What’s Really in Obama’s Health Care Reform Bill

July 30, 2009

Natural News

by Mike Adams

What’s really in Obama’s health care reform bill? Almost no one knows, and here’s why: It’s 1,017 pages long and written in an alien form of bureaucratic English that can barely be decoded by earthlings.

And yet, astonishingly, a U.S. Army translator has been found who speaks “Washington Doublespeak” and he was kind enough to decode the bill and post his plain-language findings over at FreeRepublic.com.

Below, we reprint what he found in the health care reform bill. As you read this, keep in mind that some of these translations are a bit loose with the interpretations, but I’ve personally spot-checked these points, and they are indeed all contained in the bill in one form or another (shrouded in Doublespeak language, of course).

Editor’s note: I don’t personally agree with every interpretation listed here, and some of the bill’s provisions are actually good ideas (like banning doctors from owning stock in health care companies). But overall, this interpretation points out many alarming provisions in the proposed health care reform bill…

From CMS at FreeRepublic.com:

&bull Page 16: States that if you have insurance at the time of the bill becoming law and change, you will be required to take a similar plan. If that is not available, you will be required to take the government option!
&bull Page 22: Mandates audits of all employers that self-insure!
&bull Page 29: Admission: your health care will be rationed!
&bull Page 30: A government committee will decide what treatments and benefits you get (and, unlike an insurer, there will be no appeals process)
&bull Page 42: The “Health Choices Commissioner” will decide health benefits for you. You will have no choice. None.
&bull Page 50: All non-US citizens, illegal or not, will be provided with free healthcare services.
&bull Page 58: Every person will be issued a National ID Healthcard.
&bull Page 59: The federal government will have direct, real-time access to all individual bank accounts for electronic funds transfer.
&bull Page 65: Taxpayers will subsidize all union retiree and community organizer health plans (example: SEIU, UAW and ACORN)
&bull Page 72: All private healthcare plans must conform to government rules to participate in a Healthcare Exchange.
&bull Page 84: All private healthcare plans must participate in the Healthcare Exchange (i.e., total government control of private plans)
&bull Page 91: Government mandates linguistic infrastructure for services; translation: illegal aliens
&bull Page 95: The Government will pay ACORN and Americorps to sign up individuals for Government-run Health Care plan.
&bull Page 102: Those eligible for Medicaid will be automatically enrolled: you have no choice in the matter.
&bull Page 124: No company can sue the government for price-fixing. No “judicial review” is permitted against the government monopoly. Put simply, private insurers will be crushed.
&bull Page 127: The AMA sold doctors out: the government will set wages.

Click here for the full report and links from Natural News.

Americans Spend $34 Billion a Year on Alternative Medicine

July 30, 2009

USA TODAY

By Liz Szabo

That’s a growth of more than 25% in the past decade, says an in-person survey of 23,000 Americans from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and National Institutes of Health.

 

Alternative therapies, which range from herbs to yoga classes, now account for 11% of the total amount that Americans spend out-of-pocket on all health care.

 

These unconventional approaches are popular with people of all ages: 38% of adults and 12% of children have used them in the past year, the study says.

But Americans don’t always use these treatments under a doctor’s guidance.

The bulk of these expenses, $22 billion, go to “self care,” or treatments such as homeopathic medications and fish oil capsules that people buy without a health practitioner’s advice, the study says.

But that doesn’t mean that these patient reject conventional medical treatment, says Linda Lee, director of the Johns Hopkins Integrative Medicine & Digestive Center in Baltimore, who wasn’t involved in the new survey.

Many people combine conventional and “complementary” approaches, Lee says. For example, cancer patients may undergo chemotherapy at a hospital, but also use acupuncture for chronic pain, she says. And while natural approaches to health care may sound home-spun, they’ve also become a big business. Lee notes that supplements and alternative therapies have boomed in popularity partly due to savvy marketing.

The study shows that conventional doctors need to learn as much as possible about alternative therapies, Lee says, “not so they can necessarily prescribe or profit from them, but so they understand what it is their patients are hoping to gain and advise patients as to their appropriate use.”

The results also show why it’s important for researchers to conduct rigorous scientific studies of alternative therapies, says the NIH’s Josephine Briggs. Many alternative approaches have never been carefully tested for safety and effectiveness.

That’s starting to change.

In recent years, clinical trials presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology, for example, have shown that ginseng relieves fatigue in cancer patients, ginger fights chemo-related nausea and flax seeds seem to slow the growth of prostate tumors. Other research presented at the oncology society show that shark cartilage has no effect on fighting lung cancer.

Lee says she’s concerned about patients who “self-prescribe” alternative therapies.

Many patients also fail to tell their doctors when they try alternative therapies for fear of ridicule, Lee says. Both practices can put patients at risk, however. Alternative therapies can have dangerous interactions — both with conventional or non-conventional medications — or may pose risks for patients with particular medical conditions.

For example, antioxidant supplements can interfere with the effects of radiation therapy and some forms of chemo, Lee says. High doses of vitamin E, which can thin the blood, could be harmful for people taking other blood-thinning drugs or those about to have surgery.

“An open dialogue with our patients only improves our ability to care for them,” Lee says.

Click here to read the full report from USA Today.

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Tamiflu Causes Sickness & Nightmares in Children

July 31, 2009

Times Online

by David Rose

More than half of children taking the swine flu drug Tamiflu experience side-effects such as nausea and nightmares, research suggests.

An estimated 150,000 people with flu symptoms were prescribed the drug through a new hotline and website last week, according to figures revealed yesterday.

Studies of children attending three schools in London and one in the South West showed that 51-53 per cent had one or more side-effects from the medication, which is offered to everyone in England with swine flu symptoms.

The research by the Health Protection Agency emerged as Sir Liam Donaldson, the Chief Medical Officer for England, said that swine flu infections “may have reached a plateau”.

Releasing the latest figures, Sir Liam said that an estimated 110,000 new cases of the H1N1 virus were diagnosed by doctors in the week to Sunday. That did not include those using the new National Pandemic Flu Service for England to obtain antiviral drugs without seeing their GP.

Sir Liam said that the deaths of 27 people in England were confirmed to have been linked to swine flu, compared with 26 last week. As of Wednesday morning 793 people were in hospital in England with the virus, and 81 were in intensive care.

Yesterday Natasha Newman, 16, of Highgate, North London, was seriously ill in hospital in Athens after contracting swine flu while on holiday on the island of Cephalonia. Her parents, Julian Newman and Nikki Boughton, were at her bedside at the Agia Sofia children’s hospital, said a spokeswoman for Mr Newman’s business, J. Newman Textiles. “This is a very distressing and worrying time,” she said.

Peter Holden, the British Medical Association’s lead expert on swine flu, suggested that Tamiflu was being overused and did not need to be offered to everyone with mild symptoms. “The National Pandemic Flu Service has been a great success, and was needed to take the pressure off GPs,” he said. “But the threshold for getting Tamiflu should be quite high.

“For patients who are not in the high-risk groups — such as pregnant women, people with bad asthma or with suppressed immune systems — this virus typically causes mild symptoms and does not require a course of Tamiflu. Patients in the at-risk groups should be referred to their GP, who will use their clinical judgment.”

A total of 103 children took part in the London study, of which 85 were given the drug as a precaution after a classmate received a diagnosis of swine flu. Of those, 45 experienced one or more side-effects. The most common was nausea (29 per cent), followed by stomach pain or cramps (20 per cent) and problems sleeping (12 per cent). Almost one in five had a “neuropsychiatric side-effect”, such as inability to think clearly, nightmares and “behaving strangely”, according to the research, published in Eurosurveillance, a journal of disease.

The study was carried out in April and May when the drug was being issued as a preventive measure. The findings were echoed by a study of children at a school in the South West where a pupil had caught the disease in Mexico.

Health officials in Japan have recommended against prescribing Tamiflu to teenagers over fears it causes a rise in “neuropsychiatric events”. The researchers said that clinical trials had shown that about 20 per cent of adults reported side-effects of either nausea or vomiting after taking Tamiflu.

Both the Department of Health and the Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory products Agency said that the drug was safe, and that the benefits of treating early symptoms and avoiding potentially serious complications could outweigh the risks of side-effects.

Sir Liam said that despite a 10 per cent rise in the estimated number of cases in the week to Sunday, the latest figures reinforced “a growing impression we have had a peak”. He said that a surge would still be expected in the winter flu season, but added: “I think we are a little more confident we may be seeing a downturn in this flu.”

Scale of the outbreak

— 110,000 new swine flu cases in England last week, based on data from GPs

— 150,000 people obtaining Tamiflu without seeing a GP since last Thursday

— 51% to 53% proportion of children reporting side-effects from taking Tamiflu

— 1 in 158 people in England have contacted their GP with flu-like symptoms since outbreaks began. The rate is 1 in 77 for children aged 1 to 4

Click here to get the full report from Times Online

Recession Worse Than Prior Estimates, Revisions Show

July 31, 2009

Bloomberg

By Bob Willis

The first 12 months of the U.S. recession saw the economy shrink more than twice as much as previously estimated, reflecting even bigger declines in consumer spending and housing, revised figures showed.

The world’s largest economy contracted 1.9 percent from the fourth quarter of 2007 to the last three months of 2008, compared with the 0.8 percent drop previously on the books, the Commerce Department said today in Washington.

“The current downturn beginning in 2008 is more pronounced,” Steven Landefeld, director of the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis, said in a press briefing this week. The revisions were in line with past experience in which initial figures tended to underestimate the severity of contractions during their early stages, he said.

The updated statistics also showed that Americans earned more over the last 10 years and socked away a larger share of that cash in savings. The report signals the process of repairing tattered balance sheets following the biggest drop in household wealth on record may be further along than anticipated.

Spending Slumps

Consumer spending, which accounts for 70 percent of the economy, decreased 1.8 percent in last year’s fourth quarter from the same period in 2007, exceeding the prior estimate of a 1.5 percent drop. Purchases also began sinking sooner than previously projected, registering their first decline at the start of 2008 rather than in the second half.

Treasuries headed higher after the report, while stock- index futures declined. Benchmark 10-year note yields were at 3.58 percent at 8:51 a.m. in New York, from 3.61 percent late yesterday. Contracts on the Standard & Poor’s 500 Stock Index were down 0.3 percent at 979.

Residential construction fell 21 percent during the period, almost 2 percentage points more than previously reported, aggravating what was already the worst slump since the Great Depression.

The Commerce Department also reported today that the economy contracted at a 1 percent annual rate from April through June after shrinking at a 6.4 percent pace in the first quarter, the most since 1982. The decline in the first three months of the year was previously reported as 5.5 percent.

Recession’s Start

The National Bureau of Economic Research, the accepted arbiter of U.S. business cycles, last year determined the recession started in December 2007. The private group is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts,

Today’s updates are part of comprehensive revisions that take place about every five years and are more extensive than the changes announced at this time each year. Figures as far back as 1929 can be revised.

Over the most recent period, the third quarter of 2008 underwent one of the biggest changes, going from a 0.5 percent decrease in gross domestic product to a 2.7 percent drop. The new reading better illustrates the effect the September collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. had on the economy and credit markets.

The deeper deterioration last year underscores why Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and his colleagues at the central bank cut the benchmark rate to a record low and extended credit to non-banks for the first time since the 1930s.

The new GDP data also help explain why the unemployment rate shot up 2.3 percentage points last year, the biggest annual jump since 1982.

2001 Recession Milder

The revisions showed that the 2001 recession was less severe than originally estimated, reflecting a smaller decline in business investment. The economy actually grew 0.1 percent from the fourth quarter of 2000 to the third quarter of 2001, erasing the 0.2 percent drop previously reported.

Personal income was revised up over the last decade, after the government boosted its adjustments for the underreporting and non-reporting of income using more recent data from the Internal Revenue Service. The increases in the most recent years reflect gains from rents, interest and proprietors’ income. The government changed the way it accounts for natural disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina, eliminating much of the prior volatility in income calculations.

More Savings

Higher incomes and less spending translated into bigger savings. The savings rate for 2008 was revised up to 2.7 percent from 1.8 percent. The rate shot up to 5.2 percent in the second quarter, the highest level since 1998.

The government revised corporate profits down for 2006-2008 and up for 2004 and 2005.

Finally, Commerce shifted food services, which include meals purchased at restaurants or served in schools, out of the food category. As a result, the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge — which tracks consumer spending and excludes food and fuel — was pushed up by 0.2 percentage point for the three-year period from 2006 to 2008.

The costs of meals away from home are not as volatile as fresh food, the government said, and therefore services should be included in the measure commonly known as the core index.

Click here for the full report from Bloomberg.

Anderson Cooper’s CIA Secret

RadarOnline.com

Anderson Cooper has long traded on his biography, carving a niche for himself as the most human of news anchors. But there’s one aspect of his past that the silver-haired CNN star has never made public: the months he spent training for a career with the Central Intelligence Agency.

Following his sophomore and junior years at Yale—a well-known recruiting ground for the CIA—Cooper spent his summers interning at the agency’s monolithic headquarters in Langley, Virginia, in a program for students interested in intelligence work. His involvement with the agency ended there, and he chose not to pursue a job with the agency after graduation, according to a CNN spokeswoman, who confirmed details of Cooper’s CIA involvement to Radar.

Click here for the full story from radaronline.com

UK’s National ID Card Unveiled

July 30, 2009

BBC News

Home Secretary Alan Johnson has unveiled the final design of the controversial national identity card.

The card will be offered to members of the public in the Greater Manchester area from the end of this year.

Ministers plan to launch the £30 biometric ID Card nationwide in 2011 or 2012 – but it will not be compulsory.

Opposition spokesmen said it was a “colossal waste of money” and civil liberty groups said it was “as costly to our pockets as to our privacy”.

Hacking the iPhone as Easy as Sending a Text

July 30, 2009

International Business Times

A Mac security expert has discovered a technique that hackers could use to take control of Apple Inc. computers and iPhone’s in order to steal data, disproving the long believed theory that Apple products are more secure than PCs.

Charlie Miller, a noted security researcher, discovered the hack a month ago and contacted Apple, but the company has yet to release a software update fixing the security hole. Miller and fellow researcher Collin Mulliner will make the exploit public at today’s Black Hat cyber security conference in Las Vegas, where hosts and attendees exchange information on Internet threats. 

The hack involves sending a series of SMS messages to hijack the iPhone. At that point, the hacker could make calls, steal data, send text messages, and basically control all functions of the phone. The hacker could even use it to hijack more iPhones. 

Earlier this month, the iPhone was shown to not be as safe as users had expected. Forensics expert Jonathan Zdziarski recently bypassed the iPhone 3GS’s passcode PIN and backup encryption with relative ease.

Attacks on Apple computers are extremely rare, but security experts believe this will soon change as Macs gain market share on PCs running Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system.

Dai Zovi, who is the co-author of “The Mac Hacker’s Handbook,” said that once hackers start to put substantial resources into targeting Apple’s computers, they will be at least as vulnerable as Windows machines, according to Reuters.

“There is no magic fairy dust protecting Macs,” he said.

Miller, co-author of “The Mac Hacker’s Handbook,” said that the Mac OS will be easier to crack than Windows as it is bigger and less concisely written. This means that there is more room for vulnerabilities and bugs.

Click here for the full report from the International Business Times.

Malaria Strain Resists Drugs, May Threaten Millions

July 30, 2009

Bloomberg

By Simeon Bennett

Malaria is becoming resistant to the most powerful drugs available in Southeast Asia, as the World Health Organization races to stop the spread of the strain that could be “disastrous” for global malaria control.

Treatments derived from artemisinin, the basis of the most effective anti-malaria drugs, took almost twice as long to clear the parasites that cause the disease in patients in western Cambodia as in patients in northwestern Thailand, according to a study published today in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The delay in parasite clearance times shows the drugs are losing their power against the disease in Cambodia, the study said. The failure of artemisinin-based treatments would be “disastrous” for global efforts aimed at curbing the death and disease wrought by the malady, said Arjen Dondorp, who led the study at the Mahidol Oxford Research Unit in Bangkok.

“There is no question that this is resistance to artemisinin,” Carlos Campbell, a malaria expert with the Seattle-based Program for Appropriate Technology in Health, or PATH, wrote in an editorial accompanying the study. “History warns us that it will intensify and spread unless containment steps are taken.”

Scientists have known for decades that Pailin, near Cambodia’s border with Thailand, is a breeding ground for drug- resistant malaria. Chloroquine and Roche Holding AG’s Fansidar started to fail there in the 1950s and 1960s, before becoming ineffective elsewhere, according to the study. The WHO, with $23 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is coordinating efforts to prevent artemisinin-resistant malaria from spreading to Africa, which has 90 percent of the world’s cases of the disease.

Delayed Clearance

Delayed parasite clearance times have been observed in southern Cambodia since the study’s completion, a sign the resistant strain has already spread within the country, Dondorp said in a phone interview.

Dondorp and colleagues treated 40 people in Pailin and another 40 in Wang Pha in Thailand, with artesunate, a form of artemisinin.

In Pailin, the drug took a median of 84 hours to clear the parasite from patients’ blood, compared with 48 hours, the standard, in Wang Pha, according to the study. After three days, artesunate failed to clear the parasite in 55 percent of patients in Pailin, compared with 8 percent in Wang Pha.

Widespread artemisinin resistance “would cause millions of deaths, without exaggeration,” Dondorp said in an interview in January.

Deadly Disease

Malaria strikes about 250 million people each year and kills more than 880,000, mostly children under 5, according to the WHO. It’s the world’s third-deadliest infectious disease, behind AIDS, which results in about 2 million deaths each year, and tuberculosis, which kills 1.6 million people annually, the Geneva-based WHO said.

Malaria is caused by a tiny parasite called Plasmodium, carried in the saliva of female mosquitoes. When an infected insect bites a person, the bugs travel to the liver, multiply and enter the bloodstream. There they invade red cells, leading to fever, chills, nausea and diarrhea. Unchecked, they cause red cells to stick to the walls of capillaries, slowing blood flow. Sufferers can die from organ failure without treatment.

The latest findings confirm those of earlier, inconclusive studies that suggested artesunate was losing potency in the region. Until now, researchers weren’t sure whether slowing cure rates were due to the failure of artesunate or another less powerful drug, mefloquine, that’s usually given with it.

No Alternative

Campbell noted that there isn’t an alternative class of malaria drugs to replace artemisinin derivatives. Artemisinin- based medications work by giving malaria a short, sharp shock, clearing most of the parasites from the blood within hours. The drawback is they don’t remain in the body. The WHO’s guidelines recommend combining the drug with one of several less-powerful, longer-lasting medicines that eradicate stragglers.

Those other drugs, such as mefloquine, may cause adverse effects including nausea, vomiting and nightmares. When the two drugs are sold side by side, rather than combined in a single pill, some patients take only the artemisinin to avoid unpleasant symptoms, paving the way for relapses and drug resistance.

Counterfeit drugs containing suboptimal amounts of artesunate may also have contributed to the development of the resistant strain, Dondorp said.

Click here for the full story from Bloomberg.com

The Kevin Trudeau Show: 07-29-09

Today, Kevin explains how the mainstream media is brainwashing you and gives you the headlines they won’t:

The Outcome of Disagreeing with Barack Obama…
Big Pharma Spends Millions to Influence Politicians.
The Toxins Lurking in Your Water Supply…
JAMA Threatens a Big Pharma Whistleblower
FDA Lists the Risks of Pharmaceuticals on Own Website
KT’s Natural Cure Recommendations

Plus, John Perkins exposes how the U.S. government REALLY takes care of business!

Take Trudeau on the Go! Click here to download this show to your iPod, mp3 player, or PC through iTunes!

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