I recently had a conversation with a reasonably well-informed writer who simply missed the real reasons why most practicing physicians go along with the Fauci Fraud. As a public service, I will attempt to fill in a few gaps. But first, I must define the fraud.
There are two basic legs to the fraud. First is the idea that the Centers for Disease Control is in any way concerned with a mission related to its name. The failure of the CDC to endorse any treatment that did not emanate from its exalted halls should give us our first glint of clarity. There are literally millions of physicians around the world, and the great bulk of them truly wish to treat their patients well. Among those are thousands of researchers, a number far in excess of those at the CDC, the NIH, and other alphabet soup government agencies. The very idea that outside researchers are incapable of discovering anything useful without the help of the bureaucrats in D.C. is hubris of the highest order. And it prevents the CDC, the FDA, or any other such agency from considering the idea that maybe, just possibly, there might be intelligent life down here. Mount Olympus cannot be threatened.
The second leg of the fraud is less visible to the naked eye but much more powerful. If I wrote this before I retired, I would be called before the Board of my group and told in no uncertain terms to shut up. I might even be assessed a financial penalty with several zeroes after the one. That’s a serious impairment of my pursuit of happiness. The reason for my group’s dislike is more than the fact that I might be an irritant. They may actually agree with what I have to say. But they simply cannot afford for me to say it. That’s right: as a practicing physician in a group, my freedom of speech can become very expensive…to the group.
My group cared for patients of all descriptions, with roughly half of them on Medicare and another batch on Medicaid. Both programs are ultimately managed by the feds, one of the most humorless groups on the planet. They write a whole bunch of rules on how you have to document everything you do. If you didn’t document it correctly, it didn’t happen, and you won’t get paid. But that’s not the half of it.
Suppose you have one of those patients brought in by the ambulance from under the bridge. His only clothes are the ones he’s wearing, and he doesn’t have two nickels to rub together. It’s more than obvious that this surgery for bowel obstruction will be a charity case. Before Medicare, you’d simply write it off as your good neighbor duty. Now you don’t get a choice. CMMS (the actual administrative agency) requires you to send a bill. Twice. Or maybe three times. Whatever it takes to turn the bill into bad debt. Then you have to send it to a collection agency. Your only alternative is for your group to bring it up in its Board meeting and declare it a write-off that gets noted in the minutes.
All this rigmarole serves no purpose, and you knew that before you got to this sentence. But CMMS has a sinister side. If you do the case for free (which you did before you spent that useless money on billing and collection), CMMS will define that as your “usual and customary” bill for an exploratory laparotomy. Since your U&C is now zero, you can’t ever bill more than that for an ex lap in the future.
But what does that have to do with ivermectin? I’m glad you asked.
U&C bills are just one of the hundreds of rules that CMMS enforces. Another is “Pay for Performance.” Basically, P-f-P requires you to check a host of boxes when taking care of patients. If you didn’t get that IV antibiotic in 20 minutes before the incision, you failed P-f-P and may not get paid. The hospital won’t get paid to take care of the patient if there’s a complication.
So let us suppose that you use ivermectin to treat a COVID patient as he arrives in the hospital. Ivermectin isn’t on the Medicare/Medicaid approved list of medications for COVID. Your hospital pharmacy will call you up and give you grief. After wasting a lot of time getting them to finally let you have it, you’ve had to cancel half of your office day. The next day, you’ll get a visit from a coder, who will tell you that you didn’t use the approved treatment protocol and put the hospital in jeopardy because you flunked P-f-P. By the way, that “coder” is the person who “helps” you use the proper ICD (billing) code for whatever the patient has in order for the hospital to make the most money. But that’s not the worst of it.
Because you flunked P-f-P, that waves a red flag in front of the CMMS bulls, and you’re about to get gored. They will wonder what other bad things you’ve done. As soon as they find one, it gets flagged as “Medicare fraud,” and they will bill you for twice what you got paid as a penalty. Can you guess how many other instances of fraud they’ll find if they look hard? Do you have to ask why my partners would get upset if I published while I was still in practice? By the way, CMMS can go two years back as they look for your crimes. They can ultimately take your house, your car, and your wife’s poodle while they’re at it.
Let’s change the scene. Suppose you’re in private practice. You can’t give ivermectin because the feds will key in on it if your patient is on Medicare or Medicaid. So you decide to take care of him off the books. He pays you cash, and all is well. Not! You now took a private payment for Medicare-covered service. That will get you barred from seeing another Medicare patient for two years.
Let’s forget all the regulatory traps. You’re conscientious and try to do the best for your patients. But you’re busy, and you can’t keep up with the flood of papers on all the various COVID bits. So you wear a mask, have your patients wear masks, and do a lot of telemedicine. You keep up on the latest through Medscape and the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reporter. You should be good? Not! MMWR is put out by the CDC, and they won’t say the first good word about HCQ or ivermectin. Medscape is a little better, but not much. And all the specialty societies are toeing the line. Can we guess why?
Any doctor who actually reads the studies, or follows any of the protocols published by the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, will see a lot of peer pressure to stop. The financial risks may be extreme. It takes a spine of steel to stand up to the authoritarian orthodoxy.
[Written by Ted Noel, M.D. who is a retired anesthesiologist/intensivist who posts on social media as DoctorTed. This article was published by AMERICAN THINKER.]
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As always, posted for your edification and enlightenment by
NORM ‘n’ AL, Minneapolis
normal@usa1usa.com
612.239.0970
Media firemen scramble to save Biden candidacy
Watching the media scramble these last two weeks to save Joe Biden’s candidacy, I am reminded of a scene in Ray Bradbury’s 1953 dystopian sci-fi classic, Fahrenheit 451. That title refers to the temperature at which paper burns.
In the novel, the state employs “firemen” to burn paper lest the few civilians who care about books avail themselves of information the state does not want them to have. During the Biden stretch run, the firemen on the left have shredded what is left of their reputations as journalists to destroy information the Deep State does not want their audiences to have.
Even before Hunter Biden’s laptop surfaced, the media busied themselves suppressing information that was readily available to the ordinary citizen — montages of Biden plagiarizing, groping little girls, making racially insensitive comments, eulogizing exalted KKK cyclops, threatening Ukrainian prosecutors, even sexually assaulting at least one very credible Democrat — and they did so with enough success that the Biden camp felt comfortable positioning Joe as the candidate with “character.”
The Hunter laptop was too tangible to dispose of subtly. Not since Joseph Goebbels urged the German Student Union “to commit to the flames the evil spirit of the past” has a western nation so flagrantly thrown in on the side of ignorance. Twitter has gotten most of the attention for its total blocking of the New York Post, which broke the laptop story, but the firemen at NPR were not far behind.
“We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions,” NPR Managing Editor for News Terence Samuel told his audience in the way of answering a reader question. “And quite frankly, that’s where we ended up, this was… a politically driven event and we decided to treat it that way.” NPR’s public editor added that, in any case, “the assertions don’t amount to much.”
Had it not been for the final debate, the firemen might have succeeded in keeping major media audiences fully in the dark about what Trump called the “laptop from hell.” Knowing the subject would surface, Biden came prepared. He dismissed the laptop as a “Russian plant” and had his allies line up some 50 “intelligence” officials who seemed to agree with him.
The more sober members of the major media knew the “Russia, Russia, Russia” accusation — as Trump aptly mocked it — was insane, but it was out there. No longer able to burn it, they had to finesse it into insignificance. Top honors for sophistry in this effort go to the Washington Post and its “disinformation and political warfare” fireman, Thomas Rid.
To his credit, Rid acknowledged that Biden’s 50 intelligence officials conceded they “did not have evidence of Russian involvement.” Rid added the obvious, namely that there is good reason to be skeptical of a foreign plot:
Duh! The remainder of Rid’s article – “Insisting that the Hunter Biden laptop is fake is a trap. So is insisting that it’s real” — is pure bait and switch. It could make sense only to those mesmerized by the past four year of the Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning disinformation.
Rid argues that “the Russian interference of 2016” holds valuable lessons for 2020. In 2016, unlike 2020, Rid claims that the public had “meaningful public artifacts on day one.” He refers here to the alleged hack of the DNC servers in April 2016.
The initial Post article from June 14, 2016 — two months after the hack — may well have been prompted by Julian Assange’s appearance on a British TV show two days earlier. On that occasion, Assange told the interviewer, “We have upcoming leaks in relation to Hillary Clinton,” adding ominously, “We have emails.”
If Assange released damaging emails, the Clinton campaign needed to establish an alternative story line to offset the pending embarrassment. No doubt it would be more politically useful to portray Hillary as a victim of a Russian plot on Trump’s behalf than as a criminally negligent keeper of secrets.
Assange never did release Hillary’s emails. He did, however, release emails purloined from the DNC servers and from Hillary campaign chair John Podesta, the first in July, the second in October. The emails may have been embarrassing, but they were not “disinformation.” They were “information.” No one seriously disputed their legitimacy.
As to Rid’s “meaningful public artifacts,” they were not exactly public, nor particularly meaningful. In fact, the artifacts were held tight by CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm that the DNC hired to examine its servers, a firm that, according to the Post, did not even pretend to know “how the hackers got in.”
Scandalous in its own right was the willingness of the Obama DOJ to allow the DNC to sidestep the FBI and hire a private firm on a matter of the highest national security. By contrast, John Paul MacIsaac, the computer repair storeowner, promptly took the Biden laptop to the FBI when he became aware of its contents.
Rid tells us that MacIsaac is a Trump supporter. He does not mention that “CrowdStrike is a deeply Democratic firm” served up to the DNC by Perkins Coie, the same law firm used as a DNC cut-out on the Steele dossier. In fact, Rid does not mention CrowdStrike at all.
Nor, most tellingly, does Rid mention Christopher Steele or his infamous dossier. Yes, a massive disinformation campaign took place in 2016 and the years following. Yes, it involved Russians. Yes, the conspirators — likely including some of the 50 Biden “intelligence” operatives — conspired to smear a candidate for president with nonsense allegations that defied the most desperate attempts at confirmation.
“We must treat the Hunter Biden leaks as if they were a foreign intelligence operation — even if they probably aren’t,” says Rid. Alice’s Queen of Hearts could not have said it better.
[From an article by Jack Cashill, published by AMERICAN THINKER. Jack Cashill’s new book, Unmasking Obama: The Fight to Tell the True Story of a Failed Presidency, is widely available. See also http://www.cashill.com.]
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As always, posted for your edification and enlightenment by
NORM ‘n’ AL, Minneapolis
normal@usa1usa.com
612.239.0970
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Tagged as American Thinker, Biden eulogizing KKK, Biden groping little girls, Biden making racially insensitive comments, Biden no longer a "candidate with character", Biden part of "most desperate attempts at confirmation" of the conspiracy, Biden part of conspiracy to smear a candidate for president with nonsense allegations, Biden plagiarizing, Biden sexually assaulting very credible Democrat, Biden threatening Ukrainian prosecutors, Biden tries to dismiss laptop evidence as "Russian plant", Biden tries to finesse laptop into insignificance, Jack Cashill, media busy themselves supressing information, MSM scrambles to save Biden candidacy