Death Doc Kermit Gosnell's Silent Co-Conspirators

Planned Parenthood now says it's "appalled" by the Philadelphia house of horrors run by accused serial baby-killer and pregnant-mom murderer Dr. Kermit Gosnell. Bull.

The appalling inaction of the nation's largest abortion provider, along with countless other clinics and "pro-choice" groups in the know, speaks far louder than their belatedly self-serving words.

The criminal trial of Gosnell is entering week six. The death doctor faces seven counts of first-degree murder for severing the spinal cords of babies born alive during abortions. That's in addition to one count of third-degree murder in the death of Karnamaya Mongar, a 41-year-old Bhutanese refugee who died of a monstrously negligent drug overdose at Gosnell's "Women's Medical Society" clinic. Her family has brought a separate civil suit against Gosnell.

Conservative and pro-life journalists have covered the gruesome case since Gosnell's arrest more than two years ago. Through social media, last week faithful chroniclers of this evil killing spree finally forced national outlets to acknowledge their selective attention to mass murder. While mainstream journalists flogged partisan story lines about the GOP's "war on women," turned birth control crusader Sandra Fluke into the nation's Florence Nightingale and splashed the photos of Sandy Hook children all over their front pages, the mostly poor and minority women and babies victimized by Gosnell went ignored.

The liberal Atlantic Magazine admitted last week: It "should be a front-page story." After a relentless Twitter campaign by pro-lifers, The New York Times grudgingly sent a reporter to the trial. But this is so much more than a media malpractice story. It's the nightmarish consequence of medical and ideological malpractice.

As I first noted in my column and on my blog when the scissors-wielding sadist was arrested in January 2011, the murders committed under the banner of "choice" were ignored for four decades by abortion advocates. The Philadelphia grand jury report, now amplified by trial testimony, outlined the systematic execution of hundreds of healthy, living, breathing, squirming viable babies. The panel concluded that the "vast majority of the babies he aborted" were more than 24 weeks old.

Gosnell joked that one murdered baby was so big, the child "could walk around with me."

On Wednesday, clinic worker Kareema Cross said she witnessed between 10 and 15 babies breathing after being delivered by patients who had received labor-inducing drugs. After their spinal cords were cut, Cross recalled babies still moaning and moving after being stuffed in shoeboxes. Their skulls would be crushed after delivery. Their feet and other body parts ended up in row upon row of specimen jars on display in Gosnell's filthy facility.

Gosnell's silent co-conspirators include the abortion clinics in Virginia and Washington, D.C., that referred Mongar and her family, who spoke no English, to his clinic because of its widespread reputation for doing abortions "regardless of gestational age." They also include the left-wing religious and immigrant community activists who "assist" refugees by hooking them up with government-funded "affordable reproductive health services," a.k.a. abortion mills.

Patients were "treated" by unlicensed incompetents, including a young girl groomed from her teenage years. The late-term mothers' wombs and bowels were perforated with infected instruments. Government inspectors "literally licensed Gosnell's criminally dangerous behavior," the Philly grand jury found. The Pennsylvania Department of State was "repeatedly confronted with evidence about Gosnell" — including the clinic's unclean, unsterile conditions, unlicensed workers, unsupervised sedation, underage abortion patients and over-prescribing of pain pills with high resale value on the street — "and repeatedly chose to do nothing."

As I noted in 2011, nearby hospital officials who treated some of the pregnant mothers who suffered grave complications from Gosnell's butchery did nothing. And an inspector for the National Abortion Federation, the leading association of abortion providers that is supposed to uphold strict health and legal standards, determined that Gosnell's chamber of horrors was "the worst abortion clinic she had ever inspected" — but did nothing.

Gosnell's enablers have concocted all sorts of excuses for themselves. The billion-dollar abortion racket says "lack of funding" and "access" to "health care" is the real problem. But expanding "access" is exactly how Gosnell got away with murder after bloody murder. As the grand jury revealed, pro-choice bureaucrats in liberal GOP Gov. Tom Ridge's administration concluded that increased inspections "would be 'putting a barrier up to women' seeking abortions. Better to leave clinics to do as they pleased, even though, as Gosnell proved, that meant both women and babies would pay."

Gosnell's enablers also claim that his case is a grisly exception. But I repeat: Deadly indifference to protecting life isn't tangential to the abortion industry's existence — it's at the core of it. In the past few years alone, Dr. Andrew Rutland of California and Dr. Steven Brigham in Maryland had their medical licenses revoked after their late-term abortion mills were exposed. Like Gosnell, Rutland killed an Asian woman after administering a drug overdose during a late-term abortion procedure. Like Gosnell, Brighamstored the bodies of late-term fetuses in freezers.

Just this week, the state of Delaware announced an investigation of several Planned Parenthood clinics after botched abortions and the resignations of two registered nurses who witnessed malpractice. Surgical abortions have been halted at one of the facilities. "What I believe should happen is that Planned Parenthood should no longer be self-regulated," Joyce Vasikonis told The News Journal.

Even as it disavows Gosnell's "criminal enterprise," Planned Parenthood's lobbyist in Florida officially testified three weeks ago that the group believes the decision to save a baby born alive after a botched abortion "should be left up to the woman, her family and the physician."

The sanctity of "privacy" and "choice" trumps the sanctity of life, you see. It's how all abortion profiteers get away with murder.

By Michelle Malkin - author of "Culture of Corruption Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks and Cronies" (Regnery 2010). Her e-mail address is malkinblog@gmail.com.

COPYRIGHT 2013 CREATORS.COM

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Why Dr. Kermit Gosnell's Trial Should Be a Front-Page Story ...

Unmourned, Unloved and Politically Inconvenient

Networks Give Rutgers Scandal 41 Minutes, Gosnell Abortion Horrors ‘0’

Charles Krauthammer Says Media Avoiding Abortion Doctor Murder Trial because of what it Reveals about Abortion in America

Official: Inconvenient For Babies To Be Kept Alive After Botched Abortion

Planned Parenthood’s Roots

New Live Action video shows Planned Parenthood encouraging gender-selective abortion, Medicaid fraud

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Technorati Tags: Dr. Kermit Gosnell,abortion,murder,torture,choices,Life is a Gift,abortion clinics,pro-choice,pro-life,babies,Planned Parenthood,watch the other hand,Christianity,Life,abortion survivors,liberal media,MSM

Obama’s Electronic Medical Records Scam

By Michelle Malkin • December 14, 2012 09:18 AM

by Michelle Malkin  -  Creators Syndicate

Here’s more evidence that government “cures” are inevitably worse than the “diseases” they seek to wipe out. Buried in the trillion-dollar stimulus law of 2009 was an electronic medical records “incentive” program. Like most of President Obama’s health care rules, this top-down electronic record-sharing scheme is a big fat bust.

Oversight is lax. Cronyism is rife. The job-killing and privacy-undermining consequences have only just begun.

The program was originally sold as a cost-saving measure. In theory, modernizing record-collection is a good idea, and many private health care providers have already made the change. But as with many government “incentive” programs, the EMR bribe is a tax-subsidized, one-size-fits-all mandate. This one pressures health care professionals and hospitals across the country into radically federalizing their patient data and opening up medical information to untold abuse. Penalties kick in for any provider that hasn’t switched over by 2014.

So, what’s it to you? Well, $4 billion has already gone out to 82,535 professionals and 1,474 hospitals, and a total of $6 billion will be doled out by 2016. But the feds’ reckless profligacy, neglect and favoritism have done more harm than good.

Don’t take my word for it. A recent report released by the Department of Health and Human Services Inspector General acknowledged that the incentive system is “vulnerable to paying incentives to professionals and hospitals that do not fully meet” the program’s quality assurance requirements. The federal health bureaucracy “has not implemented strong prepayment safeguards, and its ability to safeguard incentive payments postpayment is also limited,” the IG concluded.

Translation: No one is actually verifying whether the transition from paper to electronic is improving patient outcomes and health services. No one is actually guarding against GIGO (garbage in, garbage out). No one is checking whether recipients of the EMR incentives are receiving money redundantly (e.g., raking in payments when they’ve already converted to electronic records). No one is actually protecting private data from fraud, abuse or exploitation.

Little is being done to recoup ill-gotten payments. In any case, such “pay and chase” policing after the fact is a crummy way to run government in lean times — or in fat times, for that matter.

As for the claim that the EMR conversion will reduce paperwork, many doctors say the reality is just the opposite. In Greensboro, N.C., Dr. Richard Aronson told local TV station FOX 8 that the mandate doubled the amount of paperwork in his private practice. Everyone from optometrists to general practitioners to chiropractors to podiatrists must divert precious time and resources to conforming with Washington health bureaucrats’ imposed vision. Some medical professionals are now warning that the dangerous phenomenon of “distracted doctoring” is on the rise as a result of data-driven imperatives that direct health care providers’ attention away from their patients and onto their screens and hand-held devices.

You know who is benefiting from the initiative? Put on your shocked faces: Obama donors and cronies.

Billionaire Judith Faulkner, Obama’s medical information czar and a major Democratic contributor, just happens to be the founder and CEO of Epic Systems — a medical software company that stores nearly 40 percent of the U.S. population’s health data. Another billion-dollar patient-record database grant program has doled out money to the University of Chicago Medical Center (where first lady Michelle Obama and senior adviser Valerie Jarrett both served in high-paid positions). As I’ve previously reported, these administration grants circumvent any and all congressional deliberation as part of Team Obama’s election-year “We Can’t Wait” initiatives.

Even as the White House touted the move toward gee-whiz 21st-century electronic databases, health care professionals in the know have debunked that claim, too. Companies like Faulkner’s, which lobbied loudest for the mandates and “incentives,” represent traditional hard drive-dependent software firms that are already dated. As Athenahealth Chairman and CEO Jonathan Bush, who advocates cloud-computing alternatives, put it: The Obama electronic records mandate is “healthcare information technology’s version of cash-for-clunkers.”

Then there’s the still-growing and untold number of doctors nationwide who are closing up shop or limiting their practices and converting to “concierge care” to escape this and myriad other Obamacare intrusions. My own primary care physician in Colorado Springs quit her regular practice and converted to “concierge care” because of the EMR imposition. Creve Coeur, Mo., doctor Shari Cohen made the same move.

“The demands of caring for my patients while navigating through the current health care delivery systems dictated that I take more and more time away from patient care and spend an increasing part of my day on the system itself,” she told the Creve Couer Patch. “Electronic Medical Records was the final shove for me. It added another whole layer in interference in the doctor-patient relationship and one I was not sure I wanted to take on.”

More paperwork. More waste. Less accountability. Less care. Government malpractice at work.

Technorati Tags: ObamaCare,electronic medical records,scams,Michelle Malkin,ObamaCare costs

The Expanding Catalogue of Obamacare Fables

Is there a health insurance horror story disseminated by the White House and its allies that ever turned out to be true? Obamacare advocates have exercised more artistic license than a convention of Photoshoppers. Now, a prominent sob story shilled by President Obama himself about his own mother is in doubt. It's high past time to call their bluffs.

The tall-tale-teller-in-chief cited mom Stanley Ann Dunham's deathbed fight with her insurer several times over the years to support his successful push to ban pre-existing condition exclusions by insurers. In a typical recounting, Obama shared his personalized trauma during a 2008 debate: "For my mother to die of cancer at the age of 53 and have to spend the last months of her life in the hospital room arguing with insurance companies because they're saying that this may be a pre-existing condition and they don't have to pay her treatment, there's something fundamentally wrong about that."

But there was something fundamentally wrong with Obama's story. In a recently published biography of Obama's mother, author and New York Times reporter Janny Scott discovered that Dunham's health insurer had in fact reimbursed her medical expenses with nary an objection. The actual coverage dispute centered on a separate disability insurance policy.

Channeling document forger Dan Rather's "fake, but accurate" defense, a White House spokesman insisted to the Times that the anecdote somehow still "speaks powerfully to the impact of pre-existing condition limits on insurance protection from health care costs" -- even though Dunham's primary health insurer did everything it was supposed to do and met all its contractual obligations.

No matter. Expanding government control over health care means never having to say you're sorry for impugning private insurers. Democrats have dragged every available human shield into the contentious debate over Obama's federal takeover of health care. Personal anecdotes of dying family members battling evil insurance execs deflect attention from the cost, constitutionality and liberty-curtailing consequences of the law. The president's Dunham sham-ecdote is just the latest entry in an ever-expanding catalogue of Obamacare fables:

-- Otto Raddatz. In 2009, Obama publicized the plight of this Illinois cancer patient, who supposedly died after he was dropped from his Fortis/Assurant Health insurance plan when his insurer discovered an unreported gallstone the patient hadn't known about. The truth? He got the treatment he needed in 2005 and lived for nearly four more years.

-- Robin Beaton. Also in 2009, Obama claimed Beaton -- a breast cancer patient -- lost her insurance after "she forgot to declare a case of acne." In fact, she failed to disclose a previous heart condition and did not list her weight accurately, but had her insurance restored anyway after intense public lobbying.

-- John Brodniak. A 23-year-old unemployed Oregon sawmill worker, Brodniak's health woes were spotlighted by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof as a textbook argument for Obamacare. Brodniak was reportedly diagnosed with cavernous hemangioma, a neurological condition, and was allegedly turned away by emergency room doctors. Kristof called the case "monstrous" and decried opponents of Democrats' health care proposals as heartless murderers. The truth? Brodniak not only had coverage through Oregon's Medicaid program, but was also a neurology patient at the prestigious Oregon Health and Science University in Portland (a safety-net institution that accepts all Medicaid patients). Kristof never retracted the legend.

-- Marcelas Owens. An 11-year-old boy from Seattle, Owens took a coveted spot next to the president in March 2010 when Obamacare was signed into law. Owens' 27-year-old mother, Tiffany, died of pulmonary hypertension. The family said the single mother of three lost her job as a fast-food manager and lost her insurance. She died in 2007 after receiving emergency care and treatment throughout her illness. Progressive groups (for whom Marcelas' relatives worked) dubbed Marcelas an "insurance abuse survivor." But there wasn't a shred of evidence that any insurer had "abused" the boy or his mom. Further, Washington State already offered a plethora of existing government assistance programs to laid-off and unemployed workers like Marcelas' mom. The family and its p.r. agents never explained why she didn't enroll.

-- Natoma Canfield. The White House made the Ohio cancer patient a poster child for Obamacare in 2010 after she wrote a letter complaining about skyrocketing premiums and the prospect of losing her home. After Obama gave Canfield a shout-out at a health care rally in Strongsville, Ohio, and promised to control costs, officials at the renowned Cleveland Clinic, which is treating her, made clear that they would "not put a lien on her home" and that she was eligible for a wide variety of state aid and private charity care.

Since Obamacare passed, the amount workers pay in health care premiums has soared an average of nearly 14 percent; thousands of businesses have sought waivers in search of relief from the law's onerous mandates; medical device makers have slashed jobs and research; and the private individual health insurance market is in critical condition. Post-Obamacare truth is bloodier than pro-Obamacare fiction.

By Michelle Malkin Posted on TownHall

Related:

Turns Out Obama’s Story About His Mother’s HealthCare Struggle Is Inaccurate