words and gestures during Todd Blanche's cross-examination and Michael Cohen's spoken words about one telephone call.  That changed their opinions from "good job, Prosecution" in presenting your case, to "How is the D.A. going to overcome this October 24th telephone call?"

          The difference in reactions between my reading the trial transcript, and people who heard and saw the cross over one telephone call, struck me.  We live in a time when people no longer think as much as they once might have, instead they go with their gut reactions, their emotions, much more than they ever did in the past.  The O.J. Trial is a good example here, I think.  Everyone "knew" that O.J. was a murderer, or at least that was the prevailing opinion on the matter.  Until.  Until everyone could see that O.J. could not get his hand into a glove years later, at trial.  Then they acquitted him.

          That brings me to the second question I have, which is the effect of Michael Cohen's testimony on reaching a verdict in this case.

          Emotions generally seem to rule in reaching important decisions more often than reasons and thinking do.  I think that explains the difference in reactions in the O.J. Simpson Trial.  I think that also explains the difference in reactions to Michael Cohen's trial testimony this past week.

          I am not saying that there will be the same result in the Election Corruption Trial in NYC as there was in O.J.'s Trial.  If the results did end up being the same, though, it would not surprise me.

Please read the disclaimer.  ©2024 Dennis J. Wall.  All rights reserved. 

 

SPACE FAILURE: THE NEVER-ENDING STORY OF PRIVATE PROFIT-TAKING.

The true story of private profit-taking from my taxes and yours continues ....  See Richard Tribou, Another Delay For Boeing Starliner, Now Targeting May 25, p. 4, ORLANDO SENTINEL, in print & online Saturday, May 18, 2024 (may be behind a paywall).

Please read the disclaimer.  ©2024 Dennis J. Wall.  All rights reserved.

THEY KNOW HOW STRONG WE ACTUALLY ARE. THAT'S THE TRUTH.

If Their Furor was confident about being on trial in NYC, we wouldn't be seeing surrogates pop up outside of the courthouse to mouth the things he tells them to say, but cannot say himself thanks to the Order of the Court not to put people in danger by saying such things.

          The surrogates constantly show up, although their parts are played by different actors in a rotating repertory, let's call them the Scum Pistols.

          If Their Furor was confident about being on trial in NYC, Their Furor would not put in an order for the Scum Pistols to show up.

          That's how we know how strong we really are.  It's the fact that Their Furor and his gang know that they will not be heard unless they show up all the time (sometimes wearing the same costumes such as matching blue suits and red ties).

          There are more of us than there are of them.

          And they know it.  That's why they travel to NYC to stand outside of a courthouse, then go away again whence they came.

          Do we know our own strength? 

Please read the disclaimer.  ©2024 Dennis J. Wall.  All rights reserved.

RIGHT ON CUE ....

Right on cue, after this article was published here, SPACE, THE FAILURE FRONTIER.  This is the latest story, by Richard Tribou, Pressure Mounts on Vulcan Rocket / Military contracts require second flight, but payload's delayed, ORLANDO SENTINEL, p. 3, print & online, Friday, May 17, 2024 (may be behind a paywall).

Please read the disclaimer.  ©2024 Dennis J. Wall.  All rights reserved.

SPACE, THE FAILURE FRONTIER

Private corporations are burning public money on their way to the launch pad or, in some cases, after their lift-off with failure.  Like Goldilocks and the Three Bears, some of them fail all the time, some of them fail often, and all of them fail and their repeated failures are often reported in the local newspaper.

          I grow concerned that these stories of failure are ignored by the national newspapers and cable media.  Failures are inconsistent with their narrative of successful exploration of outer space by modern-day cowboys, individual entrepreneurs who are responsible for their own success, so the story goes.  I read the national newspapers online and I do not read about these failures, only the incomplete story of their successes.  I am making a continuing effort to share the complete story.

          In the meantime, newspapers continue to build up their selective narrative of cowboys conquering the final frontier, space.  They have built up rich people with incomplete stories of success before.  It did not go well for us.

Please read the disclaimer.  ©2024 Dennis J. Wall.  All rights reserved.

MEMO TO SUSAN NECHELES: MEASURE TWICE, CROSS ONCE.

Carpenters' motto:  Measure once, cut twice.  Lawyers who cross-examine witnesses can learn from that motto.

I have read the trial transcript of Thursday's renewed cross-examination by Susan Necheles, Esquire of the witness Stormy Daniels.  Ms. Necheles' approach seems to have been written with blinders on, that Ms. Daniels worked in adult films, what Ms. Necheles called "porn," and so the jury should not believe Ms. Daniels.

          It was Melania who posted nude photos of herself on the Internet.  Not Stormy Daniels.

          It was Melania who reportedly came up with the description of the Hollywood Access tape as "locker room talk."  Not Stormy Daniels.

          It was not Melania that Their Furor summoned to his bedroom at a golf tournament while his bodyguard stood outside the one doorway.  It was Stormy Daniels.

          Remember:  Measure twice, cross once.

Please read the disclaimer.  ©2024 Dennis J. Wall.  All rights reserved.

IT'S NOT NORMAL: PART 1, THE HOUSE UNAMERICAN ACTIVITIES subCOMMITTEE.

SO ACT LIKE IT'S NOT NORMAL.

It's not even a committee.  It's a subcommittee.  The most prominent member is Virginia Foxx from the 5th District of North Carolina.   In her most recent contest, she was re-elected with 175,279 votes, reportedly a blowout in that part of the country.

           She represents fewer people than some of her witnesses do.

          You may remember Ms. Foxx, or at least remember something she said.  Ms. Foxx is the member of congress who famously told a reporter to shut up when the reporter was asking incoming Speaker of the House Mike Johnson why he supported the insurrection.  Take a look at the YouTube clip, here.

          This is the counterpart of the subcommittee of the current version of the House Unamerican Activities Committee, featuring Ms. Elise Stefanik, that called university administrators as witnesses in order to berate them in front of TV cameras.

          This subcommittee is now calling K-12 administrators as witnesses in order to berate them in front of TV cameras, featuring Ms. Foxx.

          The cable media love this stuff.  They must, because they keep airing it, over and over.  The newspapers must love it as much as cable media does, because they too publish this stuff over and over again.  Must make for lots of clicks and eyeballs – and money.

          One question I have is:  Why show up?  Why do the witnesses show up to be berated?  Are the witnesses ill-informed or just masochists?

          And why do they show up without counsel under the circumstances?

          If the witnesses do not show up to give people like Ms. Stefanik or Ms. Foxx this TV spectacle, what do they think will happen, that the House might vote to hold them in contempt of Congress for not showing up?  Or for showing up with a lawyer?  As I understand it, the only organization authorized by law to ask any judge to hold people in contempt of Congress is the Department of Justice.  (And even then only when Congress subpoenaed the witness, not just when the witness was 'invited' to 'voluntarily' give testimony but was really 'invited' to be abused.)

          Even Merrick Garland would not ask a judge to hold a person in contempt of this Congress, or for not showing up to be abused by people like Foxx or Stefanik.

          So, first of all, stop acting like this is normal.  It's not, so act like it's not normal.

To be continued ....  Please read the disclaimer.  ©2024 Dennis J. Wall.  All rights reserved.

CAMPUS PROTESTS ARE NOT "PRO-HAMAS," "ANTI-AMERICAN," & "ANTI-SEMITIC."

A friend of mine, a very good writer and editor named John DiMugno, writes from California that "What politicians describe as 'pro-Hamas, anti-American protests' journalists describe as 'pro-Palestinian protests.'   No one seems interested in understanding why relentless cruelty and suffering, regardless of the perpetrator and the victim, is enough to cause young people to speak out."  (Emphasis added.)

Amen.

Please read the disclaimer. 

877 FEDERAL JUDGES HONOR THE RULE OF LAW.

There are some 900 federal judges in the Courts of the United States.  Let's call it an even 900.  That means that 877 federal judges honor the rule of law.  877 federal judges hire their law clerks, and presumably federal magistrate judges and other courtroom officers and personnel as well, based on demonstrated capacity for the job.

          Unfortunately, 13 get all the headlines for refusing to even consider hiring certain people.  Each of the 13 was appointed during the American Apocalypse between January 20, 2017 and January 19, 2021.  Reportedly, "2/3" of the 13 are in Texas.

          They have no problem, it seems, with hiring people from the University of Mississippi which is currently under a self-imposed investigation for racism based on developments within the last few days – in 2024, not 1924 or 1964 -- in which a large racist mob surrounded a smaller group of students on campus and threatened their safety. 

          The rest, 877 federal judges, do not get the headlines but they get the best candidates.

          And that's the way it is, May 2024.

Please read the disclaimer.  ©2024 Dennis J. Wall.  All rights reserved.

COMMENTS IN RESPONSE TO REQUEST FOR INFORMATION ... Continued.

This article continues from the article published earlier today sharing my Comments as examples of Responding to the federal government's Request For Information regarding our personal experiences with the consolidation of healthcare services in this country.

          Turnover of professionals.  Before consolidation, I observed that the nurses who assisted my caregiver tended to remain the same from visit to visit.  Before consolidation, the nurses tended to be familiar with my chart on each successive visit, and in many cases had first-hand knowledge of what symptoms and conditions I may have presented in the past, with memories refreshed no doubt from my records including my chart.  For example, I have made it a point to say when a nurse or a tech or whoever draws my blood, to say that as long as they keep talking to me, we're going to be all right, and they did.  In fact, they remembered my saying that because they had heard it from me before, of course, even though my blood was not drawn regularly and still they remembered.

          After consolidation, the nursing turnover was so great and often that the nurses did not know me or my chart, including my reaction to having my blood taken.

          The patient portal.  This innovation has been with us for years, but I do not recall it existing before my local family practitioners' office where I was a patient for some 25 years, consolidated with a private equity firm.

          I resisted using the portal for a long time because I was used to my physicians contacting me, and not the other way around.  I ended my resistance to the portal when the futility of resistance became obvious; after the portal went into effect, my physicians' office no longer telephone me to let me know such things as test results were ready.   After consolidation and the portal took effect, I had to access their portal if I were going to know that test results, for example, were ready.

          In my experience, the advent of the patient portal altered the relationship between doctor and patient.  Before the portal arrived following consolidation with the private equity firm, the emphasis of my relationship with my physicians flowed from their office to me, I was the reason for their existence.

          After the portal arrived following consolidation, the emphasis of that relationship flowed from me to their office and nothing, absolutely nothing including the test results example I have mentioned, could happen unless I, the patient, approached their office through the so-called patient portal and not otherwise.  I learned this when I tried – unsuccessfully and often – to telephone..

          Thank you for your consideration of my Comments.

Please read the disclaimer.  ©2024 Dennis J. Wall.  All rights reserved.

 

COMMENTS IN RESPONSE TO REQUEST FOR INFORMATION.

I left these Comments yesterday because the Request For Information document itself says that May 6 was the deadline.  The regulations portal showed the deadline as sometime in June.   I am going with the original document as I could not find any information anywhere that the deadline was extended, but use your own judgment, of course.

 

COMMENTS IN RESPONSE TO REQUEST FOR INFORMATION, DOCKET NO. ATR 102 (ALSO:  FTC DOCUMENT ID FTC-2024-0022-0001)

Question 1 asks about Effects of Consolidation.

          Scheduling errors increased greatly after my long-standing family practitioners' practice was consolidated with a private equity firm.  In my own experience, the people doing the scheduling changed after the consolidation, but they had been changing more frequently even before, as I recall.  Even with the earlier changes in staff, there were never any scheduling errors that I can recall. 

          After the consolidation, I personally experienced being scheduled as a patient for the wrong times on the wrong days.  It is one of the reasons I left that practice to become a patient elsewhere, after probably 25 years or more as their patient.

          Apparent staff turnover.  I have already mentioned that I personally observed staff turnover even before consolidation of my family practitioners' practice with a private equity firm.  Putting that in perspective, the turnover before consolidation was not like the turnover after consolidation.  Turnover was so frequent after consolidation that every appointment with their practice was an adventure in meeting staff that I had never met there before;  the office just did not seem capable as a result of keeping people for any length of time, certainly not for the length of time that passed between one appointment to the next.

          One notorious way that business owners increase their own take-home from their businesses is to reduce the expense of what they pay their workers.  I ran my own business for 40 years and so I believe myself qualified to comment on that practice as short-sighted and stupid from the point-of-view of having an ongoing business, and to comment as well that although I have never chosen that way of running a business myself, it is a way that is guaranteed to increase your short-term profits. 

          You are not interested in general Comments on the way that businesses are run, of course.  You have requested information on consolidation in health care markers.  I have already mentioned the effects on me of staffing shortages and scheduling errors at my local family practitioners' office.  Now I am going to tell you about the effects on me of professional shortages there.

To be continued ....

Please read the disclaimer.  ©2024 Dennis J. Wall.  All rights reserved.

WHEN THE RACISTS ANNOUNCE THEY WILL BE CRUEL, BELIEVE THEM.

Here is a story we can unpack from The Guardian newspaper by Adria R. Walker, University of Mississippi:  'Abhorrent' Counter-Protestors Condemned / Largely White, male group taunts pro-Palestinian protestors on campus and one man makes racist gesture towards Black woman, The Guardian (online Saturday, May 4, 2024).

          It would be easy to dismiss this as a report from Mississippi.  That would eliminate the truth that this is representative of current events across the United States.

          Newspapers and cable media conveniently label these racists as "counter-protestors."  Try this one on for size:  These people are racists.  They did not show up to "counter protest" a thing.  Sometimes these stories are written and published as though racist gestures toward Black people, particularly toward a Black woman, are an aberration, an unusual and regrettable side-effect of a "counter protest."

          They did not show up to counter protest, they showed up to make racist gestures, to say racist things, in short, they showed up because they are racists.

          While you are trying things on for size, try this one too:  The students protesting the murders in Gaza are not actually "pro-Palestinian" although, once again, it is convenient for newspapers and cable media to describe them so.  They may not even know, many of them, what it means to be Palestinian.

          The students protesting on their campuses, on the greens of the universities to which they and their families have paid tuition, are there because they are against cruelty and inflicted suffering.  In the end, that is also why the racist mobs descended on them, not just in Mississippi but in California and other places as well.

          Cruelty and inflicted suffering, and protests against them.  Those are our choices.  Choose well.

Please read the disclaimer.  ©2024 Dennis J. Wall.  All rights reserved.

SOME UNANSWERED QUESTIONS, UCLA.

A continent's width away, from Florida I have been following accounts of a riot on the UCLA campus Tuesday night, largely in The Los Angeles Times.  From my admittedly distant vantage point, I have some lingering questions.

There was a 1 1/2 hour delay between the time that "police" arrived on the UCLA campus on Tuesday night – early Wednesday morning, and the time that they went to work apparently to keep protestors apart from counter-protestors.

The counter-protestors apparently came ready to rumble.  They were also armed with fireworks.  They beat people up, and the reporting is not disputed that the people that the counter-protestors beat up included UCLA student journalists.   There are questions to follow up on, including:

Why did the police stand by while these people attacked the protestors and their camp on the UCLA campus?

Were the police concerned for their own safety from these counter-protestors?

Were the police delaying their response to see if the counter-protestors were successful in their goal of destroying the camp – it was not disputed that they tried to tear it down -- so that the police eventually would not have to?

Or were the police that arrived about 1:30 AM waiting for reinforcements, until at 3 AM (by which time it is not disputed that the so-called "counter-protestors" had mostly left the scene),  the police acted?

There were reports of injured protestors from the camp.  The reports vary between 15 and 25 injured protestors so far.  But there are no reports about how many so-called counter-protestors were injured – or arrested, for that matter – if any.

How many counter-protestors were injured and how many were taken to the hospital?

How many counter-protestors were arrested and if they were, were they armed when they were arrested and if so, how?

There was at least one report that L.A. Fire Department EMT's treated protestors.

Did the EMT's also treat any counter-protestors and if so, do they know where these people came from before they arrived at the camp on the UCLA campus?

Finally, the California Highway Patrol was on the UCLA campus.  Reports reflect that L.A. Mayor Karen Bass urged UCLA Chancellor Gene Block to call in the Los Angeles Police Department, a probably more professional organization and one certainly more used to dealing with protests and crowd control than anyone at CHP.  However, Mary Osako, identified in the reporting as a UCLA Vice Chancellor for UCLA Strategic Communications, issued a statement which said that UCLA "called law enforcement for mutual aid support."

How did the Highway Patrol end up on a college campus that night?

I have saved my biggest lingering question for last.  The reporting is clear that the "pro-Palestinian encampment set up on UCLA's campus" was largely peaceful and non-violent.  That was not clear to me until I re-read, and re-read again, all the Los Angeles Times reporting in particular.  This is not a "he said, she said" or "both sidesism" kind of story.  The so-called counter-protestors came to do harm, and they did.  The campers fought back to defend themselves.

Why have journalists and the UCLA administration not made it clear that this unprovoked attack came from outside agitators and that the police were not called in on Tuesday night – Wednesday morning of this week because of anything the campers had done – other than to exercise their First Amendment rights?  (After all, it was not until the following night, Wednesday night into Thursday morning, that the police arrived to dismantle the camp at UCLA.) 

Or is that the point.

 

Please read the disclaimer.  ©2024 Dennis J. Wall.  All rights reserved.

THREE THINGS I AM THINKING ABOUT ON THE FIRST OF MAY.

I plan to expand on these thoughts, but for now I want to throw them out to you and to me for us to think about.

1. The reaction of people in power to the campus protests over Gaza and Israel has revealed that universities and colleges have shifted their focus.  Universities are now for money not for students.  School presidents are calling the cops because their rich donors want the students to get off their lawns, literally.  In the vast majority of cases, there is no violence until the police arrive on campus.  Students who paid tuition are arrested as trespassers but once arrested, most of them are released because there are no charges against most of them.  Even the New York Police Department says that the protestors they have encountered have been nonviolent and peaceful. 
2. People in charge are willing to use violence if they can get away with it.  It once was unthinkable that people in charge would call the cops on other people who are not injuring anyone or destroying property, just because the people in charge are afraid.   The people in charge who do this will not do it themselves, however; they are only willing to use violence on you if they can use others to commit violence for them.
3. The Washington, D.C. Police stand tall.  They know how to deal with protestors; they are experienced in handling protests.  When the people in charge at George Washington University called the cops to arrest student protestors, the Police said "no."  The police in Washington, D.C. said that they would not arrest people who had done nothing wrong.

Please read the disclaimer.  ©2024 Dennis J. Wall.  All rights reserved.

OUTSIDE AGITATORS.

"Outside agitators."  That's who George Corley Wallace blamed for all the civil rights troubles in the 1960's.

          It wasn't true then.  (Not unless you count the students from Northern universities who travelled to Mississippi for Freedom Summer in 1964 to help register Black people to vote.)

          I was never accustomed to taking guidance from George Corley Wallace, and I am not accustomed to taking guidance from his ghost now.

          I was surprised that university presidents do, until I realized they are not really university presidents, not in the academic sense.  For the most part, they are  not academics.  Today, university presidents are fund raisers.  That is how they get to become university presidents:  They can raise money.

          University fund raisers are afraid of their billionaire funding donors.  That makes the billionaires the real outside agitators today.  It is they who are responsible for the police riots that are reportedly taking place on university campuses with hundreds of students arrested across the nation from New York to California, tear gas and rubber bullets at Emory in Atlanta, and everywhere tents and personal property being destroyed or confiscated by men and women wearing uniforms.

          However many "outside agitators" successfully elude detection at the entrances to universities today, the real violence-causing outside agitators are the ones who write the checks and the ones who cash them.

Please read the disclaimer.  ©2024 Dennis J. Wall.  All rights reserved.

HOPE IS AN UNDERSTANDING THE FUTURE IS NOT YET WRITTEN.

"Hope is a belief that what we do might matter, an understanding that the future is not yet written.  It's informed, astute open-mindedness about what can happen and what role we may play in it.  Hope looks forward, but it draws its energies from the past, from knowing histories, including our victories, and their complexities and imperfections."

----Rebecca Solnit

"FAKE NEWS," DAVID PECKER, AND THE GREAT PROJECTION.

"Fake news."  We've heard about that for some 9 years now.  Yesterday we all learned – if we did not know already – where it came from.

          It's totally projection.  

          David Pecker testified yesterday that his publication, The National Enquirer, would make up good stories about one candidate and would make up bad stories about the candidate's opponents.  They would publish "fake news" (Mr. Pecker called it "embellish" the news) to help The Guy, and to hurt anyone else that The Guy fingered.  Sometimes they wouldn't even wait for the finger, they would make up the negative stories themselves, like they did about Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Ben Carson, and Hillary Clinton.

          "Fake news."  David Pecker.  And Projection.  When you live in a world where everything you publish is fake news, calling everything else "fake news" even though you know it isn't, comes naturally.

          "Fake news."   When you write it yourself, you may delude yourself that's what  everyone does for a living, not just David Pecker and you.

Please read the disclaimer.  ©2024 Dennis J. Wall.  All rights reserved.      

REQUEST FOR INFORMATION FROM YOU REGARDING HEALTH CARE PROVIDERS ...

... BY YOUR DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE'S ANTITRUST DIVISION, BY YOUR DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES, AND BY YOUR FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION, if online, then before May 6, 2024.

All these Government agencies want to hear from all of us.  We can submit our comments online or mail them.  If we submit our comments online, we can use the Federal eRulemaking Portal at www.regulations.gov.   Whether we submit our comments online or by mail, they want us to identify our comments by Docket No. ATR 102.   (On the Federal Trade Commission's website, I noticed this number as well on the FTC website:  Document ID FTC-2024-0022-0001.  When I leave my comments online at www.regulations.gov, as I intend to do, I will use the Docket No. ATR 102 like they ask for, but I just wanted you to know in advance what you will see if you send your comments through the FTC's website.)

          These people want to hear from everyone who has a stake in Health Care in this nation.  They want to hear from stakeholders, whether or not the stakeholders also hold shares in the companies that hold themselves out as providing you with Health Care in this country.

          We will address different aspects of this Request for Information ("RFI") as time goes on, but that is not because the RFI is very long; it isn't very long.  It is only 12 pages long (11 pages, really, because the 12th and last page is only a signature page and does not have any text to read on it).  Rather, you and I will take our time together to look over the RFI because the information these agencies are looking for is huge.

          For example, the agencies list out 5 questions they are interested in, 4 specific questions and one last overall question that asks if there is anything else we would like to address that we haven't already told them about.

          We will start with their first question, and they ask us to "identify, where possible, the question numbers your comments are intended to address."  Question 1 asks about Effects of Consolidation.

          If you are a patient – and who isn't at one time or another – they want to know how a transaction that involved your health care providers like home-and community-based services, health systems, nursing homes or ambulatory surgical centers to name a few, affected in any way the providers'  costs for you to obtain care, or ...

... costs of health insurance coverage, medical debt and access to charity care, quality of clinical or non-clinical care, quality of the patient’s experience, access to and denials of care, language access, types of goods and services offered, safety, utilization of services, drug utilization, staffing levels, mix of providers and medical support staff, practices regarding prior authorizations, other utilization management, or reimbursement strategies, referral practices, site of service for procedures, ease of access to providers, patient billing, collections, financial assistance practices, access to or sharing of patient information, differences in these areas in rural compared to urban settings, and differences in areas for marginalized patient populations, including differences by race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, income level, disability, Tribal status, or citizenship status.

Think they left anything out?  Please remember that these are only examples of what you can talk to them about; they want to hear your experiences with these things, not somebody else's experiences.

     Whatever we do in leaving our comments to provide them with information, they want us to remember this very important thing:

DO NOT include sensitive or confidential information in the comments including: social security numbers, dates of birth, driver’s license numbers or other state identification numbers, financial account information, sensitive health information, or competitively sensitive information. Comments will be posted on the Internet and made available to the public (subject to exceptions such as for personal privacy information of persons other than the submitter).

TO BE CONTINUED .... Please read the disclaimer.  ©2024 Dennis J. Wall.  All rights reserved.

TODAY IS EARTH DAY. LEAVE A COMMENT!

Today is the 54th anniversary of Earth Day!  Celebrate by leaving a Comment about changes in your Health Care in 2024!

          Uncle Sam has a Request For Information (RFI), your information.  The RFI is only 12 pages long, which is not too long for Uncle Sam who can be very wordy as we all know.  Click on the blue underlined Request For Information to read all 12 pages of it.

• Have there been changes in your health care since a provider was bought or merged or changed procedures?
• Has your work safety in the health care industry, or have your wages from a health care provider, changed in recent times?
• Is health care affordable for you as a patient or as a taxpayer, both, since one or more of your health care providers changed their business operations because they were bought by some other company, or because they bought some other company or merged with it somehow?

THEN UNCLE SAM WANTS TO HEAR FROM YOU!

          Tell the U.S. Department of Justice, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the Federal Trade Commission!  You can send your comments to them by U.S. Mail, or you can leave your comments online at www.regulations.gov.  Put the Docket Number ATR 102 on your comments, and send them in before May 6, 2024.  That's it!

          Except to remember this, as Uncle Sam put it:

Privacy Note: The agencies’ general policy is to make all comments received from members of the public available for public viewing in their entirety on the Federal eRulemaking Portal at www.regulations.gov. Therefore, commenters should be careful to include in their comments only information that they wish to make publicly available.

Please read the disclaimer.  ©2024 Dennis J. Wall.  All rights reserved.

TOMORROW IS EARTH DAY. LEAVE A COMMENT!

Tomorrow is the 54th anniversary of Earth Day!  Celebrate by leaving a Comment on changes in your Health Care in 2024!

          Uncle Sam has a Request For Information (RFI), your information.  The RFI is only 12 pages long, which is not too long for Uncle Sam who can be very wordy as we all know.  Click on the blue underlined Request For Information to read all 12 pages of it.

• Have there been changes in your health care since a provider was bought or merged or changed procedures?
• Has your work safety in the health care industry, or have your wages from a health care provider, changed in recent times?
• Is health care affordable for you as a patient or as a taxpayer, both, since one or more of your health care providers changed their business operations because they were bought by some other company, or because they bought some other company or merged with it somehow?

THEN UNCLE SAM WANTS TO HEAR FROM YOU!

          Tell the U.S. Department of Justice, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the Federal Trade Commission!  You can send your comments to them by U.S. Mail, or you can leave your comments online at www.regulations.gov.  Put the Docket Number ATR 102 on your comments, and send them in before May 6, 2024.  That's it!

          Except to remember this, as Uncle Sam put it:

Privacy Note: The agencies’ general policy is to make all comments received from members of the public available for public viewing in their entirety on the Federal eRulemaking Portal at www.regulations.gov. Therefore, commenters should be careful to include in their comments only information that they wish to make publicly available.

Please read the disclaimer.  ©2024 Dennis J. Wall.  All rights reserved.

ON THE FOURTH DAY, THE INVADERS RETURNED.

The Bozo Boys are back!  They're on our street, outside our door!

Still no word from the authorities how long, doing what, whether our street will be closed off like some but not all of the streets around us .... 

Whatever.

Please read the disclaimer.  ©2024 Dennis J. Wall.  All rights reserved.

THE THIRD DAY, AND HEREIN OF THE FEDERAL ELECTIONS COMMISSION.

It was all over on Monday as it turns out.  They came, they parked here, they tore up the road one street over.  Then they left and haven't been back. 

          No notice that they were coming.  No idea when they will come back.  The invasion is on hold.  But it is a good bet that they will be back.  This is America in 2024.

          That brings me to the Federal Elections Commission.  It is one example of how our federal government does not function, and it presents a real opportunity to go big or go home.

          The FEC declined to investigate – not declined to prosecute, mind you, but declined to investigate – a complaint that campaign funds in at least two elections were illegally used to fund various activities and people with respect to running a so-called "ghost" candidate in Florida.  A "ghost" candidate is a person who has say the same last name as a real candidate of the opposing party, in these cases, the opposing party's candidates are Democrats and the funders are Republicans.   In one of these cases, the ghost candidate not only did not campaign but fled to Sweden.

          The FEC declined to investigate the funding concerning these ghost candidates because the Republican members of the FEC voted to reject the recommendation of their general counsel to investigate this stuff, presumably because these shenanigans involved Republicans running for office who ended up being elected.  Well, what is to be done?

          It is up to Congress to abolish the FEC, but the Republicans in Congress don't give out much confidence that they will actually act.  The President, on the other hand, presumably could remove Commissioners.  Here in Florida, Ron DeSantis has removed State Attorneys who will not enforce his laws, one of whom was just critical of DeSantis's abortion laws but did not say he would not enforce them.  Since when does Ron DeSantis have more power than the President of the United States?

          So, Joe, consider removing Federal Election Commissioners who voted in favor of illegally funding federal elections by voting against their own lawyer's recommendation to investigate the allegedly illegal funding.  If they sue, let them.  Ron DeSantis has come up with his own defense funds after the State Attorneys he removed have sued him.  Surely you can raise defense funds as well.

          In the end, the ideal solution will be to eliminate every commission, agency, and appointed group that does not function because of so-called "politics," although it's hard to believe that saying "it's politics" is just another way of saying "it's illegal."  Since politics keeps good things from seeing the light of day in Congress, however, at the present time perhaps the best remaining alternative is to consider removing the people who perpetrate these wrongs.

Please read the disclaimer.  ©2024 Dennis J. Wall.  All rights reserved.

THE SECOND DAY.

The street is quiet.  So far, there are no trucks, machines, or men milling.  

          "Milling."  That's a new word I learned yesterday.  It's when a layer or layers of asphalt are taken off and taken away such as from a roadbed.

          I sent an EMail to my homeowner's association yesterday.  No Reply as yet.

Please read the disclaimer.  ©2024 Dennis J. Wall.  All rights reserved.

MORNING IN AMERICA APRIL 15, 2024.

It was all over in 25 minutes.

    The machines pulled up across the street from where I live at 7 am.  My first clue was the sound of an idling truck engine.  I had no clue they were coming.

    As best I can recall -- this was morning in America, remember -- they were lined up across the street like this:  a truck or two, a very long flatbed trailer, a huge digger with a crane the likes of which I had never seen before in a residential neighborhood, and of all things a water truck.  Soon their lineup was joined by a car.

    The digger was on treads like a tank.  It ambled off down my street, leaving tracks, and turned down the next street.  The truck or trucks followed it.  The water truck and the car moved up to my neighbor's lawn across the street and parked on it.  They were soon joined by a second car.

    All this took 25 minutes.  It left a taste, but so far only a taste, of an invasion.  Thank God this was not an invasion, not even close, as people have experienced in other countries.

    Also, the tracks from the digger machine treads are gone with the morning dew.

    This is what I think they call American exceptionalism.  As I write these words, it is still morning and I suspect there is much more to come even though I have not been told about it by my government or anyone else.  I checked the local homeowner's association newsletter and other ways that my government might try to give me notice, but nothing's there.

    The reality of morning in America in 2024 is that it's not over.

Please read the disclaimer.  ©2024 Dennis J. Wall.  All rights reserved.  

    

YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO ERASE JAN 2017 - JAN 2021.

Here is an article that highlights something that its author and editors never imagined:  Christina Jewett, National Sciences Academy Asks Court to Strip Sackler Name From Endowment, NEW YORK TIMES online April 12, 2024 (may be behind a paywall).

The National Academy of Sciences has gone to court to ask a judge to strip the name of the Sackler family of Purdue Pharma Opioid fame, from the Millions of Dollars of donations the Sacklers gave for conferences, prizes, and studies that would feature the Sackler name.  The Academy cannot get any takers for those events if they bear the Sackler name.

For their part, the Sacklers apparently say that there was no need to go to court and get a judge involved.  They say that if they had only been asked, they would have agreed to repurpose their donations for "scientific studies, projects and educational activities" – presumably without their name on them, but perhaps not.

In any case, the article tells you when the Sacklers began their donations, but it does not say when the donations ended.

Now the most remarkable thing about this article, something that the author and her editors did not intend to show, and something which the modern major media does all the time now:  The major media write like the Federal Government, the United States and, in this specific instance, the National Academy of Sciences were all the same as they are now and were before January 2017 through about January 2021.

The Academy was not the same then as now nor as before, of course.  I recall the Pandemic, hydroxychloroquine, and so on.  That was the time when the Opioid Crisis flourished as well.  I don't know about you, but I do not believe in coincidences as big as those.

The truth of course is that the National Academy of Sciences was not the same between January 2017 and January 2021.  To pretend that it was is simply not true.

P.S.

Here's one more thought before we go.  The Sacklers now say that if they had only been asked, they would have agreed to repurpose their Millions in donations and, presumably (but who knows?), take their name off their donations.  So, did anybody ask?  Ever?  And if so, what did the Sacklers reply, then?  Thank you.

Please read the disclaimer.  ©2024 Dennis J. Wall.  All rights reserved.

Health Care Changes? Uncle Sam Wants to Hear From YOU!

          Uncle Sam has a Request For Information (RFI), your information.  The RFI is only 12 pages long, which is not too long for Uncle Sam who can be very wordy as we all know.  Click on the blue underlined Request For Information to read all 12 pages of it.

         Here is the kind of thing that Uncle Sam wants to know about:

• Have there been changes in your health care since a provider was bought or merged or changed procedures?
• Has your work safety in the health care industry, or have your wages from a health care provider, changed in recent times?
• Is health care affordable for you as a patient or as a taxpayer, both, since one or more of your health care providers changed their business operations because they were bought by some other company, or because they bought some other company or merged with it somehow?

THEN UNCLE SAM WANTS TO HEAR FROM YOU!

          Tell the U.S. Department of Justice, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the Federal Trade Commission!  You can send your comments to them by U.S. Mail, or you can leave your comments online at www.regulations.gov.  Put the Docket Number ATR 102 on your comments, and send them in before May 6, 2024.  That's it!

          Except to remember this, as Uncle Sam put it:

Privacy Note: The agencies’ general policy is to make all comments received from members of the public available for public viewing in their entirety on the Federal eRulemaking Portal at www.regulations.gov. Therefore, commenters should be careful to include in their comments only information that they wish to make publicly available.

Please read the disclaimer.  ©2024 Dennis J. Wall.  All rights reserved.

REQUEST FOR INFORMATION FROM YOU REGARDING YOUR HEALTH CARE PROVIDERS ...

... BY YOUR DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE'S ANTITRUST DIVISION, BY YOUR DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES, AND BY YOUR FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION, if online, then before May 6, 2024.

These Government agencies want to hear from you.  We can submit our comments online or mail them.  If we submit our comments online, we can use the Federal eRulemaking Portal at www.regulations.gov.   Whether we submit our comments online or by mail, they want us to identify our comments by Docket No. ATR 102.   (On the Federal Trade Commission's website, I noticed this number as well on the FTC website:  Document ID FTC-2024-0022-0001.  When I leave my comments online at www.regulations.gov, as I intend to do, I will use the Docket No. ATR 102 like they ask for, but I just wanted you to know in advance what you will see if you send your comments through the FTC's website.)

          These people want to hear from everyone who has a stake in Health Care in this nation.  They want to hear from stakeholders, whether or not the stakeholders also hold shares in the companies that hold themselves out as providing you with Health Care in this country.

          We will address different aspects of this Request for Information ("RFI") as time goes on, but that is not because the RFI is very long; it isn't very long.  It is only 12 pages long (11 pages, really, because the 12th and last page is only a signature page and does not have any text to read on it).  Rather, you and I will take our time together to look over the RFI because the information these agencies are looking for is huge.

          For example, the agencies list out 5 questions they are interested in, 4 specific questions and one last overall question that asks if there is anything else we would like to address that we haven't already told them about.

          We will start with their first question, and they ask us to "identify, where possible, the question numbers your comments are intended to address."  Question 1 asks about Effects of Consolidation.

          If you are a patient – and who isn't at one time or another – they want to know how a transaction that involved your health care providers like home-and community-based services, health systems, nursing homes or ambulatory surgical centers to name a few, affected in any way the providers'  costs for you to obtain care, or ...

... costs of health insurance coverage, medical debt and access to charity care, quality of clinical or non-clinical care, quality of the patient’s experience, access to and denials of care, language access, types of goods and services offered, safety, utilization of services, drug utilization, staffing levels, mix of providers and medical support staff, practices regarding prior authorizations, other utilization management, or reimbursement strategies, referral practices, site of service for procedures, ease of access to providers, patient billing, collections, financial assistance practices, access to or sharing of patient information, differences in these areas in rural compared to urban settings, and differences in areas for marginalized patient populations, including differences by race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, income level, disability, Tribal status, or citizenship status.

Think they left anything out?  Please remember that these are only examples of what you can talk to them about; they want to hear your experiences with these things, not somebody else's experiences.

     Whatever we do in leaving our comments to provide them with information, they want us to remember this very important thing:

DO NOT include sensitive or confidential information in the comments including: social security numbers, dates of birth, driver’s license numbers or other state identification numbers, financial account information, sensitive health information, or competitively sensitive information. Comments will be posted on the Internet and made available to the public (subject to exceptions such as for personal privacy information of persons other than the submitter).

TO BE CONTINUED .... Please read the disclaimer.  ©2024 Dennis J. Wall.  All rights reserved.

Music Therapy and Post-Polio presentation to Australia, the USA, ...

... and the World! 

Everyone is invited to see Dianne McTaggart Wall’s presentation on Music Therapy and Post-Polio to the Australia Post-Polio Support Group on Sunday, April 7!  It will start at 7:00 PM ET, so register now through the TryBooking registration link (www.trybooking.com/BOBOW).   Go big or go home!

Dianne is the author of the best-selling book, Somebody Told Me I Could / A Polio Survivor Who's in it For The Long Haul, which is available wherever fine books are sold; visit her website, diannemctaggartwall.com, The landing page of her website says it all:  A Life Well-Lived With Disabilities.

 

 

TODAY I TURN THE POST OVER TO REBECCA SOLNIT ...

"What if we imagined 'wealth' consisting not of the money we stuff into banks or the fossil-fuel-derived goods we pile up, but of joy, beauty, friendship, community, closeness to flourishing nature, to good food produced without abuse of labor?  What if we were to think of wealth as security in our environments and societies, and as confidence in a viable future?

          'Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers,' William Wordsworth wrote a couple of centuries ago.  What would it mean to recover those powers, to be rich in time instead of stuff?

          For so many of us, being busy with work has leached away our capacity to pursue true riches.  What if we were to prioritize reclaiming our time ...."

Rebecca Solnit, What if Climate Change Meant Not Doom—But Abundance?, essay in Opinion Section published by the New York Times on March 15, 2023 (but which I can no longer find there today; emphasis added).

EVEN THE OLD TESTAMENT GOD FLED GAZA, DEFENSELESS.

It has been clear to many since October, or should have been, that the far righteous zealots keeping the Bibi in power are on a mission to kill.

          They believe that their God has told them to kill.  So they kill everyone.  They kill the children because they may grow up to become terrorists.  They kill the women because they may either be terrorists themselves or the mothers of terrorists, or both.

          They justify this by their "religion."  Which is murder by another name.

          Even Yahweh has left Gaza.

          Defenseless against this onslaught, He was last seen stopping at a food kitchen on His way out, thinking it would be safe there.  We know what happened.

          It was not safe.  Surely it is clear to everyone now that the religious zealots keeping the Bibi in power are on a mission to kill.

          At long last, surely it is clear.

Please read the disclaimer.  ©2024 Dennis J. Wall.  All rights reserved.