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In The Wake of Roe’s Demise, Democrats Are Doing All They Can to Thwart Democracy


BY: JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON | JULY 22, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/07/22/in-the-wake-of-roes-demise-democrats-are-doing-all-they-can-to-thwart-democracy/

Merrick Garland

Democrats say they love democracy, but when it produces laws they oppose, they’ll use all their power to undermine it.

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Democrats love to talk about democracy — mostly about how it’s under threat from Republicans and “Christian nationalists” and anyone who opposes their agenda. But at least on a rhetorical level, they seem to cherish democracy and rightly think that a government of the people, by the people is the surest safeguard against tyranny.

In practice, though, they hate democracy and will use every tool at their disposal to subvert and destroy it. Hardly a day goes by that Democrats don’t proclaim as much by their actions. Just look at their response to the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade last month, which triggered laws in more than a dozen states banning or placing new restrictions on abortion. Voters in those states elected the people who passed these new laws, which in many cases are broadly popular. By overturning Roe, the court breathed new life into the democratic process, returning an issue to the American people that an earlier Supreme Court had snatched away from them.

But Democrats don’t really want democracy when it comes to abortion, which they consider sacrosanct. They have no qualms about protecting it from regulations by state lawmakers through the raw exercise of federal executive power, if need be. This week, Attorney General Merrick Garland threatened to sue states that have outlawed or restricted abortion since the end of Roe, and he also said the Justice Department would try to get a judge to toss a Texas lawsuit that would block newly issued rules from the Biden administration’s U.S. Department of Health and Human Services forcing doctors to perform abortions in emergency rooms.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Garland’s DOJ said last week it had launched a special task force to “evaluate state laws that hinder women’s ability to seek abortions in other states where the procedure remains legal or that ban federally approved medication that terminates a pregnancy.” The task force will also “oppose state efforts to penalize federal employees” who perform abortions “authorized by federal law.”

What could that mean? Well, take a look at the lawsuit Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton just filed against HHS. The administration is trying to use the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) to force ER doctors to perform abortions, even if it contravenes state laws outlawing the procedure. EMTALA was passed in 1986 as a way to prevent “patient dumping,” or turning away people who couldn’t pay, and it requires hospitals that receive Medicare money (which today is all of them) to treat people who show up at an ER in need of emergency treatment.

The Texas lawsuit argues the Biden administration is trying to “use federal law to transform every emergency room in the country into a walk-in abortion clinic,” and that “EMTALA does not authorize — and has never authorized — the federal government to compel healthcare providers to perform abortions.”

Garland and HHS claim that EMTALA preempts state law, but it’s unclear what that means in the context of the new HHS rules. If a state legislature passed a law saying that emergency rooms are prohibited from treating patients who have no health insurance, then yes, EMTALA would preempt that.

But as Paxton’s lawsuit rightly notes, the law says nothing about abortion, nor does it say anything about which specific treatments a hospital ER must administer. It only states that Medicare-participating hospitals have to provide “stabilizing treatment” for “emergency medical conditions,” and it specifically defines both of those terms in the statute. 

For Democrats, though, laws passed by representatives of the people don’t carry as much weight as rule by administrative fiat. On July 11, the Biden administration’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services issued “guidance” purportedly reminding hospitals of their obligations under EMTALA. But the guidance was much more than a reminder, and it was accompanied by a letter from HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra that amounted to an abortion mandate for hospitals, asserting powers under EMTALA that simply don’t exist anywhere in federal law.

First, Becerra’s letter claims that if an ER doctor determines that “abortion is the stabilizing treatment necessary to resolve [an emergency medical condition as defined by EMTALA], the physician must provide that treatment.”

But this is nothing more than a cheap word game. Abortion isn’t a “stabilizing treatment,” and nowhere in federal law is it construed as such. Becerra is conflating Democrats’ loose rhetoric about abortion — that it’s “reproductive healthcare” or “women’s health” — with the straightforward reality of the federal EMTALA statute, which says nothing about abortion and, to the contrary, specifically includes a mention of an “emergency medical condition” as one that threatens the life of an unborn child. 

Second, Becerra’s false claim that EMTALA preempts state abortion laws is contradicted by the plain language of the law itself, which says it doesn’t preempt state law “except to the extent that the requirement directly conflicts with a requirement” of EMTALA. But abortion is not a requirement of EMTALA and doesn’t even fit the law’s definition of “stabilizing treatment” for an “emergency medical condition.”

In a decent country, Texas would easily win this lawsuit — and the Justice Department would never step in to try to get it thrown out. But Democrats are committed to subverting the democratic process at both the state and federal level in order to preserve some shred of their abortion regime. They’re trying to preempt state laws they don’t like by twisting the meaning of federal laws that don’t have anything to say about abortion.

Remember that the next time you hear President Biden or some other leading Democrat talk about “threats to democracy.” They don’t care about democracy, they care about power. And they will use every ounce of it they have to advance their policies — the will of the people be damned.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.

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OKLAHOMA HOSPITAL CLOSES, MEDICAL WORKERS LAID OFF DUE TO LACK OF PATIENTS


Posted by DANIEL FLEMING | 

URL of the originating web site: https://steadfastloyalty.com/politics/oklahoma-hospital-closes-medical-workers-laid-off-due-to-lack-of-patients/

Integris Baptist Medical Center in Oklahoma City closed down all operations except emergency, radiology, and ambulatory infusion after they were forced to close the rest of the hospital due to lack of patients. The numbers coming from WHO, the CDC and Dr Fauci have all been many multiples higher than they should have been.

In the case of Integris Baptist Hospital, their undoing was the cancelling of all elective surgeries on the assumption that the country did not have enough hospital beds to cover their needs. Even in New York, the epicenter of the disease, the numbers were many times what was needed. Andrew Cuomo said that New Yorkers would die because President Trump did not send him 30 thousand ventilators.

New York in fact needed less than the 4000 ventilators President Trump sent them.  The same holds true in the number of beds needed. Much of that number can be explained by actions from our president. He fearlessly issued travel bans from countries with a high rate of corona virus. President in fact saved countless thousands of lives.

From The Blaze

Integris Baptist Medical Center in Oklahoma City closed down all operations except emergency, radiology, and ambulatory infusion. The hospital has experienced a 50% drop in revenues since procedures deemed nonessential by the government have been halted.
Oklahoma, like many states, has enacted a policy of temporarily banning nonessential medical procedures in an effort to preserve resources, especially personal protective equipment such as masks. In states without an overwhelming COVID-19 outbreak, some hospitals are seeing very little activity.
A spokeswoman for Integris said direct personal caregivers will be transferred to a larger hospital in the city, while non-direct patient care staff will be furloughed until the hospital reopens.
Furloughed workers won’t receive pay, although they will have access to benefits. They can be paid for the time they’re unable to work if they use their paid time off, and they will be allowed to use 80 more hours than they’ve actually accrued. Still, for many workers, that won’t go very far.

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Obamacare Threatens Charitable Hospitals


PLEASE READ MY NOTE AT THE END OF THIS VERY IMPORTANT ARTICLE. – JB

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The Last Resistance //  http://lastresistance.com/3024/obamacare-threatens-charitable-hospitals/

From Dr. Jerry Newcombe:

It’s a good thing our current administration wasn’t around in the 4th century when St. Basil of Caesarea invented what writer George Grant calls “the first non-ambulatory hospital” in history, i.e., a medical facility with beds.

Pouring forth the love of Jesus Christ, the good saint who lived in the Mediterranean port city northwest of Jerusalem is credited with this humanitarian development of the institution of the hospital. Roberto Margotta, author of “The Story of Medicine,” says of Basil’s hospital, that the “rule of love” prevailed, with the “care and comfort of the sick.”

The longest lasting hospital that still operates (no pun intended) is Hotel Dieu (i.e., God Hospital) in Paris founded in the year of our Lord 600. It borders Notre Dame Cathedral.

In the New World, the oldest, still-operating medical facility is Jesus of Nazareth Hospital in Mexico City, founded in 1524. In many other places and times, Christians of various stripes started all sorts of hospitals and health clinics. That’s true across the globe. Even to this day, many hospitals show their Christian origin in their very name. Good Samaritan. Holy Cross. Christ. Baptist. Bethesda. St. Mary’s.

Some hospitals are named after St. Luke (e.g., St. Luke Presbyterian, Rush St. Luke) because the author of the third Gospel and Acts was a doctor. He was even Paul’s doctor.

Many people of good will, regardless of their religious convictions (or the lack thereof), are involved in the healing of the sick. Christian charity (that is, voluntary love for the Lord and for others) was what historically motivated so many of the great developments in organized health care in the first place, and that remains true to some degree today.

It’s disturbing, then, to learn that the government’s takeover of the health care system will likely punish charity hospitals in the future. In short, Obamacare could be bad for our health.

A headline in “The Daily Caller” notes, “Obamacare installs new scrutiny, fines for charitable hospitals that treat uninsured people” (8/8/13). Patrick Hawley reports: “Charitable hospitals that treat uninsured Americans will be subjected to new levels of scrutiny of their nonprofit status and could face sizable new fines under Obamacare.”

The fines could be as stiff as $50,000 “if they fail to meet bureaucrats’ standards,” he writes.

Hawley adds, “A new provision in Section 501 of the Internal Revenue Code, which takes effect under Obamacare, sets new standards of review and installs new financial penalties for tax-exempt charitable hospitals, which devote a minimum amount of their expenses to treat uninsured poor people. Approximately 60 percent of American hospitals are currently nonprofit.”

I thought Obamacare was supposedly about providing health care for the poor and uninsured. It seems to me this is more about government control than it is about helping people.

Dr. David Stevens is the president of the Christian Medical and Dental Associations, located in Bristol, Tennessee. They represent about 16,500 members and are in contact regularly with over 30,000 physicians and dentists. I’ve interviewed him a few times for radio and TV.

He once told me, “All three of my children work with a health care ministry in inner-city Memphis. They’re motivated by their faith, and they sacrifice every day, not only at their work place; but they live [there], right with the people that they serve because of their faith.”

But enter Obamacare with its stifling regulations in the health care field, and such good works could be ultimately discouraged to satisfy the bureaucracy.

Dr. Stevens observes: “…if ever we needed Christians in health care, it’s now; but unfortunately, we’re putting a system into place that ultimately could drive them out of health care.” For example, if laws forced them to violate their conscience.

He laments, “That’s scary, especially as we look at the bioethical issues we’re facing on physician-assisted suicide, embryonic stem cell research, abortion, and the list just goes on and on—where having a doctor that shares your Christian worldview is going to become more and more important in beginning-of-life care and in end-of-life care.”

Stevens adds, “We need health care reform, but we need to attack the real problem—out-of- control costs—not open the doors for millions and millions of more people at this point to enter the system and increase costs even more. We need to deal with access, but if we can get costs under control, it’s going to be cheaper for everyone, the insured now and those that can be insured when the cost is lower.”

Driving conscientious Christians out of health care is the worst thing that could happen to that field, yet it seems that Obamacare regulations could end up doing just that. Ironically, at the same time many are losing their jobs because of Obamacare and may need charitable health care.

I remember in the comedy record, “The First Family” in the early 1960s, where comedian Vaughn Meader did a masterful job imitating JFK. At a mock press conference, a reporter asks “JFK” what his solution would be to the coming social security crisis. Meader’s reply as JFK was, “Try to stay young.” Applying the same humorous logic to today: What’s the solution to health care crisis, should Obamacare go fully into effect? “Don’t get sick.”

Sadly, more government bureaucracy in the health care field may ultimately drive out that spirit which gave birth to much of it in the first place.

Dr. Jerry Newcombe is a key archivist of the D. James Kennedy Legacy Library and a Christian TV producer. He has also written or co-written 23 books, including The Book That Made America: How the Bible Formed Our Nation and (with D. James Kennedy), What If Jesus Had Never Been Born? His views are his own. http://www.jerrynewcombe.com

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Let’s go over again how insurance premiums are calculated and where claims are paid from;

  • Premiums are calculated by adding the cost of doing business/administration; plus actuarial claims average for that Zip Code, plus the amount of money necessary to invest to cover the claims amount.
  • That last figure is important because no insurance company can take in a dollar of premium and pay out a dollar of claim. That is bankruptcy. Claims are paid from the return-on-investment (ROI)  that was invested in the market. If the market is bad or down, so is the ROI, making the insurance company having to raise premiums to cover the loss. Unless the assets are high, the insurance company is always on the brink of bankruptcy. When you look at any insurance company, regardless of what they are insuring, the higher their assets means greater comfort for the buyer because those high assets means they have the ability to pay the claim, even in a disastrous situation.
  • It takes 6 months to a year of investment in order to afford paying claims.
  • As claims exceed return-on-investments rates, premiums have to be increased to cover the loss.
  • When an insurance company buys claims (i.e., covering preexisting conditions), they are starting in a loss on their ROI. In order to accommodate such demands, services have to be adjusted, reduced, eliminated or restricted, amounts paid to medical professionals have to be reduced, and premiums increased to help recover losses to ROI. Sometimes the insurance company have to purge certain claimants in to cover some of the loss of ROI. You heard of people being dropped by their insurer because of claims. Now you why.

With Obamacare starting off in the red on its ROI, increased cost is the only answer.

 

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