Claims And Issues

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.

"FOOL ME ONCE ...."

In 1967, Israeli jets and P.T. boats attacked the United States Navy Ship Liberty.  The Liberty was a spy ship, loaded with electronics to monitor the 1967 War which was then in progress between Israel and its neighbors.

          The Liberty was defenseless.  It was carrying no weapons.

          Israel claimed that its attack was a mistake.  They killed 34 people including one who was an employee of the U.S. National Security Agency.

          In 2024, Israeli jets attacked the World Central Kitchen mission in Gaza.  Volunteers at the mission were bringing food to cook.  They cooked for Israelis, for Palestinians, and for anyone else who showed up needing a meal.

          They were defenseless.  They were not carrying any weapons.

          Israel claimed that its attack was a mistake.  Jose Andres, who founded World Central Kitchen, responded with this information:  "It was a direct attack on clearly marked vehicles whose movements were known by the Israel Defense Forces."

         The aid workers clocked in with the IDF; they told the IDF where they were, what they were doing, where they were going, and when they would be there.

          Then the Israeli jets attacked.

Your mother probably told you what mine told me:  "Fool me once, shame on me; fool me twice, shame on you."  Somehow shame is not enough this time.

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

152mm ARTILLERY SHELLS MADE IN USA = 32,000 GAZA, ZERO UKRAINE.

One country wants 152mm artillery shells to kill children.

                       Another country wants to defend itself.

                                    "No joke," Joe.

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