Sunday, April 27, 2014

Good Girl Moonshine - aka “Ginger Juice”

Just Receive this from a friend…

Fill a quart sized jar with water and ice.
Add  1 -2 Tablespoons of raw apple cider vinegar. I use Braggs.
Add 1 tsp of  ginger powder, fresh ginger root or a few drop of ginger essential oil to taste
Add a few shakes of Nustevia Pure Extract Powder to taste. I only  use 3-4 shakes because I don’t like things too sweet but you can play with  sweetness and try more. If you use Truvia – try 3-5 tsp.  I prefer to use liquid stevia.

img_6052
Gratitude Journal – Cross-Posted at the Encouraging Home: I certainly can’t take credit for this refreshing, invigorating drink, but I have been making countless jars of it, and drinking it down every day since learning about it last week.
along with my {seemingly} very thirsty children. :)

*****I have edited this to say that perhaps I am a bit “crunchy” or have weird taste buds . . .
because not everyone I talk to likes good girl moonshine or some of my other faves
like I and my family do.

Maybe we’re just weird like that. There that’s all I’m going to say.
You’ve been warned and now you’ll just have to try it for yourself!*****

It’s been over three months now, and I am even more enthused about the way of eating and wholesome living that has helped me drop approximately 8 pounds, {though it could easily be more . . .

I just didn’t have a working scales until about 3 weeks into this way of Trim Healthy eating},
has cleared up more than 90% of my PMS, including many, many headaches, and gives me much needed energy and a “clear” mind vs. the foggy brain that I get on a sugar and carb laden diet.

I have had my days of cheats (my friends know this usually means chocolate chips),
but for the most part, I have been enjoying great food that makes me feel great too!

Good Girl Moonshine is just one more way that the authors of Trim Healthy Mama
continue to teach and give through their book, as well as their Facebook page
and private Facebook groups, which any female may ask to be a part of.
It really is a wealth of support and information.


Here is a bit of what Serene had to say about this lovely, refreshing drink.

img_6074{I look forward to drinking this on hot summer days!
Husband loves it too and says I should buy seltzer water
to add to it and give it even more pep.}

*****************************

“Since I (Serene, coauthor of THM) have been enjoying such copious amounts of my new favorite drink, I decided to do some studies about ginger. What do you know? I read that ginger actually dulls the appetite. But, I noticed this first hand before I even read this merit of ginger. Ginger heats up the thermogenic temperature of the body the metabolism which gives a double punch alongside apple cider vinegar’s own weight loss talents.

. . . Ginger is a potent digestive aid and fires up the digestive juices. It reduces flatulence and eases tummy cramps. It improves the absorption and assimilation of essential nutrients in the body. . . . Ginger clears the micro-circulatory channels of the body including the easily clogged sinuses. It clears throat and nose congestion and is a wonderful immune stimulant along with apple cider vinegar. Ginger is up at the top of the list with the most potent anti-inflammatory supplements on God’s green earth and can relieve common aches and pains and even help with more serious arthritic conditions.

Here are just some of the goodies Apple Cider Vinegar offers you:
•It is abundant in potassium which is imperative for growth and building muscles, the transmission of nerve impulses, heart activity and preventing brittle teeth and hair loss.
•It encourages weight loss by breaking down fats to be used instead of stored in your adipose tissue.
•It is loaded with acetic acid which slows the digestion of starch and lowers the rise in glucose levels that occur post mealtime.
•It is anti-viral, anti-fungal, and anti-bacterial due to its high levels of malic acid.
•It is super alkalinizing though being rich in ash.
•It lowers bad cholesterol and helps to regulate blood pressure.
•It is a powerful detox tool and improves bowel function
•It clarifies the skin
•New research reveals it shows strength in killing cancer cells or slowing their growth.

Hey if you hate ginger – no worries. Just leave it out. Add a few drops of your favorite edible young living essential oils like sweet orange or lemon. You could also add natural flavor extracts like maple flavoring etc.”

img_6067

So what are you waiting for? Again… Here’s the recipe!

Good Girl Moonshine {aka “Ginger Juice”}

•Fill a quart sized jar with water and ice.
•Add a generous drizzle of raw apple cider vinegar (I use 2 Tablespoons)
•Add 1 teaspoon of ginger powder or (my favorite) is to press about an inch
of fresh ginger in my garlic or lemon press for that delightful fresh taste.
•Add a few shakes of stevia to taste {Nustevia Pure Extract Powder is excellent).
And that’s it! Let me know how you like it,
whether I’m the one introducing you to it,
or if you’ve been drinking it for days now.

gg moonshine on gratitudejournalblog

{And I’m warning you, if you want any for yourself, don’t let your children get their first taste.}

Saturday, April 26, 2014

Affordable Care Act, ObamaCare, plans pose actuarial and rate challenges for insurers, rate to skyrocket in 2015

By Jay Hancock, Saturday, April 26, 3:06 PM  -  Washington Post  -  E-mail the writers

With the results sure to affect politics as well as pocketbooks, health insurers are preparing to raise rates next year for plans issued under the Affordable Care Act.

But how much depends on their ability to predict how newly enrolled customers — for whom little is known regarding health status and medical needs — will affect 2015 costs. 

Republicans have been sharply critical of the rule and of the many ways people can skirt it.

“We’re working with about a third of the information that we usually have,” said Brian Lobley, senior vice president of marketing and consumer business at Pennsylvania’s Independence Blue Cross. “We’ve really been combing the data to get a first look.”

At stake are price increases that buyers on the federal exchange, HealthCare.gov, and other online marketplaces will encounter when they get renewal notices this year. Forecasting success or failure could also affect whether insurers stay on the exchanges, a key pillar of the health overhaul.

The 2014 enrollment period closed at the end of March for most consumers. But carriers selling medical plans on HealthCare.gov must file initial 2015 rate requests with federal regulators in late May or June — even though they have little idea about the health and potential costs of their newly enrolled members. Deadlines also loom for state-run exchange filings.

WellPoint, the biggest player in the online exchanges, is talking about double-digit rate hikes for 2015. Such increases would give ammunition to Republican critics before the November elections.

Analysts’ expectations vary, but nobody is predicting decreases.

“We’ll see rate increases in the marketplaces, but I think it’s anyone’s guess” about what the precise changes will be, said Sabrina Corlette, project director at the Georgetown University Center on Health Insurance Reforms. “It’s like nailing Jell-O to a wall.”

The health law required insurers to accept all applicants this year for the first time without asking about existing illness. That reduces what they know about customers and raises the likelihood that they’ll sign sicker, more expensive members who were previously denied coverage.

At CoOportunity Health, a nonprofit carrier in Iowa and Nebraska, many enrollees scheduled medical treatments — including surgeries — as soon as possible after their coverage began Jan. 1, said chief operating officer Cliff Gold. Among the procedures were several expensive transplant operations, including heart and lung procedures that can cost more than $1 million each.

But insurers tend to receive pharmaceutical claims long before hospital bills. They are poring over these early prescription records for clues about new members’ medical status.

Pharmacy-benefit manager Express Scripts published data April 9 showing that marketplace enrollees in January and February were substantially more likely than average to have HIV infections, chronic pain, depression and other high-cost ailments.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean average costs will soar.

For one thing, insurers figured they would cover more sick patients this year and priced plans accordingly. Early pharmacy data at Independence Blue Cross, Lobley said, are “on par for what we expected.”

Even if carriers signed more chronically ill customers this year than planned, the health law includes “reinsurance” and other safety valves designed to keep high-cost members from pushing up rates.

A sign-up surge at the end of March is another reason not to rely on early claims information.

Just as the first enrollees were more likely to need immediate care, insurers think people who pushed the deadline may be healthier and younger. If so, they would balance the risk and help cover the cost of the early birds.

“It’s clear that sick people were signing up” for January coverage, said David Axene, a fellow of the Society of Actuaries working with insurers to set 2015 rates. “The question now is, were the later people healthier?”

Nobody knows. While March enrollees seem to have been younger on balance, their health status remains largely a mystery.

Blue Shield of California signed more than 50,000 people during the last two weeks of March.

“It’s still too early to draw conclusions,” said Amy Yao, Blue Shield’s chief actuary. “I have the best actuarial team in the whole country. Even with that, it’s less than 50 percent confidence” that they’ll hit the rate-setting sweet spot for 2015, she said.

It’s unclear how many of the 8 million who enrolled through the exchanges were previously uninsured. Many who did have coverage switched carriers this year, meaning their new insurers couldn’t see their health histories.

At CoOportunity Health, a start-up created with funding from the health law, every one of the 74,000 customers is new.

“It is an actuarial nightmare to try to guess what you’re going to get,” Gold said.

It’s not just member health that insurers have to think about. President Obama allowed many people to keep old plans that aren’t compliant with ACA rules. Carriers must calculate how that exception (people covered under old plans are thought to be healthier on average) affects average costs in their new policies.

Backup resources for plans with disproportionate shares of sick and expensive members will become a little weaker next year. Insurers have to factor that into their rates.

And they need to look at the big picture.

What economists call the cost trend — how high prices rise per procedure and how many procedures Americans get this year — may be the biggest variable in setting prices for 2015, experts said.

And the trend seems to be up. After several years of relatively tame increases that many tie to a sluggish economy, medical spending accelerated late last year.

Even so, the forces affecting 2015 premiums may not drive up ACA prices as much as some are forecasting. Finding that insurers have gotten discounts from select hospitals and doctors, the Congressional Budget Office recently lowered its estimate for the cost of premiums and taxpayer subsidies under the health law.

“I’m not expecting double digits like some people have predicted” for 2015 rate increases, Axene said. “I’m expecting mid-to-high single digits” — from 6 to 8.5 percent.

That would still be far higher than growth in the economy or family incomes.

Given the uncertainties that come with a major new social law, officials at Independence Blue Cross don’t think the picture will become clear until much later.

“We always viewed this as a three-year plan,” Lobley said. “We always thought there would be a lot of volatility in years one and two. We really thought 2016 would [bring] market stability in the individual market.”

Kaiser Health News is an editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Related: 

2.7 Million ObamaCare Enrollees Still Unaccounted For

Aid organizations across the country were jammed with people racing to get insurance under the Affordable Care Act..

Feds prepare to take over Oregon’s health exchange

21 ACA deadline extensions, in one chart

Friday, April 25, 2014

2.7 Million ObamaCare Enrollees Still Unaccounted For

President Obama speaks about the status of the Affordable Care Act in the press briefing room of the White House on April 17, 2014.  -- AP

President Obama speaks about the status of the Affordable Care Act in the press briefing room of the White House on April 17, 2014. -- AP View Enlarged Image

IBD - Investor's Business Daily: Affordable Care Act: President Obama has for a while been bragging that 8 million people have signed up for ObamaCare. But the administration still hasn't released the state-by-state numbers to back up that number.

You'd think that with such good news, the administration would want to put out as many details as possible, as soon as possible. But judging by previous months, the latest Health and Human Services enrollment report is now nearly two weeks behind schedule.

As a result, we still don't know where 2.7 million ObamaCare enrollees came from.

Here's what we do know:

The exchanges run by 15 states and Washington, D.C., have reported final enrollment numbers at least through March, and most have numbers through April 15. The combined total for these exchanges is 2.6 million.

For the remaining 36 states, all we have are the numbers HHS released through February. At that point, these states accounted for 2.7 million sign-ups.

Add the two together, and you get 5.3 million. That means roughly 2.7 million must have signed up in just these 36 states after March 1 to reach the 8 million mark. And that means enrollment in these states must have doubled in just the last six weeks of a 28-week open enrollment period.

To call this an incredible achievement is putting it mildly, particularly since the state-run exchanges saw enrollment climb only 62% in those final six weeks.

So where did these 2.7 million come from? We won't know until the HHS report comes out, which presumably could be any day now.

But even if Obama can account for these fantastic gains, there are still several questions that need answering.

First, of course, is: How many have paid?

Georgia says that only 48% of the 221,604 who enrolled through March 31 have paid their premiums. In South Carolina, only 59% of the 114,789 who enrolled through April 15 had done so.

Another question: Do the numbers account for people who dropped coverage earlier? We know at least some have been kicked off for nonpayment, and others canceled their plans for one reason or another. Is HHS netting out these losses, or is it simply adding new enrollment numbers on top of the old ones?

And, did the agency screen out duplicate enrollments? One broker told us that in the last month his company was encouraged to simply start a new application if something went wrong during the process, so as to speed things up. He figures 30% of the ObamaCare applications his firm handled in the home stretch were duplicates. Did these get counted in the final tally?

The mainstream media, unfortunately, have shown zero interest in trying to make sense of these numbers, much less independently verify them. Instead, they obeyed Obama's command to "move on."

But until we get more data, and get answers to these questions, we're reluctant to accept any ObamaCare numbers put out by this administration.

UK… Oregon… hospitals burn aborted babies for ‘green’ fuel

Addenbrooke's Hospital, with its incinerator chimney on the left.

Photo via Wikimedia  -  Addenbrooke's Hospital, with its incinerator chimney on the left.

Abortion -  By Daniel James Devine  -  Posted March 24, 2014, 02:20 p.m. -  World

Government-run hospitals in the United Kingdom have been burning the bodies of hundreds of aborted and miscarried babies in incinerators designed to heat their facilities. The practice of including fetal remains among trash dumped into “waste-to-energy” furnaces has gone on for several years, and was uncovered in a Channel 4 Dispatches television news investigation that will air Monday night.

The UK Department of Health on Sunday proclaimed an immediate ban on the fetal incineration practice, according to The Telegraph. A department health official and member of parliament, Daniel Poulter, called the practice “totally unacceptable.”

Ten medical facilities operated under the National Health Service admitted they burned fetal remains along with trash, and two hospitals used the bodies in waste-to-energy incinerators. The Telegraph said Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge incinerated 797 babies under 13 weeks of gestation at its waste-to-energy plant, and told the mothers the bodies had been “cremated.”

The Addenbrooke’s incinerator is part of the hospital’s “Think Green” program to reduce waste and cut carbon emissions. According to the hospital’s website, the ash from the incinerator was scheduled to be used as a concrete additive beginning in July 2013. Addenbrooke’s previously provoked criticism in 2006 after news broke that the hospital was saving money by cremating babies in the same incinerator used for trash.

Another hospital, Ipswich, in the county of Suffolk, incinerated 1,101 bodies in its own energy plant. The hospital said the fetal remains had been brought from other medical facilities by a private contractor. Ipswich cremates the remains of babies from its own facility, but does not incinerate them for energy, a spokeswoman said.

“While the vast majority of hospitals are acting in the appropriate way, that must be the case for all hospitals and the Human Tissue Authority has now been asked to ensure that it acts on this issue without delay,” Poulter told The Telegraph.

Channel 4 found that 27 UK medical facilities have incinerated at least 15,500 fetal remains following abortions or miscarriages in the past two years, either for cremation or fuel purposes.

The disposal of fetal tissue following abortions is a secretive practice in the United States as well. Medical waste companies often collect and dispose of the babies’ remains. In other cases, abortion center staffers may bag and dump the bodies into waste bins—or FedEx them overnight to processing centers where the tissue is sold or given to researchers, as WORLD reported in 2011.   

What has this world come to? First Flavor enhancers… now fuel? 

Aborted fetuses from Canada were burned at waste facility to power Oregon homes

Horrifying: Bodies of Aborted Babies Burned to Power Homes ...

Video: Oregon commission orders stop on using dead babies to generate power 

Boycott PepsiCo… Here Is Why and Why You Should Be Concerned For More Than One Reason! 

Senomyx: Pepsi Ignores Criticism on Use of Aborted Cells in Research

Thursday, April 24, 2014

Obamacare Slashes Senior Home Health Care Services

In early April, the Obama Administration delayed cuts in the Medicare Advantage program mandated by Obamacare. These plans, used by 30% of Medicare beneficiaries, supplement traditional Medicare coverage. The planned cuts to the MA program risked a political firestorm just months before the midterm elections. While MA received a short-term pardon, the Obama Administration is going forward with dramatic cuts to home health care services for seniors.

by Mike Flynn 23 Apr 2014, 7:59 PM PDT  -  Breitbart.com: Over 3.5 million seniors receive health care services in their home. Over 60% of the recipients are women. These beneficiaries tend to be older, poorer and sicker than the overall Medicare population. Because of this, they often lack transportation, making home health care services critical for their well-being. Those impacted by the ongoing cuts are the most vulnerable and at-risk seniors. 

Obamacare gave the Obama administration wide latitude in containing spending in the program. In a decision that baffled critics, however, the administration chose to impose the maximum cuts allowed, cutting reimbursements by 14% over the next four years. The announced cuts will dramatically shrink the home health care sector and leave over a million seniors without access to health services. 

“Despite the broad discretion granted to it by Obamacare, the Administration decided to impose the deepest possible cut, which is already having a dire impact on jobs, women and vulnerable seniors,” Eric Berger, CEO of the Partnership for Quality Home Healthcare said. “Without relief, these Medicare cuts will continue to impact the home health professionals upon whom millions of the Medicare program’s most vulnerable seniors depend.” 

In issuing its reimbursement guidelines, the administration acknowledged that "approximately 40%" of the more than 11,000 home health care agencies would be losing money by 2017. 

Home health care services had been one of the fastest growing sector for jobs. In December, 2013, however, on the eve of the cuts taking effect, the sector shed almost 4,000 jobs, the largest loss of jobs in the sector in more than a decade. Over 1.2 million Americans currently work in the home health care sector, 90% of whom are women. An analysis by Avarle Consulting estimated that almost half of these jobs, 498,000, are threatened by the Obamacare cuts.

Sunday, April 20, 2014

Creating a Healthier Easter Basket and Menu

easter-eggs

Apples4theTeacher:

With the rate of childhood obesity on the rise, try something new. This year, buy healthy snacks instead of candy. You don’t have to sacrifice flavor, either. Low-calorie or low-fat doesn’t mean it has to taste bad.

This is one time that toys are okay. According to my kids, you can never have too many toys. An Easter basket is about getting a special treat. No one said those treats had to be edible. Small hand-held electronic games are available at stores like Wal-Mart, Target, and Toys ‘R Us for less than ten dollars. Card games like Yugioh and Dungeon Dice Monsters are winners with kids these days. For the younger set, try dolls or action figures.

Jelly beans versus dried fruit. Jelly beans would be great if it wasn’t for all of the sugar. You can never eat just one or five for that matter. Dried fruit offers nutrition and taste in the same bite-sized portion as jelly beans. Ocean Spray® makes a snack called Craisins®. They are dried sweet cranberry snacks in different flavors. Also, Sun-Maid®, best known for their raisins, makes dried fruit treats including yogurt- and chocolate-covered raisins. My favorite is chopped dates. Kids won’t believe they’re eating something that’s good for them.

Snack size versus regular size. If you add candy to your basket, smaller is better. Choose snack-sized morsels like Three Musketeers® or Peppermint Patties®. These candy treats are lower in calories than other choices. Just add three or four for a sweet treat instead of chocolate bunnies or cream eggs.

Store bought versus homemade treats. We all enjoy going to the store and getting bubble gum and cupcakes, but do you really know what’s in what you are eating? Most if not all marketable treats started in someone’s kitchen. That means they were homemade at one time. Let’s take Rice Krispy treats® for example. The recipe was on the cereal box before they became a pre-packaged item in the store. At home, low-fat ingredients can be substituted to create delicious treats for the Easter basket. When you know what’s inside your food, you feel better about serving it to your kids.

Easter baskets don’t have to be chock full of junk to be fun. Healthy additions make you a better parent without sacrificing taste. Teach children to eat right while they are young so that they develop a lifetime of good habits.

How To:

    • 1

      Substitute healthy snacks for the sugary and chocolate-laden ones found in a traditional Easter basket. Give your children yogurt-covered raisins, dried fruit and homemade versions of the popular treats found in stores, which are much more nutritious for them.

    • 2

      Add books by your children's favorite authors, along with some fun Easter-themed bookmarks to their Easter baskets. A movie of a favorite book is also a great gift, like The Velveteen Rabbit, Multi-media

    • 3

      Fill the Easter basket with toys your kids can use while staying active outside, such as sidewalk chalk, bubbles, balls and sporting equipment.

    • 4

      Consider stocking the Easter basket with small gifts designed to encourage creativity in your children, such as paints, brushes, coloring books and crayons.

    • 5

      Arrange various kinds of seed packets with some gardening tools so your child can plant flowers or vegetables and watch them grow. Spring is the perfect time for your children to pick up gardening as a new hobby.

    • 6

      Pour healthy and homemade trail mix composed of a nutritious and low-sugar cereal, nuts, pretzels, bagel chips and a few jelly beans into plastic Easter eggs.

Fun and healthier holidays are all about striking a balance.  Your gifts, baskets and menu can be both.  But in the end, let’s remember that if we strike that balance on a more regular basis, it is okay to indulge every now and then… unless there are direct health challenges to consider.

Angelina Not A Chocolate Bunny Pup - 2009

 

Thursday, April 17, 2014

Sebelius' Shameful Legacy

Outgoing HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius will be remembered by most for the insanely botched roll-out of ObamaCare, but her most shameful legacy to those of us who remember it, will always be her disgraceful tenure as Governor of Kansas because of her unwavering support for illegal late term abortions, and her role in vilifying the attorney general who was trying to put a stop to them.

SmallBiz Small Talk

By Debra Heine – Breitbart.com  -  Cross-Posted at AskMarion: Infamous late term abortionist,  Dr. George Tiller, who practiced his shady, sordid business in Wichita, was able to game the system through strategic donations to Democrat politicians, most particularly, Kathleen Sebelius.

Kansas City resident Jack Cashill remembers the history well, and wrote about it today at the American Thinker.

During Sebelius’s six years as governor, women came from 48 states and points beyond to have late-term abortions in Kansas.

They came not because Kansas had uniquely liberal abortion laws.  They came because Sebelius was uniquely hostile to the law’s enforcement.  The state’s most efficient practitioner of this dubious art, the late Dr. George Tiller of Wichita, boasted on his website of having “more experience in late abortion services with fetuses over 24 weeks than anywhere else in the Western Hemisphere.”

What Tiller’s website did not say is that during the six years of Sebelius’s reign as governor, he ended the lives of thousands of healthy babies ready to be born, in full violation of state law.  Nor did the website tell how Sebelius personally intervened to let the carnage continue.  This was no small task.  To succeed, she had to destroy her Republican attorney general, Phill Kline, who was hot on Tiller’s trail.

Local Democrats and their media accomplices vigorously engaged in the "othering" of Kline.

Othering is a way of defining and securing one’s own positive identity through the stigmatization of an “other.” Whatever the markers of social differentiation that shape the meaning of “us” and “them,” whether they are racial, geographic, ethnic, economic or ideological, there is always the danger that they will become the basis for a self-affirmation that depends upon the denigration of the other group.

As Andrew Stiles recently noted at The Washington Free Beacon, liberals are in the process of trying to destroy Ted Cruz by "othering" him.  

But before the othering of Sarah Palin and Ted Cruz, there was the particularly vicious othering of another effective conservative, Phill Kline.

The story could begin in any number of places, but a likely starting place is 2002, the year Sebelius ran for governor and Kline ran for attorney general.  As a state representative five years earlier, Kline had helped draft legislation to check the state’s then thriving late-term abortion business.  The new law allowed for a late-term abortion on a viable baby only “to preserve the life of the pregnant women” or to prevent her from suffering “substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function.”

Tiller poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into a variety of PACs and cut-outs, making what should have been an easy win for Kline in 2002 into "a nail-biter." 

Four years later, he invested close to $2 million to Democrats.  

He had to.  For the three previous years, Kline had plied an unsympathetic state judiciary to get access to Tiller’s case file, and he was finally poised to succeed. 

Tiller and his political patrons, chief among them Sebelius, resisted at every step.  To block Kline, Sebelius persuaded  popular Republican district attorney Paul Morrison to switch parties and run against Kline on her ticket.  The Democrats, Tiller’s paid proxies, and the media then launched a vicious campaign to portray “Snoop Dog Kline” as a “panty-sniffer” with no greater interest than invading the privacy of Kansas women.

So relentless were The Kansas City Star’s attacks on the “anti-choice extremist” Kline that he lost the election, and the Star won Planned Parenthood’s top media honor, the “Maggie Award,” named for its eugenicist founder, Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood

Margaret Sanger’s ideas are live and well in the Obama White House! Here is Ultra Left Wing HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’ Spin (Remember, Sibelius was an ardent supporter of murdered partial birth abortionist, Tiller and her extreme record on abortion has sadly been ignored (or hidden) by the media.) Sebelius has also been exposed as a major player in the Obama War on Religion.

Three months after Kline was forced out, Sebelius hosted an elegant but extremely discreet soirée at Cedar Crest, the governor’s mansion, for Tiller and his staff.  What made this event newsworthy was that just a few months earlier, Kline had filed 30 counts against Tiller for performing illegal late-term abortions.

Photos from the "soiree", include Sebelius proudly holding up a tee shirt given to her by Tiller which reads “Trifecta 2006: Sebelius, Parkinson, Morrison.”

Cashill has much more at The American Thinker with this biting conclusion:

I cannot imagine that Ms. Sebelius is having much fun this week, but if she is known going forward only for the humiliation of ObamaCare, she will have a better legacy than she deserves.

Agreed. And the most disturbing aspect of the sordid tale is the fact that she was chosen by Obama to be his HHS Sec. not despite this shameful legacy - but because of it.

And only in Obamaland, where Progressivism runs wild, could this women entertain running for the Senate with a record and history like hers!!

*Lucky for us there are 3 numbers that show a Sebelius Senate run is all but doomed.

Wednesday, April 16, 2014

The Season of Freedom and Special Needs Parenting

By Elise Ronan – Times of Israel: Freedom. The Jewish people are consumed with freedom. From our very earliest beginnings we fought for our individuality and the right to be whom we chose to be. Abraham started it. We can blame him I suppose for imbuing in our genes the need to be independent; to think for ourselves; to rely on our individuality and abilities alone. We Jews, personify freedom. We honor freedom, independence, self-reliance and self-discovery. We promote this freedom of choice in the celebrations of Passover or Hanukkah or remembering Masada and Bar Kochba. We, the Jewish people, have always held tightly to our need to choose our own path. We love being the iconoclast.

But what do you do when everything you were brought up to believe in is threatened? What do you do when your freedom, independence and abilities are truly called into question? When that inherent need to take charge of your life is no longer part and parcel of who you are? What do you do when you know that even with all the love that you have for your child, you need help from strangers? What do you do when you realize that you cannot do it all alone? That somewhere in your soul you realize that if you love your child enough, you need to hand their future over to a “village” of people in order for your child to survive?

Now this “village” is very different than the concept of “community” in Judaism. We are a universal People, we Jews. We are distinct human beings and at the same time part of a whole community. We are the inheritors of a legacy that has shaped human history and at the same time we are individuals with wants, needs and desires. We are ourselves and at the same time we are the embodiment of all Jews.

But a village that you create for your special needs child is something totally different than a community. When you have community in Judaism you begin by saying I am a part of something. It is a positive uplifting experience that gives you pleasure, succor and direction. You begin by saying “here I am.” But that is not how special needs parenting begins. Special needs parenting begins by asking “what am I to do now?” “Where am I to go with my child?” “Who will help my child” and in the end, “who will love my child enough to care for them when I am gone?” (#youmightbeanautismparentif You may have a will and a guardian picked out, but in the end you know you can never, ever die.)

The first thing you feel, as a special needs parent is fear (yes, with alot of pissed off thrown in too). Complete unadulterated, gnawing at your heart fear. Fear that takes your breath away. It changes you. You become someone else. You are no longer the you, you knew. Your soul is consumed. And you need to acknowledge something that goes against everything you ever thought you would have to acknowledge when parenting…. You have to admit that you have no idea how to help your child. You are at a loss. You feel so abjectly alone. You feel defeated in that you must recognize your need for strangers to help and guide you in this journey.

It is an interesting epiphany when you can finally realize that you need a village to raise your child. That no, you cannot do it alone. We are taught that parenting is something we pass on from generation unto generation. It is why the jokes abound about mommalies and daddalies when talking to our children. We see and hear our parents in ourselves. But that changes when you deal with a special needs child. What worked before will not work now. What was done for generations will not help your child. The concepts that so successfully raised multitudes of human beings no longer apply. Parenting a special needs child is not innate. It is a methodical thought out, wholly planned process. It is a unique understanding of parenting.

But what is most important when you finally acknowledge that you need that village is to remember above all else, that you have NOT failed. It is not an indictment of your parenting, but an acknowledgement of what a good parent you truly are to know you need help. To recognize that you cannot always be everything to your child is important. To know that there are others out there who are capable of providing support is very important. To recognize that if your child is to succeed in life, they will need more than you can give them takes parents who see beyond themselves. It takes a type of strength, something inherent in a free and independent people, to recognize that you cannot do everything all alone. Asking for help for your child takes bravery, it gets you beyond the fear.

Parenting a special needs child is walking into an unknown future, just as the Children of Israel walked out of Egypt to a future without direction, and yes most of us do it without the missteps of the golden calf (well, as best as we can anyway). Because unlike those who waked into Sinai, we know that we cannot understand or have control over the future. We know no idols or talismans will protect our children. By recognizing that we need help we have proceeded past that initial soul crushing terror and are ready to produce a future for our children. We know we will have to do our best to create a happy and positive world in which our children can live. We know that we can create to the best of our ability, a village of people who love, nurture and support our child. We know that we can only do the best that we can, no more. We have acknowledged, stripped the confusion from our souls, because in the end we finally admit that we too are merely human.

We learn over years, days, hours, even minutes, that the trajectory of our lives can change in an instant. We understand that community is one thing and creating a “village” is another. We try to impart unto our children what we can give each of them and grasp from strangers, who can and in many ways become like family, their knowledge and compassion to help our children succeed in life. Freedom and independence is not always about being steadfast and singular in our outlook. It is not always about standing on our own two feet. At times freedom and independence is knowing, just knowing, when we know nothing at all.

One day during a support group meeting, someone asked me what I would have done earlier in my children’s lives. I think they were looking for some great explanation of how to handle issues and events and what I might have done differently. They were looking in some way for guidance on how they should process and prepare for certain problems that could arise. That of course is what I do to help people. Give them the benefit of my past experience. Practical and realistic supports that can help with the day-to-day. I knew they wanted specifics. But I also knew, that before you can have specifics, before you can create a program of support, before you can produce a village, you need to acknowledge the reality of the situation and recognize your own human limitations.

So I answered simply, “ I wish I had been braver sooner.” And I knew, at that moment, with that acknowledgment, that I was  finally, truly, once again, on the path out of Egypt headed towards freedom. For the first step towards freedom is recognizing your fears. Second step is not giving in.

Related:

83 percent of brain injury vaccine compensation payouts were for autism caused by vaccines

Sunday, April 13, 2014

Death Panels for Babies in Obamacare? Kids With RSV Should Beware

Sarah Palin was attacked mercilessly for her claims that the Obamacare legislation would lead to death panels — where bureaucrats would make treatment decisions for patients or ration their expensive medical care.

Since then even some of her most ardent critics and strongest early supporters of ObamaCare have had to admit that Palin was right and that there are definitely death panels, a rationing board, or whatever you want to call it written into the ObamaCare legislation!

LifeNews.com: Sarah Palin was attacked mercilessly for her claims that the Obamacare legislation would lead to death panels — where bureaucrats would make treatment decisions for patients or ration their expensive medical care.

Since her warning salvo was fired, numerous examples have come up involving Obamacare rationing medical care or putting in cost containments that would lead to rationed care or prohibit patients from spending more of their own money on lifesaving medical treatment or wanted care.

Now, Jacqueline Halbig, principal at Sovereign Global Solutions and former senior policy adviser for the Dept. of Health and Human Services, has a guest post at the pro-life blog run by Jill Stanek about another Obamacare rationing example.

Parents of children with disabilities should pay particular attention because Halbig says “babies, especially those born prematurely, now face an even greater uphill battle – receiving needed health care” thanks to Obamacare. The rest of her column follows:

Every year between November and March, there are outbreaks of Respiratory Syncytial Virus, an illness similar to the flu.

RSV1RSV is the leading cause of pneumonia and bronchiolitis, and hospitalization for children under the age of one; premature infants and children before the age of two with congenital heart or chronic lung disease are considered to be at highest risk.

Each year RSV causes two million hospitalizations and 14,000 deaths. In addition, RSV disproportionately affects minority and especially African American babies, who, according to the Centers for Disease Control, are 59% percent more likely to be born prematurely than white infants.

While there is no vaccine for RSV, there is an FDA-approved treatment available. When it became available in 1997, the American Academy of Pediatrics issued evidence-based guidelines for its use, recommending that the treatment be administered once per month during outbreak season (an average of five months total).

But in 2009, with no clear medical evidence for doing so, the AAP both shrunk the pool of eligible infants and reduced the number of RSV treatments that would be made available – for some babies down to 3 doses, while for others as low as 1 dose. The only clear reason given was cost.

Unfortunately, the AAP’s guidelines are widely implemented by Medicaid and insurance providers, who in turn followed suit and greatly reduced coverage.

In response, concerned groups of parents, prenatal advocates, and medical providers such as the National Perinatal Association, the National Medical Association, and the National Black Nurses Association have pointed out that there is no definitive research to support these changes (indeed, these are not FDA-approved doses) and are urging the AAP to reconsider their recommendations.

If cost is the issue, let’s consider the cost of non-treatment. A 2010 study by the NMA and NBNA showed the rate of hospitalization and emergency room visits without proper treatment for RSV is astronomical.

For example, a child not properly treated for RSV is five times more likely to be hospitalized and more than twice as likely to visit an emergency room visit than with the flu.

But for those premature infants who received treatment, hospitalization decreased by 55-80%. Furthermore, infants who received the recommended treatment had decreased emergency room and physician office visits. As a result, there are cost savings associated with proper treatment.

Since RSV disproportionately affects African American, Hispanic and premature babies, there is great concern that this rationing policy will further increase health disparities in these communities.

So what’s the real benefit of limiting this treatment? If Obamacare’s objective is to make health care more accessible and affordable, an honest cost benefit analysis would respect the bottom line and acknowledge that an ounce of RSV prevention is cheaper than a pound of emergency room cure – unless their bottom line equates death as the cheapest option.

Related: 

Obama, Democrats Promised "Death Panels" Would Not Exist In Obamacare – Sarah Palin on Hannity

RUSH: Palin Was Right - There Are Indeed Death Panels In ObamaCare (audio) 

Obama Embraces 'Death Panel' Concept in Medicare Rule 

BILL WHITTLE: Sarah Palin was RIGHT

Betsy McCaughey: Obamacare designed to vastly expand single payer Medicaid by eviscerating Medicare 

RUSH: Palin Was Right – There Are Indeed Death Panels In ObamaCare (audio)

Death Panels are HERE 

Will Sick Babies Be Starved to Death Under Obamacare? 

“Death Panel” Three Years Later 

Did Obama hint at health-care rationing in SOTU?

On the Road to Death Panels

ObamaCare for Seniors: Sorry, You're Just Not Worth It

Meet the ObamaCare Mandate Committee

Obamacare rationing panels an ‘immediate danger to seniors’: former AMA president

Obama Regulation Czar, Cass Sunstein, Advocated Removing People’s Organs Without Explicit Consent

Obama’s "Science Czar" Advocates De-Developing the US to World of Zero Growth

Video: More Scary Stuff From Obama’s Science Czar

Holdren Says Constitution Backs Compulsory Abortion

Holdren: Seize Babies Born to Unwed Women

List of Obama’s Czars Plus Two – Updated: 8.18.09 – Remember when the Czars were the hot topic… but they overwhelmed us and forgot them to do they scary dirty jobs…

Science Czar John P. Holdren – Updated 9.2.09

Meet Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel: Deny Coverage to Elderly an Disabled for the Greater Good – But don’t forget… Sarah Palin was crazy…

Complete Lives System by Ezekial Emanuel

ObamaCare… the Kiss of Death - Collection of OBAMA SCARE - Articles U CAN NOT MISS!

Obama Embraces 'Death Panel' Concept in Medicare Rule

Obamacare to Herd Disabled Seniors to Bare-Bones Medicaid Plans

"People 70 and over will not be treated under Obamacare… and you thought DEATH PANELS were gone"– Updated

Soylent Green Anyone???

Great Grandmother Mary Allen Hardison: 101-Year-Old Woman Breaks Guinness World Record... Oldest Female to Paraglide Tandem

Go Granny Go!!

Seniors Left Behind?

The 'kill granny' bill

The Return of Mediscare

Checkout: ObamaCare Survival Guide 

Noam Chomsky Shocker: Palin Was Right About Obama

“Sarah Palin Was Right” TV Ad by CCC PAC

Friday, April 11, 2014

It's Scapegoat Time In ObamaLand - Sebelius 'Resigns'

It’s Official…

http://ih.constantcontact.com/fs122/1102271207824/img/1959.jpg
Joshua Pundit – Cross-Posted at AskMarion: It's official. The foul Kommissar in charge of dismantling America's health system and imposing ObamaCare is 'resigning' effective immediately and President Obama is going to nominate Sylvia Mathews Burwell, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, to replace her.

But wait a minute. Here we were being told ObamaCare was going so well! Of course, if you believe that, you deserve to.

Just the numerous changes the president illegally made to the law to keep it from imploding ought to tell you all is not well when it comes to ObamaCare. Politicians don't change something that's working, or kick the person in charge out on the streets. I'm being generous when I estimate that those '7 million sign ups' President Obama was thumping his chest about the other day probably equals something like 3 million actual customers, and most of those are medicaid patients 'buying' free care anyway. Meanwhile, something like five million Americans have lost their coverage entirely.And just wait until after the midterms, when the real carnage kicks in as the waivers end.

Sylvia Mathews Burwell is a loyal clintonista and Democrat functionary, and unlike Sibelius she's apparently bright enough not to lie so obviously in public. Her ability to conjure numbers out of thin air regardless of reality (based on what the Obama OMB has projected in the last year or so) should be a useful talent as well.

As for Sebelius, she deserves a special reward for her part in this. I'm certain she'll receive it, in this world or the next.

Peddle your bicycle back to Kansas, creep. But given how unpopular ObamaCare is in the Sunflower State and across the nation, you might be better off staying in DC.

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Miss Gulch… I can see a bit of resemblance

If You Vote for Congressmen Who Support Obamacare, You’re Voting for Obamacare

Canceled Policies Senators3

By Jedidiah Noble – Independent Sentinal Originally posted November 13, 2013

Many people were angry with Justice Roberts when he declared Obamacare constitutional and I was one of them. He furthered angered the right with these quotes:

“We do not consider whether the Act embodies sound policies. That judgment is entrusted to the Nation’s elected leaders.”

“Members of this Court are vested with the authority to interpret the law; we possess neither the expertise nor the prerogative to make policy judgments. Those decisions are entrusted to our Nation’s elected leaders, who can be thrown out of office if the people disagree with them. It is not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices.”

Now I have to say that he was right. If we want to change the law, we have to vote the Obamacare politicians out of office. We cannot rely on the Supreme Court of the United States, it is not their job.

We, the American people, voted for Obamacare, not once, but repeatedly by electing and re-electing politicians who support Obamacare. We did it here on Long Island when we re-elected congressmen Tim Bishop, Steve Israel, and Carolyn McCarthy, among others. Virginia did it when they recently elected Governor-elect McAuliffe. In fact, McAuliffe ran on Medicaid expansion and Obamacare. He took the election as a referendum for both.

Debbie Wasserman-Schultz said Democrats will be able to run on Obamacare in 2014.

Will they?

We should be most mindful of the 12 Senators who voted for Obamacare, any one of them could have stopped the law which passed with 60 votes.

We voted for them as Justice Roberts indicated.

Consider the words of Nancy Pelosi, “…but we have to pass the bill so you can find out what’s in it, away from the fog of the controversy”:

Video: Nancy Pelosi Pass the Bill to find out what's in it

Despite this, we voted for Obamacare by electing these politicians who did not read the bill and did not know what was in the bill.

Will we do it again?

The following are the names of the Senators who cast decisive votes for Obamacare. If you vote for them again, you are voting for Obamacare. There is no other way to look at it. If you don’t want Obamacare, you cannot vote for these Senators:

Mark Begich, Alaska; Dick Durbin, Illinois; Al Franken, Minnesota; Kay Hagan, North Carolina; Mary Landrieu, Louisiana; Jeff Merkley, Oregon; Mark Pryor, Arkansas; Jack Reed, Rhode Island; Jeanne Shaheen, New Hampshire; Mark Udall, Colorado; Tom Udall, New Mexico; Mark Warner, Virginia.

These senators are now scrambling for cover and looking for ways to make it appear as if they didn’t support what they wholeheartedly supported – The Affordable Care Act. They were given multiple opportunities by the House to adjust the bill in the past three years and they refused.

Mary Landrieu is putting through a bill now that will supposedly allow people to keep their present coverage as President Obama promised. It is co-sponsored by Obamacare supporter, Dianne Feinstein, whose state now has 1 million people losing their insurance.

Mary Landrieu has been an ardent supporter of Obamacare from day one. She flew on Air Force One with Mr. Obama two weeks ago but made certain she was not photographed with him.

Are you going to fall for their ploys?

These people do not have our best interests at heart. They wanted to support Mr. Obama, not us. They do not deserve to be our representatives.

Make no mistake, a vote for them is a vote for Obamacare.

If you vote for them again, you will get what you deserve and Justice Roberts would agree.

Let’s not forget the representatives in the House who voted for Obamacare? Click here to find out if your congressmen was among them.

As an aside, healthcare.gov won’t be ready by December 1st as promised by Mr. Obama. Jay Carney said it will be ready for a lot of people. They plan to put peoples’ personal and financial information at risk on a site that is somewhat working.

So, the person who wrote Obama’s budgets (which failed to win even Dem support) will replace Sebelius. What can even possibly go wrong?

Yep you heard that correctly, the person who wrote Obama’s budgets (which failed to win even Dem support) will replace Sebelius. What can even possibly go wrong?

Kathleen Sebelius resigns: Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius attends a Senate committee hearing, April 10, 2014.: Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius listens on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, April 10, 2014, during the Senate Finance Committee hearing on the HHS Department's fiscal Year 2015 budget.

AP Photo Susan Walsh

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius will resign from her post following a rocky rollout for the president's healthcare program.

By Juliet Eilperin and Amy Goldstein, Updated: Thursday, April 10, 7:59 PM - E-mail the writersWaPo – Cross-Posted at AskMarion

Video: Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is resigning, ending a tumultuous tenure as the public face of the Affordable Care Act. President Obama will nominate his budget director on Friday as her successor, according to White House officials.

Sebelius entered the Cabinet in 2009, three months into Obama’s presidency, as a well-regarded former governor of conservative Kansas. She is leaving after months of intense criticism over the botched rollout in the fall of the insurance marketplace.

During the firestorm, Obama made clear to his aides that he would not seek the resignation of his health secretary, and her departure is timed to brighter news for the White House as enrollment soared late last month.

Still, some White House allies said Thursday night that the troubled launch of HealthCare.gov had heightened tensions between Sebelius and the president’s staff members, who had become increasingly mistrustful of the department she led. Some Democrats, meanwhile, had argued privately that someone should be held accountable for the problems with the federal insurance exchange.

According to federal health officials, Sebelius approached Obama in early March and told him that, with the insurance enrollment period ending that month, the time had come for new leadership at HHS, the government’s largest domestic agency. A White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, said Sebelius told the president that “she felt confident in the trajectory for enrollment and implementation of the Affordable Care Act.”

According to White House officials, Obama will nominate Office of Management and Budget Director Sylvia Mathews Burwell to take Sebelius’s place. Although Burwell does not have an extensive background in health-care policy, she is known for her strong management skills and has experience in issues of poverty and global health issues from her time at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Moreover, she is popular on Capitol Hill. The Senate confirmed her as OMB director 96 to 0 almost exactly a year ago. Her nomination to lead HHS will require Senate confirmation as well.

Sebelius and Replacent

Sebelius and Burwell

The news of Sebelius’s resignation, first reported Thursday night by Bloomberg News and the New York Times, caught Washington and health-care policy circles by surprise. Even the administration’s closest allies on health-care issues said they had no clue that her departure was imminent.

Senior Democrats on Capitol Hill also appeared to be caught off guard by the announcement. But they rushed out praise for Sebelius. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) said in a statement: “From day one, Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has remained laser-focused on a single purpose: to make health care a right, not a privilege, for all Americans. Her leadership has been forceful, effective, and essential.”

One former administration official, speaking, like others, on the condition of anonymity about behind-the-scenes working relationships, said Thursday night that Sebelius maintained a warm relationship with the president.

A health policy specialist close to the White House said that Obama’s staff had long preferred to be “running the show” on the health-care law but that Sebelius and her aides were increasingly “cut out of the process” after the launch of HealthCare.gov escalated into a political disaster for the president.

Other senior administration officials played central roles in helping repair the Web site and steer the law’s implementation after the rollout. Jeffrey D. Zients, a former OMB official who directs the National Economic Council, rejoined the administration to spearhead a team of federal employees and contractors who worked to repair HealthCare.gov. Meanwhile, Phil Schiliro, who served as Obama’s chief legislative liaison during his first term, returned in December to oversee the policy side of the law.

Sebelius was not part of the group of White House aides who recently told Obama in the Oval Office that health-care enrollment had surpassed 7 million. While she sat in the front row as the president told the nation on April 1 about the law’s success, he did not mention her in his speech.

Yet Sebelius remained a tireless promoter of the health-care law over the past six months, urging uninsured Americans to sign up on state and federal exchanges. Traveling to major cities such as Miami, Phoenix and Houston to reach residents whose Republican governors opposed the law, she held 43 local events and more than 100 local interviews over the past several months.

Sebelius was confirmed on April 28, 2009. Her tenure — 1,808 days as of Thursday — is about 500 days longer than the average for HHS secretaries, dating to the Carter administration. Federal health officials said Thursday night that she has not set a departure date but that her plan generally is to remain until her successor is confirmed. As for her next professional role, she “is considering other options,” the officials said.

Although Sebelius is best known as the public face of the Affordable Care Act, her work spanned issues from the H1N1 virus to childhood obesity to parity for mental health treatment.

With the equivalent of 77,000 full-time employees, she has had a sprawling domain at HHS. The department oversees Medicare and Medicaid as well as the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and many smaller agencies. For that reason, the department’s work touches the lives of more Americans than most other parts of the government.

Congressional Republicans seized on Sebelius’s resignation to criticize the Affordable Care Act as unworkable.

“Secretary Sebelius was asked to promote something unready, poorly structured, and unpopular,” Sen. Charles E. Grassley (Iowa) said in a statement. “She was given a law that was just about written in pencil the way the deadlines changed all the time. That put her in a position of having a strained relationship with Congress. It’s disingenuous for the White House to distance itself from the problems and attribute them to partisan sniping at one member of the Administration. The next secretary might have a fresh start with the public and Congress but the flawed law is still the law.”

Despite the troubled launch of HealthCare.gov, which left many consumers unable to access the federal exchange for nearly two months, the administration managed to meet its goal of enrolling 7 million Americans during its initial sign-up period. On Thursday, Sebelius said that about 7.5 million consumers had enrolled, although those who don’t pay their premiums will not be insured.

In the fall, Sebelius proved steely under harsh congressional questioning, telling her Republican critics that they could blame her for the Web site’s problems.

“Access to HealthCare.gov has been a miserably frustrating experience for way too many Americans,” she said in her opening statement before the House Energy and Commerce Committee in late October. “So let me say directly to these Americans: You deserve better. I apologize. I’m accountable to you for fixing these problems. And I’m committed to earning your confidence back by fixing the site.”

Thursday, April 10, 2014

Looking for Answers to the Autism Epidemic in All the Wrong Places

By Autism-Warrior-Parent -  Joan Swirsky  -  The Independent Sentinel

Just last week, on March 24, 2014, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta (CDC) released its latest data on autism. After surveying medical and school records from 11 states, the CDC found that autism has more than doubled since the new century began only 14 years ago. Today the condition affects one out of 68 children – five times as many boys as girls. Alarmingly, there was a 30 percent climb in its incidence between 2008 and 2010.

Maybe you missed the story, since the day it broke, and the following day, the media –TV, radio, print – devoted about 30 seconds and just a few articles to this horrific report, significantly less time than is still spent endlessly speculating on Flight 370 or debating the use of the word “bossy,” both of which pale in comparison to the marathon of unendurable daily ads for Cialis and Viagra! Exhibit Number One in America’s priority system!

The powers-that-be at the CDC once again trotted out the age-old rationales to explain this bizarre finding:

  • Greater awareness and therefore earlier and more accurate diagnoses
  • The role that being an older parent plays not only in the incidence of autism but also Down syndrome and other developmental disabilities
  • Genes
  • “Something” in the environment

The study found that the incidence of autism in blacks “continues to lag behind whites and Hispanics,” which some experts attributed to racial bias (i.e., blacks lack equal access to medical care), but other experts said that blacks may simply be less vulnerable to autism for some unknown reason.

What is consistently omitted, however, is the role that ultrasound exams during pregnancy may and probably do play not only in this seeming black/white disparity, but in the rapidly-escalating incidence of the condition. More about that below.

WHAT WE KNOW TODAY

Autism is a neurological disorder that affects the normal development of the brain, causing self-defeating behaviors and an inability to form social relationships. It usually appears before the age of three. Most scientists believe that autism is strongly influenced by genetics but allow that environmental factors may also play a role.

To be diagnosed on the autistic spectrum, a child must have deficits in three areas:

  1. Communication (most children can’t make eye contact; others can’t speak)
  2. Social skills (typified by disinterest in both people and surroundings)
  3. Typically “normal” behavior (many autistic children have tics, repetitive behavior, inappropriate affects, et al)

Those diagnosed on the autistic spectrum range from high-functioning, self-sufficient people, even geniuses, to those who need lifelong supportive help.

Newsday reporter Delthia Ricks interviewed Coleen Boyle, the Director of the National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities (a division of the CDC), who said that “8-year-olds [were chosen for the study] because, by that age, everyone with an autism-spectrum disorder usually will have been diagnosed.”

According to NY Times writer Benedict Carey, the study revealed “a huge range in autism prevalence… from one child in 175 found with autism in Alabama, to one in 46 in New Jersey.”

Other sites in the study, Carey reported, were in Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Georgia, Maryland, Missouri, North Carolina, Utah and Wisconsin.

After the CDC announced the horrifying results of its study, several members of Congress and advocacy groups called for more funding for research and support services.

A LARGELY-DEBUNKED THEORY

The increased incidence of autism has been attributed by legions of parents and a number of professionals to the mercury-containing preservative thimerosol, used to prevent bacterial or fungal contamination in the vaccines babies and children routinely receive.

This is not backed up by hard science.

Thimerosol, which has been used in vaccines since the 1930s, has not been used in the U.S. since 2001 and the vaccine dosages containing the preservative that were given before then had about the same amount of mercury found in an infant’s daily supply of breast milk.

Numerous studies – by the Centers for Disease Control, the Institute of Medicine, American Academy of Pediatrics, the World Health Organization, and the National Academy of Sciences, among others – have found no autism-vaccine link, while other studies have shown an increase in autism in countries that have removed thimerosal from vaccines.

Nevertheless, aided by salivating personal-injury lawyers, parents have filed thousands of lawsuits claiming that thimerosol “caused” their children’s autism. Between late 1999 and late 2002, mercury was removed from most childhood vaccines, including DPT (Diphtheria, Tetanus, Pertussis), Hepatitis B, and Hib [Haemophilus influenza b]. The MMR (Measles, Mumps, Rubella), which is a live vaccine, is not compatible with thimerosal.

Also abetting the quack science are figures like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who wrote an article, “Deadly Immunity,” for Rolling Stone magazine, which was reprinted in Salon.com. But Salon ended up removing the article from its website because of the scorn it received from the scientific community. Kennedy’s articles were “rife with factual errors and distortions,” wrote Robert V. Fineberg, M.D, president of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies.

What appears significant, however, is the degree to which diagnoses of mental retardation and learning disabilities throughout the country have decreased at the same time as diagnoses of autism have risen, as reported in a May 2006 issue of Behavioral Pediatrics. Some experts theorize that “diagnostic substitution” may explain this phenomenon. Diagnostic Substitution means that children who were diagnosed with other conditions – including ADHD and learning disabilities – are now diagnosed with autism.

ultrasound

MY THEORY

In the early ‘70s, I worked as a delivery-room nurse at a university-affiliated hospital near my home on Long Island. It was a revolutionary time in obstetrics, when the Lamaze method of “prepared childbirth” and the use of sonograms to visualize fetuses were gaining popularity.

Actually, ultrasound technology was first developed in Scotland in the mid-1950s by obstetrician Ian Donald and engineer Tom Brown to detect industrial flaws in ships. By the end of the ‘50s, ultrasound was routinely used in Glasgow hospitals, but it was well into the 1970s before it was used in American hospitals to check that the developing baby, placenta, and amniotic fluid were normal and to detect abnormal conditions such as birth defects and ectopic pregnancies, et al.

At the end of the ‘70s, I became a certified Lamaze teacher and spent the next 22 years giving classes in my home. In a very real way, I had my own laboratory, as I learned directly from my clients about the increasing escalation of sonogram exams they had as the decades elapsed.

In the early 1980s, it was common for only one or two out of the 10 women in my classes to have a sonogram. In just a few years, every woman in my classes had had a sonogram. And in the late ‘80s and ‘90s, almost every woman had not one sonogram, but often two or three or four or five – starting as early as three or four weeks gestation and extending, in some instances, right up to delivery!

It was in the ‘90s, in fact, that it began to occur to me that the scary rise in the incidence of autism might be linked to the significant rise in ultrasound exams. Over the years, I’ve posited my theory to a number of people, written letters to the editors of newspapers – including the NY Times, for which I wrote for over 20 years, but they still refused to publish my letter – and e-mailed my idea to one of the top news people at the Fox News Network, but the we report/you decide powers-that-be on that station strangely decided not to report on this subject.

I contacted autism researchers Dr. Marcel Just and Dr. Diane L. Williams, who told me via e-mail that Dr. Pasko Rakic at Yale was, indeed, exploring the autism-ultrasound link.

Then, in 2006, I found an article in Midwifery Today, “Questions about Prenatal Ultrasound and the Alarming Increase in Autism,” by writer-researcher Caroline Rodgers.

“The steep increase in autism,” Rodgers wrote, “goes beyond the U.S.: It is a “global phenomenon”… that “has emerged…across vastly different environments and cultures.”

“What do countries and regions with climates, diets and exposure to known toxins as disparate as the U.S., Japan, Scandinavia, Australia, India and the UK have in common?” Rodgers asked.

“No common factor in the water, air, local pesticides, diet or even building materials and clothing can explain the emergence and relentless increase in this serious, life-long neurodevelopmental disorder,” she stated.

However, Rodgers added: “What all industrial countries do have in common is …the use of routine prenatal ultrasound on pregnant women. In countries with nationalized healthcare, where virtually all pregnant women are exposed to ultrasound, the autism rates are even higher than in the U.S., where due to disparities in income and health insurance, some 30 percent of pregnant women do not yet undergo ultrasound scanning.” Aha! Could this be why blacks and Hispanics in America continue to lag behind whites in the development of autism?

Even in remote, rural regions of developing countries like China, ultrasound is in common use because sex determination is so important to their one-child – preferably male – policy.

The cause of autism, Rodgers continues, “has been pinned on everything from `emotionally remote’ mothers…to vaccines, genetics, immunological disorders, environmental toxins and maternal infections – a far simpler possibility…is the pervasive use of prenatal ultrasound, which can cause potentially dangerous thermal effects.

ENTER HARD SCIENCE

In August 2006, Pasko Rakic, M.D., chair of Yale School of Medicine’s Department of Neurobiology, announced the results of a study in which pregnant mice underwent various durations of ultrasound. The brains of the offspring showed damage consistent with that found in the brains of people with autism.

The research, funded by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, also implicated ultrasound in neurodevelopmental problems in children, such as dyslexia, epilepsy, mental retardation and schizophrenia, and showed that damage to brain cells increased with longer exposures.

Dr. Rakic’s study, Rodgers said, “… is just one of many animal experiments and human studies conducted over the years indicating that prenatal ultrasound can be harmful to babies.”

In thedailybeast.com, Jennifer Margulis, author of Business of Baby: What Doctors Don’t Tell You, What Corporations Try to Sell You, and How to Put Your Baby Before Their Bottom Line, writes that Dr. Rakic “concluded that all nonmedical use of ultrasound on pregnant women should be avoided.”

In her research, Margulis said, she discovered that “there is mounting evidence that overexposure to sound waves – or perhaps exposure to sound waves at a critical time during fetal development – is to blame for the astronomic rise in neurological disorders among America’s children.”

PROBLEMS WITH SOUND AND HEAT

A 2009 article in Scientific American by John Slocum explains that sonar (Sound Navigation And Ranging) systems, which were first developed by the U.S. Navy to detect enemy submarines, “generate slow-rolling sound waves topping out at around 235 decibels; the world’s loudest rock bands top out at only 130. These sound waves can travel for hundreds of miles under water, and can retain an intensity of 140 decibels as far as 300 miles from their source.”

This is relevant because many mass deaths and strandings of whales and dolphins have been attributed to the sonar waves emitted from Navy ships. Slocum writes that a successful 2003 lawsuit against the Navy brought by the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) to restrict the use of low-frequency sonar in waters rich in marine wildlife was upheld by two lower courts, but the Supreme Court “ruled that the Navy should be allowed to continue the use of some mid-frequency sonar testing for the sake of national security. “

There are hundreds if not thousands of cases that point to the dangers of sound waves. As many as 3,000 dead dolphins were found in Peru during the summer of 2012.  Researchers at the Organisation for the Conservation of Aquatic Animals (ORCA), a Peruvian marine animal conservation organisation, attributed the mass deaths to the use of deep water sonar by ships in nearby waters. In June of 2008, four days after a Navy helicopter was using controversial sonar equipment during training exercises off the Cornish coast in Great Britain, 26 dolphins died in a mass stranding.

Two quick questions: If sonar beams can kill fully-developed dolphins, what effect, then, do they have on the developing brains of in-utero embryos and fetuses? And why is this never discussed or debated or mentioned on TV broadcasts like the ones last week that reported the CDC’s latest and quite disastrous findings?

Getting back to those embryos and fetuses, Rodgers explains that an ultrasound used in fetal imaging emits short pulses of high-frequency sound waves that reflect off the tissues of the fetus, and the return echoes are converted into images. In addition to vibration, ultrasound waves can cause heating of the tissue and bone.”

“When the transducer from the ultrasound is positioned over the part of the fetus the operator is trying to visualize,” she continues, “the fetus may be feeling vibrations, heat or both.”

Rodgers then cites a warning the Food and Drug Administration issued in 2004: “…even at low levels, [ultrasound] laboratory studies have shown it can have…”jarring vibrations” – one study compared the noise to a subway coming into a station – “and a rise in temperature.”

Imagine how these assaults affect the developing brain of a fetus!

Just as concerning, as far back 1982, the World Health Organization’s (WHO) study, “Effects of Ultrasound on Biological Systems,” concluded that “…neurological, behavioral, developmental, immunological, hematological changes and reduced fetal weight can result from exposure to ultrasound.” Two years later, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) reported that when birth defects occurred, the acoustic output [of sonograms] was usually high enough to cause considerable heat.

And yet, in 1993, the FDA approved an eight-fold increase in the potential acoustical output of ultrasound equipment! Ostensibly, this increase was done to enhance better visualization of the heart and small vessels during microsurgery. Clearly, the health and well-being of developing fetuses was not a consideration!

“Can the fact that this increase in potential thermal effects happened during the same period of time the incidence of autism increased nearly 60-fold be merely coincidental?” Rodgers asks.

Pregnant women are always warned to avoid steam rooms and saunas, based on studies published in numerous prestigious journals in which an irrefutable relationship between elevated maternal temperature and the development of brain defects in their infants has been established.

Again, Rodgers asks the question every woman must be asking herself after hearing of the disastrous results of the new CDC study:

“Using common sense, why would anyone think that intruding upon the continuous, seamless development of the fetus, which has for millions of years completed its work without assistance, be without consequences?”

KEEPING THE HEAT ON (so to speak)

In October of 2010, Ms. Rodgers participated in a forum sponsored by the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. In PDF format, she presented a lecture about autism and ultrasound entitled “The Elephant in the Room,” which included the following information:

  • Worldwide autism boom identified by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) began with children born only 22 years ago in 1988-1989.
    • Since the FDA approved an allowable eightfold increase in acoustic output in the early ‘90s, only one prospective study has been undertaken. The study design did not expose fetuses to the first-trimester scans that are common today.
    • Ultrasound use and autism are more prevalent among higher socioeconomic groups.
    • Several studies have shown increased prevalence of autism among better-educated, more affluent communities. Women in these communities undoubtedly have health insurance and other resources to allow access to good nutrition, prenatal vitamins and excellent prenatal care, which, according to current practice, includes more ultrasound.

Autism surveys and studies have found the following groups of women are at higher risk of bearing children with autism:

  • Mothers who receive first-trimester care
  • Mothers with higher educations
  • Mothers with private health insurance
  • Older mothers

Rodgers concludes: Only increased exposure to prenatal ultrasound can explain all of the above.

Rodgers also elaborates on how things have changed since the FDA approved an eight-fold increase in the potential acoustical output of ultrasounds in 1993.

  • The number of ultrasound scans conducted during each pregnancy has increased, with women often receiving two or more scans even in low-risk situations
  • The development of the vaginal probe, which positions the beam of sound much closer to the embryo or fetus, may put it at higher risk
  • The use of Doppler ultrasound, which is used to study blood flow or to monitor the baby’s heartbeat, has increased. According to the 2006 Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, “routine Doppler ultrasound in pregnancy does not have health benefits for women or babies and may do some harm.”

Currently, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) are researching this issue in their Study to Explore Early Development (SEED).

There is a vast human tragedy – a true man-made disaster – taking place before our eyes.

For whatever reasons – follow the money? – the mountain of evidence that points to a causal relationship between prenatal ultrasound exams and an escalating pandemic of autism is being systematically ignored.

Could it have anything to do with the huge investments doctors and scientists have made in ultrasound technology, which, according to Jennifer Margulis, “adds more than $1 billion to the cost of caring for pregnant women in America each year”?

Could it have anything to do with the revenue now pouring like an avalanche into the coffers of diagnostic and treatment centers and classrooms?

Could it have anything to do with modern journalism’s almost complete abandonment of hard-nosed reporting and life-saving exposés?

As Caroline Rodgers said, there is an elephant in the room when it comes to the subject of autism – and that elephant is the worldwide blitzkrieg of ultrasound exams on pregnant women, exams that have bombarded the babies they’re carrying with the brain-warping sound waves and heat that will affect them every second of their autistic lives..

Related: 

A Genetic Clue to Why Autism Affects Boys More

83 percent of brain injury vaccine compensation payouts were for autism caused by vaccines 

Book Review and Giveaway: Make Your Worrier a Warrior by Dan Peters, PhD 

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