Why isn’t anyone talking about the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), or Obamacare’s inevitable rationing? (Photo Washington Times)

While it has been proven that the Affordable Care Act was designed specifically to fail in order to pave the way for Single Payer, one major piece of the Obamacare puzzle has been inexplicably left out of the existing debate, and that is the inevitable rationing that the legislation brings.

This is a reprint from an article I wrote (from a now-defunct website) warning people about how rationing is a key element of Obamacare. It is one of the most important articles I have ever written and proves that the academics promoting Obamacare at the time were also staunch advocates of rationing, which is a necessary part of any government health program.

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I am writing this because I think that this topic is urgently important and nobody truly understands what is happening behind closed doors (and open doors) in academia, in conferences, seminars, etc., all to ensure that rationing is “accepted” in the public square. The word “Rationing” has been somewhat marginalized, but one can very easily do a Google Scholar search for rationing and find it all over various academic publications.  The idea is to find “code words” in order to make the idea of rationing, i.e., death panels more palatable for Americans.

Make no mistake, it IS going to happen under ObamaCare and is already happening now, in some instances, but will get worse: much, much worse.  How do I know?  I read their words and I take them at their word.

The way this will be justified will be by using “experts” in the field of bioethics, just like it was to justify abortion – I know this because I have been familiarizing myself with academic journals.  Therefore, people must know some basic principlesin bioethics in order to understand the positions and know how to respond.

Justifying Death Panels: (Code Words / Phrases)

Some common arguments for rationing (most deal with cost):

• “Healthcare is already being rationed” referring to people willing to wait for an organ transplants, being turned down for insurance, etc.
• “People do not need all of these tests.” (See the Choosing Wisely Campaign below)
• The last year of life is a costly burden that negatively impacts future generations.
• Many people would rather die at home.1
• It is not fair to use expensive interventions when people will die soon anyway.

The idea of rationing health care became a very popular topic within Bioethics circles after the passage of the Affordable Care Act, aka, “ObamaCare.” Many conferences and journal articles dealt with the issue, particularly surrounding the issues of “fairness” and “end of life care.”

As this report shows, not only do bioethicists advocate rationing, but some have learned to not use the word, and they freely admit that they believe rationing to be inevitable.

In a story about the Women’s March on Washington, Time magazine published various “Portraits of Dissent” that included the views of a 17-year-old Calvert County, Maryland, high school senior with the words “Nasty, Queer, Bitch,” marked on her cheeks and forehead. She was quoted as saying rights were in danger because of the Trump presidency and that Vice President Mike Pence “is someone that supports electroshocking people like me to turn us into people we aren’t.”

Pence never said any such thing. But where did this fictional and irrational claim come from? And why did Time publish this lie?

A new report from the National Task Force for Therapy Equality to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) identifies precisely where many of the false claims are originating. The report, entitled, “Lies, Deception, and Fraud,” accuses the Southern Poverty Law Center, Human Rights Campaign, and the National Center for Lesbian Rights of a hate campaign designed to ban psychotherapy for individuals with sexual and gender identity conflicts.

You may recognize the Human Rights Campaign as the pro-Obama group that furnished a speaker for the FBI’s recent gay “pride” summit.

In one case documented in the report, a transgendered woman associated with a New Jersey homosexual-rights organization claimed she had been tortured at a “conversion therapy camp” and that it constituted “child abuse.” But no such camp ever existed. It did exist in a 1999 movie, “But I’m a Cheerleader,” starring drag queen RuPaul. In Washington State, gay rights advocates claimed that children were subjected to shock therapy and ice baths to get them out of the lifestyle. No evidence of such practices was ever presented.

Evidence shows that same-sex attractions can be changed through counseling and can result from bad relations with a parent or sexual abuse. Indeed, the Restored Hope Network (RHN), representing the largest coalition of ex-homosexual ministries in the world, just held a national conference.

The National Task Force for Therapy Equality is part of the Equality And Justice For All, a coalition of psychotherapists, psychiatrists, physicians, public policy organizations and clients. The co-coordinator, Christopher Doyle, is a former homosexual who says that therapy changed his life. He is now married to his wife and they have five children.

Despite claims in the media that people are born gay, this is a myth perpetuated by left-wing homosexual organizations. There is no scientific evidence for the claim. Another myth is that counseling away from same-sex attraction involves shock therapy. There is no evidence whatsoever that the technique has been used or coerced on children or adolescents to modify sexuality.

Perhaps the best known of the three organizations cited above, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), calls the idea of counseling homosexuals to leave the lifestyle “quackery.”

The SPLC has a notorious reputation, even on the left. It raises money by using terms like “homophobia” and “Islamophobia” to demonize people supporting traditional Christian values. The group’s “Hate Map” of conservative organizations inspired a homosexual militant to launch a terrorist attack on the Washington, D.C. headquarters of the Family Research Council in 2013. It was “liked” on Facebook by the left-wing Bernie Sanders supporter who tried to massacre a group of Republicans at a baseball game outside of Washington, D.C.

Its fundraising practices, which have generated a reserve fund of about $300 million, are at the heart of the complaint by the National Task Force for Therapy Equality to the FTC. The FTC complaint asks for action to be taken against the three organizations because they use “deceptive and fraudulent” claims. Such claims, of course, are prominently featured in the liberal media, which regularly refer to the SPLC as a “civil rights” organization.

On a national basis, six liberal states and several cities and jurisdictions have passed legislation banning licensed psychotherapy for minors with unwanted same-sex attractions and general identity conflicts. The legislation has been driven mostly by the three organizations mentioned above and local homosexual groups working with them.

Still, most states have refused to follow. And the 2016 Republican Party platform declared, “We support the right of parents to determine the proper medical treatment and therapy for their minor children.”

Bans on therapy also harm people who have been victims of sexual abuse and developed a same-sex attraction as a result of the abuse. The Equality and Justice for All website notes, “Children who have been molested by a same-sex adult and are confused about their sexual orientation as a result of the sexual abuse will be denied access to therapy simply because it is not gay-affirming. In effect, a child will be molested twice—first by the perpetrator and then again by the political environment, which refuses to treat the child unless he sees a gay-affirming therapist.”

Needless to say, as demonstrated by the Time magazine “Portrait of Dissent” cited earlier, some people seem to think that methods of brutal force are used to turn people away from the gay lifestyle. In fact, psychotherapy involves talking to people who want to leave their state of sexual confusion or unwanted sexual attraction through what are called “sexual orientation change efforts.”

While the FTC complaint has received some coverage from conservative and Christian news organizations, the major media have remained mostly silent. This is undoubtedly due to the fact that all of the major news organizations, including Fox News, financially underwrite the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association and follow its dictates. This group, which now accepts transgendered and “queer” people, asserts in the face of the scientific evidence that gays are born that way and that choice has nothing to do with it. Yet, the wife of New York City Mayor Bill “Red Bill” de Blasio is an ex-lesbian.

The claim by the young lesbian in Time magazine that Vice President Pence “supports electroshocking people like me” is an example of the falsehoods that continue to be peddled by the media. What Pence did say, in a 2000 campaign statement, was that he supported providing assistance to “those seeking to change their sexual behavior.”

Only in a culture dominated by a pro-homosexual media would such a statement be considered offensive and transformed into a demand for shocking homosexuals out of their lifestyle.

The only shock therapy practiced today is a form of media bias that makes sexual perversion acceptable and eliminates any mention of the ability to change or even cure a lifestyle that carries major health risks.

Cliff Kincaid

The latest propaganda piece from The Washington Post, “Obama’s secret struggle to punish Russia for Putin’s election assault,” is based, as usual, mostly on anonymous sources determined to make former President Barack Obama look good. The gist is that Obama tried his best to punish Russia for alleged interference in the 2016 election, but he fell short and left the matter in the hands of President Donald Trump, who has done nothing.

So Trump is blamed for Obama’s failure. How convenient.

The essence of the piece is that “intelligence” was “captured” that somehow proved that Russian President Vladimir Putin gave “specific instructions” that he wanted  to “defeat or at least damage the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, and help elect her opponent, Donald Trump.”

Pardon me, but I don’t believe this for a moment. This “intelligence” may be what the Post seeks to expose—Russian “active measures” or disinformation.

As we reported back in January, “Looking at the election objectively, it is possible to say that Russian leader Vladimir Putin may have had a personal vendetta against the former U.S. secretary of state for some reason, stemming from allegations of U.S. meddling in Russian internal affairs. On the other hand, Putin may have preferred that Clinton become the U.S. president because her failed Russian ‘reset’ had facilitated Russian military intervention in Ukraine and Syria, and he believed he could continue to take advantage of her.”

This makes far more sense than the Post story.

Remember that Obama won the 2012 election after dismissing his Republican opponent Mitt Romney’s claim that Russia was a geopolitical threat to the United States. Obama had also been caught on an open mic before the election promising to be “flexible” in changing his positions to benefit Russia.

“These comments provide more evidence that Obama was never the anti-Russian figure he postured as in the final days of his second term,” we noted.

The Post story by Greg Miller and others is an obvious response to the observation that, if Obama thought the Russian interference was such a big deal, what did Obama try to do about it?

One can read the entire article if you are interested in how pro-Obama propaganda is manufactured by the Post. Some parts of the article are more ludicrous than others, such as this paragraph:

“Throughout his presidency, Obama’s approach to national security challenges was deliberate and cautious. He came into office seeking to end wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was loath to act without support from allies overseas and firm political footing at home. He was drawn only reluctantly into foreign crises, such as the civil war in Syria, that presented no clear exit for the United States.”

The paragraph is designed to mask Obama’s indifference to Russian aggression in places like Crimea, Ukraine and Syria. In regard to the latter, Obama failed to save Syria from Russian aggression and facilitated a conflict—through secret arms shipments to the region—that now stands at 500,000 dead.

Obama’s alleged “cautious” approach in the Middle East was to support jihadist groups in Syria and Libya, and back regimes such as the Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt, which was overthrown by the military backed by the people.

The hero in the Post account is Obama’s CIA director John Brennan, who joined the agency after admitting to voting for Moscow’s man in the 1976 presidential election, Gus Hall of the Communist Party USA. Suddenly, we are led to believe, as CIA director, he became anti-Russian after discovering a Moscow plot in 2016 to disrupt the presidential election.

“In political terms,” the paper said, “Russia’s interference was the crime of the century, an unprecedented and largely successful destabilizing attack on American democracy.”

This is complete nonsense. There is no evidence any votes were changed as a result of this so-called “interference.”

The crime of the century is bad journalism based on anonymous sources who hide behind papers like the Post to spread their self-serving and partisan propaganda.

“This account of the Obama administration’s response to Russia’s interference is based on interviews with more than three dozen current and former U.S. officials in senior positions in government, including at the White House, the State, Defense and Homeland Security departments, and U.S. intelligence services,” the Post said. “Most agreed to speak only on the condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the issue.”

One paragraph in particular tells you everything you know about the anonymous sources behind this story. “Those closest to Obama defend the administration’s response to Russia’s meddling,” the Post said. Yes, indeed, those “closest to Obama” would certainly do so.

Then we’re told that that “They believe that a series of warnings—including one that Obama delivered to Putin in September—prompted Moscow to abandon any plans of further aggression, such as sabotage of U.S. voting systems.”

There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever for this dramatic statement. It’s completely made up.

Remember, this is the same Obama who once assured Putin that after he won his re-election campaign in 2012, he would have “more flexibility” with the Russian leader and be able to offer more concessions.

Now, all of a sudden, Obama is rough and tough and gets things done with the Russian leader. What a joke.

The paper reported that “Obama confronted Putin directly during a meeting of world leaders in Hangzhou, China. Accompanied only by interpreters, Obama told Putin that ‘we knew what he was doing and [he] better stop or else,’ according to a senior aide who subsequently spoke with Obama. Putin responded by demanding proof and accusing the United States of interfering in Russia’s internal affairs.”

Or else?

It sounds like the red line in Syria that Obama had warned the Syrian regime not to cross. But they crossed it anyway.

Obama’s so-called “secret struggle to punish Russia for Putin’s election assault” exists in the minds of Post reporters who are waging a not-so-secret struggle to rehabilitate the former president’s disastrous foreign policy toward Russia and most of the rest of the world.

Let’s not forget one more debacle—Obama’s deal with Russian client state Iran to facilitate the regime’s nuclear weapons program and world-wide terrorism.

That may end up being another crime of the century, on par with President Bill Clinton’s deal with North Korea that was supposed to prevent the communist regime from getting its hands on nuclear weapons.

Speaking of North Korea, whose nuclear weapons program accelerated under Obama, hear the words of Otto Warmbier’s father about his son being released after Trump took office: “I think the results speak for themselves.”

Obama’s “cautious and deliberate” approach was to let the young man languish in a North Korean prison while being tortured to near death.

Cliff Kincaid

Trump ends payouts to radical leftist groups from Obama’s big bucks shakedown-supported DoJ slush fund

While being investigated for things that never happened and facing Antifa thugs and other lunatic leftists crawling out from under rocks nationwide while the true criminals in the Democratic Party get a free pass, the Trump administration has managed to accomplish, in these few short months, more than George W. Bush accomplished (i.e. things that actually helped America out) in his first term.

Trump is already rolling back big parts of Obama’s train wreck of an agenda and pulling our nation back from the brink and toward some semblance of sanity and the rule of law. One of the latest major changes, and one with significant potential impact on the Left’s ability to wage war against America, is Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s recent announcement that the Department of Justice is ending payments to radical leftist organizations from the multi-billion dollar slush fund amassed by the Obama DoJ’s various industry shakedowns.

Peter Schweizer‘s Government Accountability Institute issued a report in October 2016, “Follow the Money: How the Department of Justice Funds Progressive Activists,” that detailed the stunning amount of money the DoJ has been awarding to left-wing groups. Under Eric Holder’s DoJ, financial institutions paid an unprecedented $110 billion in fines, much of which came in through out-of-court settlements.

Many of the cases were based on tenuous grounds, such as “disparate impact” which assumes racism based solely on the proportion of loans awarded to minorities. According to the report, “The DOJ used the threat of litigation—and the corresponding financial and reputational costs—to cause banks to take actions that a court would not have ordered them to do.”

We are still trying to figure out where it all went. But we do have some ideas. As with Obama’s corrupt green energy subsidies, it seems apparent that Holder’s DoJ extorted huge sums from banks specifically to funnel money to political allies. Schweizer documents how the DoJ flagrantly misused this money:

• Provided funding for activist groups previously denied by Congress.
• Incentivized banks to pay activist groups directly by counting each dollar donated this way as up to $10 against its actual fine.
• Funneled $53 million to Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America (NACA), led by a self-described “bank terrorist.”
• Gave $4 million to Asian Americans for Equality, an organization with communist roots and close ties to a North Korean sympathizer.

Once the funds were distributed, Catalist and other Soros-funded left-wing voter mobilization operations encouraged recipients to get out the vote for those who were “reliably progressive.”

With the DoJ slush fund, President Obama upped federal financial support to left-wing partisans astronomically. But the federal government has been funding the Left’s extremist, anti-American agenda for decades. There are literally tens of thousands of tax-exempt organizations that provide healthy incomes for millions of leftists who seek to destroy our nation, many of which receive some or all of their revenues from government.

Schweizer’s report quotes Cornelia Mrose, who testified before Congress:

In 2012, federal state and local governments gave $137 billion to organizations in the form of grants and contracts. Of that amount, $81 billion went to social service groups including affordable housing groups, legal aid groups, civil rights groups, and ethnic groups…

The report goes on to say:

…while the ostensible purpose of these organizations was to provide help for vulnerable citizens, the “real purpose” was to augment the “power, control and reach of government via an army of community groups.”

Almost every one of this “army of community groups” is left-wing. One good example is an organization I am personally familiar with, Identity, Inc. of Gaithersburg, Maryland. Identity describes its mission and vision as “creat[ing] opportunities for Latino youth and their families to reach their highest potential,” and adds, “[w]e envision a just and equitable society that nurtures all youth and is enriched by their contributions.”

“All youth” refers to illegal alien youth, of course. In reality, Identity is an illegal alien advocacy group that uses militant tactics. In 2011, Maryland residents advanced a petition to place a referendum question on the 2012 ballot to defeat what was then the recently enacted state DREAM Act — which provided in-state college tuition for illegal aliens. Volunteers needed to obtain 55,736 petition signatures. They received double that amount. However, in its attempt to derail that effort, Identity joined another notorious government-funded illegal alien advocacy group, CASA de Maryland. These were the kinds of tactics they employed:

• Screaming racist and obscene epithets in petition-bearers’ faces
• Blocking interested citizens from approaching petition tables
• Pleading with people not to sign
• Passing out misleading “Think Before You Ink” flyers
• Utilizing paid FieldWorks operatives who shadowed petition locations and coordinated by phone
• Calling police to make bogus complaints
• One petitioner even reported being spat at

Identity is almost entirely government-funded. Its most recent tax filing shows receipts of $5.2 million, of which $4.9 million — 94 percent — was government grants. Prior years show similar results. Your tax dollars at work! Similarly, CASA de Maryland, which has bragged about having such notables on its board of directors as DNC Chairman Thomas Perez and former Obama domestic policy director Cecilia Munoz, received $4.1 million in government funding in fiscal 2015, 47 percent of total revenues.

According to USASpending.gov, National Council of La Raza (NCLR), the largest illegal alien advocacy group in the U.S., has received $28.7 million from the federal government since 2008. NCLR also received $3.1 million from Bank of America’s $16.7 billion settlement. Was the $3.1 million counted among the receipts from government, or was it hidden in direct donations from Bank of America?

NCLR works through a network of 260 “affiliates” throughout the U.S., some of which also received settlement money. The National Mortgage Settlement Summary lists a total of over $2 million provided to four NCLR affiliates: El Centro de la Raza of Seattle, Washington, ($600,000); NeighborWorks, Orange County, California, ($345,000); Unity Council, Oakland, California, ($575,000); and Community Housing Works, San Diego, California, ($500,000). Were these part of La Raza’s $3.1 million, or other monies?

NeighborWorks America is a congressionally chartered organization created in 1978 as “Neighborhood Reinvestment Corporation.” It changed its name in 2005. While it is supposed to provide housing counseling in low-income neighborhoods and other housing-related services, Schweizer reports that, in practice:

“housing needs” encompasses not only direct subsidies to purchase housing, but matters as diverse as the question of the minimum wage, whether and when felons ought to have their voting rights restored, voting rights, getting the vote out, and LGBT concerns.

NeighborWorks was a conduit of disbursements to many radical organizations, including the aforementioned “bank terrorist” group NACA, and the North Korea-linked Asian Americans for Equality. NeighborWorks receives almost all its funding from government: over $2 billion from the feds since 2007.

Everyone remembers ACORN, the criminal organization that hid its finances behind hundreds of shell companies until its game was finally exposed by Capital Research Center’s Matthew Vadum and others. Between 1994 and its bankruptcy filing in 2010, ACORN received at least $79 million from the federal government. ACORN reconstituted itself under different names but old ACORN affiliates continued to receive federal funds. For example, in 2011, ACORN affiliate  Affordable Housing Centers of America (originally called ACORN Housing), received a $300,000 HUD grant. In addition, the Mutual Housing Association of New York, which was also part of the old network of affiliated nonprofits, received $50,000 from the bank settlement, even though Congress banned federal funds from flowing to any member of the ACORN network.

But the American Civil Liberties Union is perhaps the most notorious example. A law enacted in 1976 – to be precise, Public Law 94-559, the Civil Rights Attorney’s Fees Act (42 USC, Section 1988) – allows attorneys to recover fees in civil rights and constitutional lawsuits against the government. The purpose was to make it easier for people of limited means to recover costs of lawsuits when their rights had been violated. As the definition of “constitutional rights” has broadened over the years, the ACLU has turned this law into both a weapon and a profit center. Its war chest gets help from taxpayer dollars each time the group wins. Following are just a few egregious examples:

• $106,000 for a lawsuit alleging a local library policy violates a child’s constitutional right to view porn
• $108,000 from Portland, Oregon for allowing the Boy Scouts to recruit during school hours
• $549,000 from the state of Alabama for a lawsuit to remove a Ten Commandments monument from a courthouse
• $150,000 from Barrow County, Georgia to remove the Ten Commandments from a courthouse
• $950,000 from San Diego for a lawsuit demanding that the city throw the Boy Scouts out of a city park where members of that group had been gathering at their own expense for decades
• $1 million (negotiated down from $2 million) against a small Pennsylvania school district which offered “intelligent design” theory as an alternative to Darwin’s evolution

There are thousands more cases just like this that you have doubtless heard about: forcing removal of Christmas displays, taking prayer out of school, forcing the Boy Scouts to accept homosexual Scout leaders, attacking voter integrity laws, etc. The list is endless — all of the traditions and laws that protect and define our nation and culture ripped from us while we pay the bill. Other left-wing groups use this law, but none as effectively or successfully as the ACLU.

The ACLU pleads poverty, claiming that these kinds of awards don’t keep them going. But these are truly alligator tears. According to Guidestar, the hundreds of ACLU branch offices and ACLU foundations nationwide have together amassed a total of over $650 million in current net assets. Most of this comes from private donations; however, when the ACLU is not defending terrorists, it is also recovering the costs of its activities courtesy the American taxpayer.

And it is not only the attorney fees we pay. When the ACLU takes a case to court, we are paying all the court costs to indulge its rabid left-wing viciousness whether it wins or loses, and tying up courts that should be working on real cases. It still amazes me that the ACLU, a demonstrably subversive, partisan organization, continues to enjoy tax-exempt status as a result. And for those of you yet unaware, ACLU co-founder Roger Baldwin said in 1928:

I am for socialism, disarmament, and ultimately for abolishing the state itself as an instrument of violence and compulsion. I seek social ownership of all property, the abolition of the propertied class, and sole control by those who produce wealth. Communism is the goal.

Baldwin left the ACLU in the 1950s, but ACLU’s extremist designs have never really changed. It is an agent of chaos, not civil rights.

Attorney General Sessions’s order to end the horrifying practice of sending billions of dollars to left-wing extremist organizations attacking our society is a great start. But that should never have happened in the first place.

Will congressional Republicans press for a review of all the thousands of radical left-wing groups receiving taxpayer support, both through their tax-exempt status, and the many cases where they are directly funded by government?