Top Ten Reasons It Makes Sense Not to Enroll in Obamacare
By Elizabeth Lee Vliet, M.D., of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons

The entire article is here.

1) The Obamacare health insurance policies cost significantly more – likely more than the penalty (tax). Most people can expect to see their premiums double.

2) The Obamacare health-insurance policies limit your choice of doctors.

3) The Obamacare health-insurance policies limit your choice of hospitals. For example, several major state-of-the-art, internationally known cancer treatment centers are excluded.

4) Your out-of-pocket costs will skyrocket, with the new Obamacare health-insurance policies doubling and tripling the deductibles you must pay before coverage will kick in.

5) Your medical privacy is lost when you enroll, and your medical information becomes controlled by government agencies.

6) Your personal financial and health information may be seriously compromised by the security flaws in the Healthcare.gov website.

7) You are at risk of identity theft by providing your personal information to the “Obamacare navigators,” a significant number of whom have been found to have criminal backgrounds.

8) Enrolling in the Obamacare health exchange may lead to compromises of your Second Amendment rights, as medical databases collect information on gun ownership.

9) Obamacare enrollees are finding it difficult or impossible to cancel their plan if they find a better option.

10) Obamacare policies are basically “managed care” with limitations on your options – and financial incentives for your doctor to restrict your care.

(h/t Robert Wenzel)

Okay, so the above list consists of 10 good reasons to opt out, but what of the penalties?  Is it worth it, penalty-wise and financially, to opt out?  You can avoid the penalties by filing for exemptions.  The HHS offers 14 exemptions. Claim yours here.  Dr. Gary North had the skinny on these exemptions.  See his comments below.

14 Loopholes: How to Opt Out of ObamaCare Legally
Gary North--March 18, 2014

The Democrats in the Senate see what's coming in November. They pressured the Obama administration to get them off the hook for ObamaCare. HHS complied--sort of.

The HHS created an opt-out form. It exempts 14 categories of people from the obligation of paying the fine. One category is this: your policy was canceled, but you cannot find a low-cost alternative. You don't have to prove this.

Then HHS buried the exemption form. It is hard to find.

The Wall Street Journal found out about this form. It called the public's attention to the existence of this form, but it did not post its URL.

A contact of mine found it. I am posting it here, where it cannot be buried even deeper.

http://garynorth.com/Obamacare-Exemptions.pdf

The Obama administration is playing games. It is playing games with Senate Democrats: "We complied. Now you're off the hook, sort of." It plays games with the public: "We're giving you an escape hatch, if you can find it. Lots of luck!"

No one will be satisfied with this, come November. ObamaCare is the concrete blocks around the Democrats' feet. They know it. The Democrats' defeat last week in the special election in Florida was the warning bell. The Republican ran a poor campaign, but he won. He hammered the Democrat on ObamaCare.

Maureen Dowd of the New York Times wrote this.

Brown jumping in was just one blast of bad news for Democrats. They also lost a special election last Tuesday in Florida by a hair, a defeat David Plouffe called "a screaming siren." Alex Sink, a promising candidate, sank after she could not overcome the blast of ads linking her to President Barack Obama and his health care law.

Republicans had been so worried about losing the Florida election that they prematurely trashed their own candidate, a former lobbyist named David Jolly, telling Politico that his campaign was a Keystone Kops operation.

The law is a political disaster for the Democrats at this point. They have until November to reverse the voters' perception of the law.

Obama's solution so far is to offer delays on implementation. But if the Democrats lose the Senate in November, Obama will be under tremendous pressure to keep delaying implementation, for the sake of the 2016 election.

Meanwhile, people who were sent policy-rejection notices, but who don't know about the exemption, will be looking for revenge in November.

Memory Loss--Not Natural to Aging?
When I taught high school and would forget something, the students mercilessly tagged me with having Alzheimer's.  Who knows?  Maybe I was having an Alzheimer's moment.  But it's not just kids who extrapolate tidbits from the news about older people or what it means to overlook or forget or why someone overlooks or forgets, it's also other adults who believe the propaganda about the mental health of others, and in particular older people.  Turns out that older people are not at any greater risk of memory loss than younger people.  But the fact that we're told that there is we believe it because, well, when we're 27 we may not interact with many 85 year olds on a daily basis to test their memory.  People's memory will surprise you.  It's always surprised me.  When I was in college I had to memorize the titles, the authors, the dates, the first lines, and the theme of over 80 poems for an end-of-the-year English final.  I aced it.  Because I studied for it.  I used flash cards and drilled myself endlessly for three days prior to the test to where I could think of nothing else or wanted to.  Then there is other information, like Los Angeles Dodger's 1969 team rosters.  I could rattle off names, numbers, positions, and some distinctive offensive or defensive strength of the player, whether he batted right or left, and whether or not he was a star or not.  Other folks have tremendous memories, memorizing entire lines of computer code or algorithms.  I am not up to that feat.  But plenty of young folks today are.  So watch out. 

The following article on memory loss is by Natural News staff writer, David Gutierrez.  The headline gives you what you need.  The contents of the article are not that great.  He explains that memory loss is not age-related condition, but the result of brain damage.  I am always a skeptic, which I guess gave rise to this blog in the first place.  I work on percentages.  Most people don't.  They hear brain damage and are consumed by fear.  Or they hear AIDS and want to throw themselves under a bus. Put that off for another time.  Work in percentages.  Scientists do.  So do good doctors.  If a person has HIV, you have to ask yourself what the percentages are of the virus advance on healthy cells. What's the ratio of healthy cells to sick ones?  80/20?  Same thing with brain damage.  What part of the brain is damaged, and how much of the brain is damaged?  What is the percentage?  Even with these statistics, these only serve doctors in the accuracy or proximation of their diagnosis.  I would take every doctor diagnosis with a grain of salt.  The whole reason that we color their diagnosis as authoritative is because we're taught to.  Applying the concept of percentages, we're more likely to increase the percentage of certainty in a doctor's diagnosis when we know nothing about organ function or how it interacts with other organs or what our medical or biochemical history is or how nutrition mediates any condition.  Medical history is riddled with horror stories of people dying from the wrong diagnosis or a diagnosis mistreated.  I knew of a woman who was admitted to the hospital because her reproductive organ was bleeding.  The admitting ER doctor thought that she may have pneumonia and ordered her a room.  He ordered her a room because she had great health insurance.  So the initial diagnosis was pneumonia and the treatment was antibiotics.  Antibiotics?  For pneumonia? Drip.  Drip.  Drip.  For 10 days.  Technician after technician wheeled their holy hardware into her room as if they were auditioning.  They would conduct a heart exam and show the woman on her back in the hospital bed what the monitor was doing.  But she didn't know what it meant.  She wasn't trained to read it, let alone interpret the data.  No follow-up.  Never heard from that cardiologist again. Then the woman was given a breathing test.  The technician commented that her breathing was pretty good.  I asked, "I thought that she has pneumonia?" "You'll have to check with her doctor" came the retort. Well, where the hell was the doctor!  So we got no valuable information.  Oh, we got information alright, but no integrated information that could either confirm or deny the initial diagnosis of pneumonia.  All we got . . . no, excuse me . . . all she got were orders for more tests.  "To really find out what is going on in her lungs, we'll need to conduct a CT scan."  So the mindless and immoral orderlies transferred her to a mobile bed and wheeled her down the cold hall into an elevator that took her down to the radiation lab in the basement.  I held her hand the whole time.  Her eyes were fixed on mine consoling her fear and suspending the reality and the inevitability of these days and hours being the remaining few she has in this life and what my role in them was. Was I enabling the whole process?  Was I guarding against the monstrous robots who'd surrendered their powers to question for a few bucks, the altruistic psychopaths?  It was clear to me that each player knew his role. They were all just following doctor's orders.  No one stopped to ask.  "She was 89" they rationalized and "She was up there in years" came the reassurances.  Family members too saw the truth of such statements and could not muster the courage or enough self-possession to tell the government-trained doctors to go to hell.  The orderlies, the woman in the bed, and I waited for a minute in the hall for the patient already in the radiation lab to exit.  The door opened, and on her bed out she rolled.  The orderlies steering the litter made of chrome, cotton, and rubber waited patiently before they rolled her inside the room. Sitting at the center of the room, like a lasered Moloch, was the CT scan with intersecting red beams thin as string and transparent as light.  The red lights intersected like the site at the end of the barrel of a rifle. The woman lying in the mobile bed, who just a minute before was making self-effacing jokes to allay the general fears and anxieties, raised herself up by gripping my arm as if with new strength and begged in earnest, "Mike! Get me out of here!"  Her soul flushed with fear, she whispered in panic "I don't want to do this!"  The technician came over to reassure her and me of the harmless nature of the electronic portal.  I told the technician that I want to put the choice over what gets done to her body in her hands as much as possible.  He pressed me, insisting that the risks were low.  Perhaps.  If that were true, then why was his station in a closed booth insulated from any radiation?  The woman begged again.  And I told the doctor we were leaving.  On the stroll back, it pleased me that the woman was relieved and a bit scared for having survived the orders belonging to some anonymous and soulless monster.  Clearly, we could have found out who ordered the CT scan.  Easy enough.  I am sure it was her doctor.  But we were not told.  We never were told anything.  Information did not flow to the family.  Learning the rationale for the order may have proved even more difficult given the fact that the doctor was busy in his own office during the day with his own patients.  Had the doctor exhausted all his other options for discovering the cause of her ill health or for seeing whether his initial diagnosis, like a best guess, was accurate?  One has to wonder how much of the diagnostic hardware is used to fund this or that procedure.  Imagine if that woman had proceeded with the CT scan.  What would it have found that her doctor could use against her to convince her of another procedure, maybe four or five or more procedures.  I had a neighbor once who was diabetic.  She had diabetic wounds on her feet.  Her doctor cut a toe off.  Snip.  Snip.  Snip.  She returned home only to find out six months later that the infection, which the surgery was supposed to curtail, re-emerged.  And what do you think his recommendation was?  That's right . . . Snip.  Snip.  Snip.  Half a foot this time.  I mean he really wanted to get that nasty infection, right?  She went home.  Few months later, foot gets infected again. Snip.  Snip.  Snip.  One foot--gone!  I will spare you the details on that woman's life, except to say that the last time that I saw her in her wheel chair both of her legs were cut to their knees.  All to go after that darn infection.  And that infection is treated like a terrorist, wherein the doctor has to operate in order to prevent greater health calamities for the woman.  Pcychopathic altruists says it best.  

Back to the woman with the pneumonia.  

Once the doctor and the hospital staff learned that she was refusing tests, there was no more reason to treat her.  She was put on a daily regime of antibiotics called Rosin.  Drip.  Drip.  Drip.  That antibiotics robbed her of the natural gut flora that kept her well, that fought infection naturally.  I'd heard later that garlic is the best natural antibiotic.  But she remained in the hospital for an additional seven days while the family remained in suspended disbelief.  No information, nothing of value or pertinence was transmitted to me or any other family member.  Her last three days in the hospital were spent in transition care where the antibiotics flowed.  Drip.  Drip.  Drip.  At one point the woman claimed aloud that she was losing her mind.  She arrived home after ten days in the hospital never having the initial diagnosis confirmed, never having been offered an alternate treatment besides the Rosin.  That is a standard antibiotic a friend explained.  Though she was sent home after ten days, the woman was given a hospital bed to lie in.  It was placed in the front room.  That night we tried to restore her, give her some saturated fats, like coconut butter.  She asked me, and I will never forget this, "Mike, what did they do to me?"

It is not natural for the human memory to decline with age; such memory loss is a sign of disease Friday, March 14, 2014 by: David Gutierrez, staff writer Tags: memory loss, age, brain damage

(NaturalNews) Although the conventional wisdom would have us believe that people's memories naturally deteriorate as they get older, age-related memory loss is not found in all cultures around the world. Indeed, new research suggests that all memory loss is a sign of brain damage, even in patients who are not suffering from clinical dementia. In a study published in 2010, researchers from Rush University Medical Center in Chicago gave 350 Catholic clergy members yearly memory tests for 13 years, then scanned their brains after death. They found that the brains of patients who died without ever experiencing memory loss showed no signs of Alzheimer's disease or strokes. Based on this data, the researchers suggested that all memory loss is a sign of brain damage, most likely early-stage dementia. "What we're saying is the brain changes that are mainly responsible for Alzheimer's and other dementias also seem to be mainly responsible for very mild early changes in memory and thinking," researcher Robert S. Wilson said.

The Long Evil History of Government Involvement in Healthcare

the combination of exempting health insurance from the World War II wage controls and then giving health insurance a significant tax break firmly institutionalized employer-sponsored health insurance in the United States.

Robert Wenzel writes. . . 

I recently reported on The Long Evil Role of Government in Creating the Education Monster, after reading Glenn Harlan Reynolds's book, The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself. 

Now, I am reading Reinventing American Health Care: How the Affordable Care Act will Improve our Terribly Complex, Blatantly Unjust, Outrageously Expensive, Grossly Inefficient, Error Prone System, the very evil Ezekiel Emanuel (Rahm Emanuel's brother),  who played a major role in the designing of Obamacare.

I suspect the book will ultimately outrage me but, in its early chapters, Emanuel provides a semi-decent history of government involvement in healthcare. He writes:

In the 1940s and 1950s the federal government fueled a huge expansion in the construction of hospitals...

The Hill-Burton Act of 1946 was the first major health care act that the federal government funded. Over  the next 25 years Hill-Burton contributed funds to approximately a third of all hospital construction...

Another postwar transformation in hospitals was the creation of Medicare in 1965. As Rashi Fein...has pointed out, many hospital administrators had plans for expansion...but were waiting for donors . . . 

Medicare obliterated the need for hospitals to provide free or subsidized care for poor elderly patients. In addition, to buy off hospitals and pre-empt any ideas of boycotting Medicare, the Medicare payments were made generous, Essentially Medicare paid hospitals cost plus a percentage...This wildly inflationary payment system lasted until DRGs and prospective payment were introduced in the 1980s . . . 

Before 1900...[there was] a constant battle between different sects: homoeopaths, meopaths, electics, osteopaths and allopaths... In 1904...the American Medical Association established the Council of Medical Education . . . 

To support the AMA's new standards, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advacement of Teaching commissioned Abraham Flexner, who was neither a physician nor a scientist to survey American and Canadian medical schools...Ultimately he recommended that there be fewer schools . . . 

[Note: In Making Economic Sense, Murray Rothbard provides a clue on how Flexner got his job and what was behind his decisions:

Abraham Flexner, an unemployed former owner of a prep school in Kentucky, and sporting neither a medical degree nor any other advanced degree, was commissioned by the Carnegie Foundation to write a study of American medical education. Flexner’s only qualification for this job was to be the brother of the powerful Dr. Simon Flexner, indeed a physician and head of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. Flexner’s report was virtually written in advance by high officials of the American Medical Association, and its advice was quickly taken by every state in the Union.

The result: every medical school and hospital was subjected to licensing by the state, which would turn the power to appoint licensing boards over to the state AMA. The state was supposed to, and did, put out of business all medical schools that were proprietary and profit-making, that admitted blacks and women, and that did not specialize in orthodox, “allopathic” medicine: particularly homeopaths, who were then a substantial part of the medical profession, and a respectable alternative to orthodox allopathy.

Thus through the Flexner Report, the AMA was able to use government to cartelize the medical profession: to push the supply curve drastically to the left (literally half the medical schools in the country were put out of business by post-Flexner state governments), and thereby to raise medical and hospital prices and doctors’ incomes.]

Physicians, still wary [in the early 1930s] of any financial intermediary between them and patients, were hostile to any form of health insurance that covered physician services . . . .

[But the AMA softened its position.]The Great Depression depressed the utilization of physician services and physicians' income fell. Furthermore, there were increasing calls for compulsory, government-sponsored national health insurance, but the AMA viewed private voluntary health insurance preferable to government insurance...In 1934, as a prelude to the battle over compulsory health insurance that they suspected would be in Roosevelt's Social Security legislation, the AMA specified principles that should govern any insurance for physicians...

The Stabilization Act of 1942 required that the president stabilize prices and wages at September 15, 1942 levels. The day after its passage President Roosevelt issued an executive order that . . . excluded insurance benefits from controls...As a consequence, by 1950  nearly two-thirds of working Americans had health insurance for hospital stays...

Thus, the combination of exempting health insurance from the World War II wage controls and then giving health insurance a significant tax break firmly institutionalized employer-sponsored health insurance in the United States.

Deadly 2014 California Flu Season: Vaccines & Sugar the Culprit?

The article linked below explains a lot about the flu season this year.  Several weeks ago when I was sick I felt really weak.  I don't remember ever feeling so weak. I did not vomit.  My flu seemed mostly in my head and respiratory system. I noticed that when I covered my head with a towel while positioning it over a pot of boiling water that the steam worked well to clear up my sinuses and lungs.  But on two occasions I felt so weak that I felt like I was going to pass out.  Though I might get the occasional colds, I rarely get the flu. Some colds I have had have lasted for weeks.  Last year I had a cold that lasted the entire month of January. So when I got the flu I thought that this was a very bad flu season, particularly since the symptoms crushed me. The article linked ahead explains that the flu in California this season has been particularly deadly. According to the article, there has been a 4 to 5-fold increase in deaths in California due to the flu this season. But why?  According to the article, it's the increase in vaccines given.  I have never had a flu vaccine or any other vaccine. Don't want one. Won't ever get one.  But I think that because they are promoted so heavily everywhere--at local pharmacies, drug stores, and clinics--that it is creating low immunity in a lot of people.  Here's how.  If someone is feeling sick or feeling like their system is fighting a virus, it means that their Vitamin C stores in their bodies are low either because of stress, poor diet, or exhaustion. Vaccines, like so many other medical treatments today, are sold as quick fixes.  So people go get a shot, more often now at pharmacies and clinics, thinking that a vaccine is a kind of out-patient treatment.  While people are in pharmacies, they're more likely to pick up candies like Snickers, Milky Way, 3 Muskateers, or Hershey's bar.  Sugar depletes Vitamin C.  Lots of sugar in the form of candy bars at the check out stand at pharmacies depletes Vitamin C. Finally, there's the factor of over-the-counter medication at pharmacies.  And what do people take when they're sick? Aspirin or Tylenol.  Both deplete Vitamin C stores in the body. In fact, one statement from the above article that I linked to said this, "Flu shots administered from retail pharmacies rather than a doctor's office and clinics is a relatively new practice and it places three mortal flu factors under the same roof--acetaminophen (which depletes vitamin C stores in the body), sugar (candy at the check out), and the flu virus itself." Through the years I have always relied on Vitamin C to keep me healthy.  But since I've been in transition the last few months with all of my things in storage, I kind of got away from taking Vitamin C.  I rarely, rarely, rarely get the flu.  There was a flu epidemic in the US in 1918. Bayer introduced its aspirin shortly before.  During the flu epidemic, doctors prescribed it as a remedy for that epidemic. More people died as a result because the aspirin depleted the Vitamin C stores in people's bodies.  Medical history is interesting.  It reads like the history of war.  

Then there is this article on sugar.  It has been known for a very long time that sugar is bad for one's health.  Sugary foods were rarely given in families.  Sugar's history is also very interesting.  Its demand soared after WWII when the low-fat craze started by Ancel Keys from Minnesota.  It is fat that gives food its flavor; and we've learned since how important fat is for signaling between organs in the body.  "This was not what the food industry wanted to hear.  When devising their low-fat products, manufacturers had needed a fat substitute to stop the food tasting like cardboard, and they had plumped for sugar. They knew "healthy" foods were low-fat but had sugar by the spoonful and Yudkin's findings threatened to disrupt a very profitable business."  A friend of mine who grew up in another country asked me several months ago "Why do Americans appear so unhealthy?"  I answered that sugar seems to be one reason.  Because of the nutritional findings published by Ansel Keys, sugar became a standard of WWII military rations.  Think of all those men who came home from the war craving sugar?  And what do you think their children craved?  Candy.  Look at all of the holidays.  Each one involves candy.  My parents loved candy bars and sodas.  In addition to the excesses of sugar in sodas, the acids in the sodas wreak havoc on your over all health as well as your teeth.  Anyway, both parents enjoyed candy bars and sodas.  Symbols of innocence I suppose.  Part of re-living their youth. My sisters to this day pride themselves on their ability to create fantastic desserts.  And fantastic they are!!!  But they have lots of sugar.  So I think sugar when consumed in such large and daily amounts is unhealthy.  Not only does sugar destroy teeth, but no one knew or understood how sugar destroyed metabolism, leading in some cases to diabetes.  Though my dad or mom did not have diabetes, they certainly did suffer from metabolic complications, I believe, by a regularly ingesting sugary or sweetened foods.  Sugar was not treated as a toxin or as something bad people.  It was considered a treat, something special.  The article on sugar at the top of this paragraph explains that fructose, which is one of the two main carbohydrates belonging to refined sugar, is primarily metabolized by the liver; while glucose, found in starchy foods like bread and potatoes, is metabolized by ALL cells.  This means that consuming excessive amounts of fructose puts extra strain on the liver which then converts fructose to fat. Few people make the connection from sugar to being fat. Instead, they believe that fatty foods, like butter and cream and ice cream make us fat.  It's not the fat; it's the sugar. 

UPDATE

I was talking with a nurse friend of mine about vaccines after he'd read my comments on vaccines.  I asked him what drug manufacturers and retailers, who market flu shots each winter, mean by "there's a particular virulent strain of virus going around this season." He helped to clear things up a little.  First, the whole concept of viruses being more prevalent during one season over another is a marketing spin.  Viruses are with us all year round and are not seasonal.  What is seasonal are flu shots and our immunity.  As to flu shots, retailers and manufacturers sell more flu shots during the winter.  And they've got people believing that viruses go on vacation to Palm Springs from March to October. They don't of course.  But during the winter months it is our immunity that seems to retreat.  What makes people vulnerable to getting sick during the winter months is not new strains of viruses but our lack of sunlight and Vitamin D3 and activity. Since most people are indoors and the fact that there are fewer warm days during the winter, fewer days of glorious sunlight, our Vitamin D3 stores get depleted and our immunity is lessened.  Though I take Vitamin D3 throughout the year, it makes particularly good sense to be taking it during the winter months.  Vitamin D3 is found in foods like fish and eggs and milk, but it doesn't hurt to supplement during the months when we're indoors for so many days of the month and so many hours of the day. 

When drug manufacturers, retailers, and health organizations talk about flu season, it is false advertising.  It's a lie.  The flu does not come around ONLY or during the winter months as a sinister bandit and then fly south to Mexico from March to October.  Viruses are in circulation all year round. But because we're outdoors and active during the other parts of the year our immunity is stronger and vital.  If we get a flu, it means that in years past our bodies were not exposed to that particular virus.  And if we are exposed to specific viruses we've had in the past, we won't get sick from it because our immunity has already dealt with that virus.  And after we heal and recover from the flu, it's not like the virus finally leaves our system like an unwanted household guest.  The virus stays with us for life.  It's our immunity that keeps it in check, hopefully never to raise its ugly head again.  

Here are a few comments from my nurse friend:  

"The fact is that viruses do not have a "season."  They do not take a vacation after March and return in October.  They are around all year. There are no new strains, just people who have no immunity to the strains that are around all the time.  To isolate the predominant and infectious viral strains that are going around at any one time of the year scientists figure what vaccine strain was used 10-20 years ago under the assumption that there are many (people) alive now, not alive then, that have never had that strain and therefore no immunity response developed.  That is the best guess that can be made.  Those of us who were alive 20 years ago had the strain being pimped now so therefore, will probably not get it with or without a flu shot. I defy the true believers to take a  flu shot a day for 30 days and still tell me that they are "safe" and indeed good for you. I think their tone will change or some other sophisticated "spin" will be offered as to the alleged safety."

California Drought Forecasts Higher Prices