The Twisted Morality of Death Panels

Posted By Walter Hudson On October 23, 2013 @ 9:00 am In Aging,Canada,Culture,Death,Economics,Evil,Family,Obamacare,Socialism | 19 Comments

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Canada has death panels – and that’s a good thing. So reads a headline at Slate, where author Adam Goldenberg defends letting a government committee intervene in healthcare to decide who lives and who dies.

The death panel Goldenberg refers to is Ontario’s Consent and Capacity Board, a unique institution among Canada’s jurisdictions which holds the legal authority to supersede healthcare decisions made by next of kin when a patient lays incapacitated.

The Supreme Court of Canada recently ruled in favor of a family seeking to sustain the life of Hassan Rasouli, who fell victim to complications from brain surgery and has remained comatose for three years. Goldenberg writes:

In Canada, with our single-payer health care system, Rasouli’s situation has a very public bottom line: Should taxpayers foot the bill for his family’s indefinite goodbye?
But American critics of Canadian health care will declare that merely asking this question is unacceptable, unethical, even unthinkable—and that it proves that the Canadian system gives doctors a dangerous incentive to kill off their patients as quickly as possible. They are wrong. The Hippocratic Oath’s promise to do no harm still applies. But they are also only wrong in part. When taxpayers provide only a finite number of acute care beds in public hospitals, a patient whose life has all but ended, but whose family insists on keeping her on life support, is occupying precious space that might otherwise house a patient whose best years are still ahead.
The incentives in the American health care system point in the opposite direction. In the United States, keeping an all-but-dead patient alive on life support in a hospital bed generates income for the hospital, for as long as its bills get paid.

Everything wrong with the Left’s view of economics, morality, and healthcare in particular can be observed in that passage. Goldenberg’s analysis ignores any consideration of individual rights.

The Canadian government manufactures Goldenberg’s “public bottom line” by exceeding its rightful role in the first place. Should taxpayers foot the bill for the Rasouli family’s indefinite goodbye? Of course not, because taxpayers shouldn’t foot the bill in any case. Canada’s single-payer system violates the rights of individuals by forcing them to pay for the healthcare of others while prohibiting them from seeking any care for themselves not offered under public subsidy. The Canadian government thus creates the circumstances which lead to Rasouli taking up a hospital bed on the public dole. In sails Goldenberg, building a case for pulling the plug, citing those conditions as if they were a natural occurrence.

Why should we take any comfort in the Hippocratic Oath while the fundamental moral principle of individual rights goes unrecognized? If the imperative of the Canadian system was truly “to do no harm,” it would not deprive individuals of their natural means to pursue their best interests – choice.

Choice of action defines individuality. The interaction of many individuals making choices in an unfettered market results in the most efficient allocation of resources possible, because individuals will always seek the highest value at the lowest cost. When Goldenberg bemoans how the market allocates resources, as he does when scoffing at Americans keeping their “all-but-dead” loved ones on life support, he reveals his disdain of individual rights and his resentment of an individual left free to pursue his own values.

It is inappropriate, in Goldenberg’s view, for a family to value their loved one’s life above the life of a stranger who might otherwise occupy the same bed. To correct that, someone needs to intervene. Later in his piece, Goldenberg uses the word “wise” in reference to the Canadian death panel. That’s how he views it. Family members cannot be trusted to make wise decisions on their own. Rather, they must defer to “experts,” whose judgment won’t be clouded by little things like familial love and natural affection. Merely proposing such an arrangement places the “expert” values of a death panel above those conceived by individuals. Like all property in a leftist worldview, medical resources should be allocated according to a ruler’s determination of need, not mutual consent among freemen.

This is the crux of the healthcare fight, which can be extrapolated to every public policy debate. Who decides? Leaving decisions about the allocation of resources to individuals in a free market offends the Left, because market values invalidate their worldview. We learn through the market that a master’s degree in oboe performance has lesser value than a certificate from a trade school. Such discrimination simply cannot be tolerated. A young student who wants to spend eight years pursuing women’s studies cannot have her choice demeaned by a misogynistic market. Something has to be done. Wisdom must be imposed!
Likewise, as Goldenberg plainly states, a family paying a hospital to keep their “all-but-dead” loved one alive cannot be tolerated. Such valuations should not be up to plebeian family members. Wise rulers must intervene.

In advocating for death panels, Goldenberg also reveals how the Left views the judiciary. Rather than as arbiters of law protecting individual rights, Goldenberg views judges as rulers who properly make decisions for us. Goldenberg writes:

Ontario’s Consent and Capacity Board provides an objective process for resolving these difficult, end-of-life dilemmas. The board is instructed by law to focus on the patient’s best interests, not the health care system’s, or the government’s bottom line. Still, the law recognizes that, though it is usually in the patient’s best interests to be kept alive, it is not always so. As Rasouli’s doctors told the Supreme Court, prolonging his life would entail the risk of infection, bedsores, and organ failure. When recovery is out of the question, in other words, there may be fates worse than death.
Yet, the question remains: Who decides? Remember that, outside of Ontario, the resolution of these end-of-life disputes is generally reserved for judges. Ontario has simply replaced them with experts and wise community members. That’s a lead other jurisdictions should consider following when families’ emotions and doctors’ judgments collide.

Goldenberg bowls over a crucial distinction. When a judge rules in a dispute, he determines which party in the case has a legal claim. The Consent and Capacity Board does something entirely different. Rather than determine who gets to decide, the death panel takes the decision upon themselves, superseding all other claims. It is as absurd as a judge ruling against both the plaintiff and the defendant and claiming disputed property for himself.

The question of who decides can only be properly answered by an objective consideration of individual rights. Families, being composed of individuals entitled to trade value for value, may decide to spend every dime they have to keep a loved one alive. Hospitals, being corporate entities representing the joint interests of several individuals, may decide whether to accept or reject fees for service. Any deviation from that violates individual rights. The violation which is Canada’s single-payer system does not justify the further violation of a death panel. Instead, coercion ought to be removed from the system so the best interests of all parties can be determined through reason and by consent.

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Obamacare's Magical Thinkers

Not even the coolest president ever can conjure up a national medical regime for 300 million people. 

By Mark Steyn

http://www.nationalreview.com/

October 25, 2013

If you’re looking for an epitaph for the republic (and these days who isn’t?) try this — from August 2010 and TechCrunch’s delirious preview of Healthcare.gov:

“We were working in a very very nimble hyper-consumer-focused way,” explained Todd Park, the chief technology officer of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, “all fused in this kind of maelstrom of pizza, Mountain Dew, and all-nighters . . . and, you know, idealism. That kind of led to the magic that was produced.”

Wow. Think of the magic that Madison, Hamilton, and the rest of those schlubs could have produced if they’d only had pizza and Mountain Dew and been willing to pull a few all-nighters at Philadelphia in 1787. Somewhere between the idealism and the curling slice of last night’s pepperoni, Macon Phillips, the administration’s director of new media, happened to come across a tweet by Edward Mullen of Jersey City in which he twitpiced his design for what a health-insurance exchange could look like. So Phillips printed it out to show his fellow administration officials: “Look, this is the sort of creativity that is out there,” he said. “One thing led to another and he left Jersey City to come to D.C. and helped push us through an information architectural process.”

Don’t you just love it! This is way cooler than the decline and fall of the Roman Empire: The only “architectural process” they had was crumbling viaducts. I think we can all agree that Barack Obama is hipper than all other government leaders anywhere, ever, combined. Unfortunately, the dogs bark and the pizza-delivery bike moves on, and, in the cold grey morning after of the grease-stained cardboard box with the rubberized cheese stuck to it, Obamacare wound up somewhat less hipper and, in fact, not even HIPAA — the unpersuasively groovy acronym for federally mandated medical privacy in America. Appearing before Congress on Thursday, the magicians of Obamacare eventually conceded that, on their supposedly HIPAA-compliant database, deep in the “information architectural process” is a teensy-weensy little bit of “source code” that reads, “You have no reasonable expectation of privacy regarding any communication of any data transmitted or stored on this information system.”

Democrat members of the House committee professed to be bewildered at why anyone would be either surprised or upset to discover that his information can be shared with anyone in the federal government, including a corrupt and diseased IRS that uses what confidential information it can acquire to torment perceived ideological enemies. And at a certain level the more blasé of the people’s representatives such as New Jersey’s Frank Pallone have a point: If Obama thinks nothing of tapping Angela Merkel’s cell phone (as she had cause to complain to him on Wednesday, in what was said to be a “cool” conversation, and not in the hepcat sense), why would he extend any greater privacy rights to your Auntie Mabel?

Incidentally, do you think we need a congressional oversight committee to look into the effectiveness of congressional oversight committees? Every time I’m stuck at Gate 37 and glance up at the 24/7 Wolf Blitzer channel there’s somebody testifying about something: Benghazi . . . Lois Lerner . . . Obamacare . . . No one gets fired, no agency gets closed, nothing changes.

The witness who coughed up the intriguing tidbit about Obamacare’s exemption from privacy protections was one Cheryl Campbell of something called CGI. This rang a vague bell with me. CGI is not a creative free spirit from Jersey City with an impressive mastery of Twitter, but a Canadian corporate behemoth. Indeed, CGI is so Canadian their name is French: Conseillers en Gestion et Informatique. Their most famous government project was for the Canadian Firearms Registry. The registry was estimated to cost in total $119 million, which would be offset by $117 million in fees. That’s a net cost of $2 million. Instead, by 2004 the CBC (Canada’s PBS) was reporting costs of some $2 billion — or a thousand times more expensive.

Yeah, yeah, I know, we’ve all had bathroom remodelers like that. But in this case the database had to register some 7 million long guns belonging to some two-and-a-half to three million Canadians. That works out to almost $300 per gun — or somewhat higher than the original estimate for processing a firearm registration of $4.60. Of those $300 gun registrations, Canada’s auditor general reported to parliament that much of the information was either duplicated or wrong in respect to basic information such as names and addresses.

Sound familiar?

Also, there was a 1-800 number, but it wasn’t any use.

Sound familiar?

So it was decided that the sclerotic database needed to be improved.

Sound familiar?

But it proved impossible to “improve” CFIS (the Canadian Firearms Information System). So CGI was hired to create an entirely new CFIS II, which would operate alongside CFIS I until the old system could be scrapped. CFIS II was supposed to go operational on January 9, 2003, but the January date got postponed to June, and 2003 to 2004, and $81 million was thrown at it before a new Conservative government scrapped the fiasco in 2007. Last year, the government of Ontario canceled another CGI registry that never saw the light of day — just for one disease, diabetes, and costing a mere $46 million.

But there’s always America! “We continue to view U.S. federal government as a significant growth opportunity,” declared CGI’s chief exec, in what would also make a fine epitaph for the republic. Pizza and Mountain Dew isn’t very Montreal, and on the evidence of three years of missed deadlines in Ontario and the four-year overrun on the firearms database CGI don’t sound like they’re pulling that many all-nighters. Was the government of the United States aware that CGI had been fired by the government of Canada and the government of Ontario (and the government of New Brunswick)? Nobody’s saying. But I doubt it would make much difference. Asked by Mother Jones to explain why Obama the candidate uses the Internet so effectively but Obama the government is a bust, his 2008 tech maestro Clay Johnson put it this way: “The first person that you need in order to start a Web company would be a Web developer; the first person you need to start a government-contracting firm is an attorney.” The problem with Obamacare isn’t the website design, it’s the nature of government procurement in an unaccountable bureaucracy serving 300 million people.

Despite the best efforts of President Obama and doting tweeters in Jersey City, government isn’t groovy. The standard rap on Obamacare is that it’s turned America’s health system into the DMV. If only. I had cause to go to the DMV in Twin Mountain, N.H., the other day. In and out in ten minutes. Modest accommodations, a little down-at-heel, nothing cool about it at all. But it worked just fine. Friendly chap, no complaints. Government can do that at the town level, county level, even (more sparingly) at the state level.

But a national medical regime for 300 million people? Not in a First World country. And, when you’re mad enough to try it, the failure is not the insignificant enrollment numbers, but the vaporization of the existing health plans of 119,000 Pennsylvanians, 160,000 Californians, 300,000 Floridians, 800,000 in that tech tweeter’s New Jersey . . . That’s the magic that happens when you disdain the limits of prosaic, humdrum, just-about-functioning government. Perhaps things will get so bad the coolest president ever will no longer seem quite so hip. But, alas, you’ll have to wait three years for a hip replacement. That’s government health care for you. 

— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2013 Mark Steyn

ObamaCare Takes on Water

It's not just a buggy website, it's a disaster of Titanic proportions.

By Peggy Noonan

http://online.wsj.com

October 24, 2013

We should not lose The Headline in the day-to-day headlines. This is big history, not small. The ObamaCare rollout is a disaster for the White House, not a problem or a challenge or an embarrassment, not a gaffe or a bad few weeks. It is a political disaster, and the only question is whether it is partially recoverable, meaning the system can be made to work in a generally satisfactory way in the next few weeks. But—it has to be repeated—they had 3½ years after passage of the Affordable Care Act to make the program into something the American people could register for and feel they were benefiting from. Three and a half years! They had a long-declared start date: It would all go live Oct. 1, 2013, and everyone in the government, every contractor and consultant, knew it. The president put the meaning of his presidency into the program—it informally carries his name, it is his brand. It was unveiled with great fanfare, and it didn't work. For almost anybody. Crashed systems, frozen screens, phone registration that prompted you back to the site that sent you to the 800 number, like a high-tech Möbius strip.

All this from the world's greatest, most technologically sophisticated nation, the one that invented the computer and the Internet. And from a government that is able to demand and channel a great deal of the people's wealth.

So you'd think it would sort of work. And it didn't. Which is a disaster.

Even though it's huge, and those who are reporting the story every day are, by and large, seasoned and have seen a few things, no one seems to know how it will end. Because it's new territory. Does anyone believe the whole technological side can be fixed quickly? No. The president may eventually accept a brief delay in implementation—it is almost unbelievable that he will not—but does anyone think that the economics of the ACA, the content as set out and expressed on the sites, will flow smoothly, coherently, and fully satisfy the objectives of expanding health-insurance coverage while lowering its cost? You might believe that, but early reports of sticker shock, high deductibles and cancelled coverage are not promising. Does anyone think the president will back off and delay the program for enough time not only to get the technological side going but seriously improve the economics? No. So we're not only in the middle of a political disaster, we're in the middle of a mystery. What happens if this whole thing continues not to work? What do we do then?

It hardly matters if anyone is fired. That's the fifth paragraph in the Wikipedia history, or the 10th. Yes, a firing would be good democratic form, and it would acknowledge the idea of accountability—someone or some persons failed on a historic level and were removed. It would take some heat off the White House—"Look, we're doing something!"—so it's surprising they haven't done it and odd the Republicans are clamoring for it. But who would want to be the new HHS secretary? Who would take that job?

Enlarge Image

Martin Kozlowski

It was Bill Daley—accomplished political player, former commerce secretary and, most killingly, former chief of staff of President Obama, who Thursday, on "CBS This Morning," admitted the scale of the problem. Asked whether Kathleen Sebelius should be fired, he said: "To me that's kind of like firing Captain Smith on the Titanic after it hit the iceberg."

The Titanic. Some will see his comments as disloyal. Actually they were candid and realistic. Although in fairness, the Titanic at least had three good days, and Edward Smith chose to go down with the ship.

He didn't deny the waters were icy; he failed to slow his ship, failed to show heightened concern. Mrs. Sebelius did not show overwhelming confidence in the days before the debut—there was no "God himself couldn't sink this program." She repeated her lines in a way that seemed almost furtive, appearing not confident but confused, and almost guiltily stubborn. Her message was almost always the same: There are no icebergs ahead.

Norman Ornstein in National Journal this week reminds us of Democratic Sen. Max Baucus's iceberg warning—actually "train wreck"—at a hearing six months ago, in April. He warned implementation of ObamaCare could be a disaster. He told Mrs. Sebelius: "I understand you've hired a contractor. I'm just worried that that's going to be money down the drain because contractors like to make money more than they like to do anything else. That's their job." A lot of agencies are involved, he said, people are going to get confused, more simplicity is needed.

He was right. I happened to reread his warning while the House Energy and Commerce Committee questioned the four major contractors on the ObamaCare sites. The most pertinent query came from Rep. Marsha Blackburn, who asked the contractors to put on paper, and under oath, exactly how much money they had made from the federal government so far, and exactly how much they stand to make now, as they fix the sites, and in the future.

There are more questions on the failure to launch. Did Mrs. Sebelius and her top staffers know that the system was not ready and likely to fail? If they knew, did they not tell the White House? If they didn't know, how did it happen that they didn't? If the White House knew of the likelihood of a coming failure, why did they go full steam ahead? And if they didn't know, why?

Was there some degree of fabulism, or magical thinking, or reliance on blind luck within the White House and the greater administration? Many important people in the administration, and those contracting with it from the outside, would have had to ignore various signs of a coming failure. Did some of them know or have reason to know problems were both present and coming, and mislead or fail to inform their peers or superiors?

And there is the enduring mystery of why the president, who in his career has attempted to persuade the American people to have greater faith in and reliance on the federal government's ability to help, continues to go forward with an astounding lack of interest in the reputation of government.

He talks but he doesn't implement, never makes it work. He allows the IRS under his watch to be humiliated by scandal, waste, ill judgements prompted by ideological assumptions. He allows his signature program, the one that will make his name in the history books, to debut in failure. In response he says bland, rounded words that leave you wondering what just got said.

We're all reading of Jack Kennedy. He stayed up nights with self-recrimination after failure. "How could I have been so stupid?" he asked about the Bay of Pigs. A foreseeable mistake and he'd blown it, listened to the wrong people, made the wrong judgments. That man suffered over his missteps. He worried about his reputation, and the reputation of his government, and of America.

It is disorienting to not see this in a president. It is another thing about this story that feels not only historic, but historically strange.

The Mean Grace of Flannery O'Connor

http://acatholicthinker.wordpress.com

October 17, 2013

“All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.”

- Flannery O’Connor

     I didn’t care for it the first time I read it. No – let me rephrase that. The first time I read it, I was repulsed by it. Flannery O’Connor’s writing had been recommended to me from a close friend. A southern Catholic fiction writer, Mary Flannery O’Connor lived with her mother, raised peacocks while writing two novels and just over two dozen short stories.   It would be forty-five years after her death that I found myself reading her iconic and harrowing short story, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”.

     But don’t let the title of her stories, the bespectacled innocence of her photograph, or the reclusive, respectable life she led in the home with her mother fool you. Flannery O’Connor’s writing could be downright vicious and raw. Her characters are often crude, unkempt and ill-educated. Bereft of redeeming qualities and brimming with flaws, it is easy to repelled by them and the path their lives are taking. And yet, with writing that is so vivid, so animated, so…real, it is difficult to release yourself from its grip. So it is at this time, with her reader duly ensnared, that Flannery unleashes her power. In the case of “A Good Man is Hard to Find” (spoiler alert…), Flannery stuns with the slaughter of a thoughtlessly chattering grandmother and her family by a fugitive killer known as the Misfit. It hit me right between the eyes – and, frankly, I didn’t like it. Gratuitous violence. Irredeemable characters. Pointless plot. I was not impressed.

     That said, it was in 2008 that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was interviewed by Lesley Stahl on 60 Minutes. Justice Scalia relayed a high school anecdote that has stuck with me since I first heard it.

“I have – one teacher I remember was an elderly Jesuit at Xavier (high school in New York City) from Boston. He had a Boston accent. Father Tom Matthews, and he taught me a lesson that I’ve recounted in some of my speeches. He taught me what I refer to as the Shakespeare principle.

The class was reading one of the Shakespeare plays, ‘Hamlet’ or whatever, and one of my classmates or whatever, sort of smart aleck kid, John Antonelli, as I recall. It’s ridiculous I would remember his name. But [John] made some really smart aleck sophomoric criticism of the play, and Father Matthews looked down at him and he said, with his Boston accent, ‘Mister, when you read Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s not on trial. You are.’”

     And so it was for me and Flannery O’Connor. As I read her work, Flannery O’Connor was not on trial. I was. Sheepishly, I have to admit that I had similarly grossly misjudged the great G.K. Chesterton in the past (see my previous post “Finding My Way to Orthodoxy” http://acatholicthinker.wordpress.com/2012/11/22/finding-my-way-to-orthodoxy/). The work of Flannery O’Connor could be harsh, violent and discomfiting. And yet it is also thick with truth, grace and redemption. To the superficial reader, a yarn filled with unattractive figures on ill-fated endeavors may be all that is perceived. But to those willing to consider her work more deeply, powerful themes of deeply religious truths become apparent. Perhaps the greatest and most pervasive of these truths in Flannery’s stories is the pain, suffering and “meanness” that often accompanies the beautiful grace of God.

     But how is it that I came to the realization of the depth and quality of this once-scorned (by me) writer? First, conversations with my good friend kindly encouraged me that I may be wrong in my initial dislike of Flannery. Effectively, he reminded me that Flannery is not on trial – I am. Second, reading the writings of Flannery in the form of a posthumously published collection of correspondence titled “The Habit of Being” captivated me. These letters to friends and associates, never intended by the author to be released, are a masterpiece of deep thinking, religious conviction and endearing wit. Without pretense or puffery, Flannery shows a clarity of thought on the most human of concerns that is gripping in its sage-like quality. Particularly impressive to me is her insight on suffering and grace – not only how it figured into “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, but how it figures into our every day life. When Flannery O’Connor explains her novel, I am interested. When she explains her faith, I am entranced. On suffering and grace, she writes,

“I think there is no suffering greater than what is caused by the doubts of those who want to believe. I know what torment this is, but I can only see it, in myself anyway, as the process by which faith is deepened. A faith that just accepts is a child’s faith and all right for children, but eventually you have to grow religiously as every other way, though some never do. What people don’t realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross. It is much harder to believe than not to believe. If you feel you can’t believe, you must at least do this: keep an open mind. Keep it open toward faith, keep wanting it, keep asking for it, and leave the rest to God.”

“This notion that grace is healing omits the fact that before it heals, it cuts with the sword Christ said He came to bring.”

  “[The trendy "beat" writers] call themselves holy but holiness costs and so far as I can see they pay nothing. It’s true that grace is the free gift of God but in order to put yourself in the way of being receptive to it you have to practice self-denial.”

And when explaining (what I considered incomprehensible) “A Good Man is Hard to Find” to a friend,

“There is a moment of grace in most of the stories, or a moment where it is offered, and usually rejected. Like when the Grandmother recognizes the Misfit as one of her children (a child of God) and reaches out to touch him. It’s the moment of grace for her anyway – a silly old woman – but it leads him to shoot her. This moment of grace excites the devil to frenzy.”

     The frequent pairing of suffering and grace was captured in a moment between a violent Misfit and a cackling old woman. Suddenly, what I failed to understand became clear and the story had a significant impact on me. After all, aren’t the greatest stories we encounter in our Faith ones riddled with suffering (the taunting of Noah, the slavery of Moses, the guilty infidelity and murder perpetrated by David, the lonely pregnancy of Mary and the Passion of the Christ) and subsequent grace (the deliverance of the Ark, the arrival at the Promised Land, the redemption of David, the Assumption of Mary and the Resurrection and Reign of Christ)? And yet, so often while the suffering is painfully apparent, we often are blind to moments of extreme and beautiful grace in our faith and in our lives. These are moments which Flannery O’Connor shares with us again and again.

     One last question may be posed before a person would embark upon reading the raw and challenging works of Flannery O’Connor. What did she know about suffering and grace? At the age of twenty-six, Flannery would be diagnosed (like her father before her) with systemic lupus erythematosus (“lupus”), a disabling rheumatologic condition. Through chronic pain, recurrent illnesses and medication side effects, Flannery would write with keen insight, acerbic wit and devout Catholic faith. Thirteen years later, she would die. She was only thirty-nine years old. Flannery O’Connor knew suffering and she knew grace – a mean grace.

Obamacare's Huckster 'Navigators"

Poorly screened community organizers could prey on applicants. 

By John Fund

http://www.nationalreview.com/

October 24, 2013

There is good news and bad news regardingHealthcare.gov. The good news is that despite the systemic failure infecting much of the site, there is one essential component — the federal data hub — that is working as it was designed. The data hub links federal-agency records together to determine whether an applicant for health insurance is eligible for subsidies. The bad news is that because the data hub is the largest consolidation of personal data in our nation’s history, it will become a magnet for identity thieves.

This isn’t idle speculation or fearmongering. Michael Astrue, who was commissioner of Social Security until February of this year, issued this warning this week in the Weekly Standard:

[The Department of Health and Human Services] opened the door to large-scale fraud by providing funding for tens of thousands of “navigators” — people who are supposed to persuade the uninsured to apply for coverage and then assist them in the application process. Instead of hiring well-screened, well-trained, and well-supervised workers, HHS decided to build political support for the Affordable Care Act by pouring money into supportive organizations so they could launch poorly trained workers into their communities without obtaining criminal background checks or creating systems for monitoring their activities.
As a practical matter, these navigators are unaccountable, and yet they will be asking people for Social Security numbers and other sensitive information. It will not take long for navigators to become predators, and HHS has no plan to deal with the new breed of predators it is creating.

Warning signs are already cropping up.

Thirteen state attorneys general sent a letter in August to HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius warning her that the training and safeguards against identity theft by federally funded navigators may be inadequate.

More than 700 “cyber-squatter” websites with similar domain names have been created to siphon off some of the public traffic meant for Healthcare.gov. Some sites direct people to fill out an “Obamacare enrollment form,” even though they actually offer no insurance. A retired cybersecurity expert told the Washington Examiner that cyber-squatters generally drain 10 percent to 40 percent of a website’s traffic and that Obamacare sites may be on the high end of that range, given how many squatters it has attracted.

There will also be inevitable unauthorized releases of information. Minnesota’s health-care exchange inadvertently revealed the Social Security numbers of 2,000 state residents before its website even went up on October 1.

There is no federal requirement for background checks on navigators. It shouldn’t surprise anyone then that some people have found a way to form new “navigator” groups out of the ruins of ACORN, the notoriously corrupt left-wing “community organizing” group that saw dozens of its employees in multiple states convicted of fraud before and after the 2008 election. Fox News reported this month that the United Labor Unions Council Local 100 “was created by ACORN founder Wade Rathke after ACORN went bankrupt amidst widespread scandal.” The new group, which was reconstituted from old ACORN affiliates, has been accepted as part of the navigator program in several states.

“There is a real danger that Obamacare ‘navigators’ will harvest the data of applicants and use it outside of the context of the health exchanges,” says Bruce Webster, a leading IT consultant to private companies. “They couldn’t care less what plans you qualify for — but with sufficient personal information, they stand a much better chance of committing traditional identity theft on you. Or they might simply sell that information to those who will commit the actual identity theft.”

Concerns about the navigators prompted Representatives Diane Black (R., Tenn.) and Pat Meehan (R., Pa.), a former prosecutor, to write the HHS inspector general asking for a copy of the Security Control Assessment that HHS has filed with the inspector general. “We need to know what tests were performed, who did they consult with, what safeguards are in place to protect against cybersecurity attacks,” Black told me. Not surprisingly, the Obama administration has been less than forthcoming on all those issues.

Back in July (“Obama’s Branch of the NSA,” July 22), I warned that the navigators were a largely unsupervised and unregulated element of Obamacare that raised serious privacy concerns. I quoted Representative Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee, as saying, “Giving community organizers access to the federal data hub is bad policy and potentially a danger to civil liberties.”

Everything we’ve learned about the health-care exchanges and Healthcare.gov should only heighten those concerns. Perhaps the reason we haven’t seen serious problems yet is that so few people can use the website to date. But once they do, it will be open to people genuinely looking for health insurance as well as to unscrupulous hucksters, and it may take some time for us to pry out of the Obama administration just how much the health-care exchanges could put the privacy of Americans at risk.

— John Fund is national-affairs columnist for National Review Online.

Film Review: 'Gravity'

Between Heaven and Earth

By A. O. SCOTT

http://www.nytimes.com/

October 3, 2013

NYT Critics' Pick

“Life in space is impossible.” That stark statement of scientific fact is one of the first things to appear on screen in “Gravity,” but before long, it is contradicted, or at least complicated. As our eyes (from behind 3-D glasses) adjust to the vast darkness, illuminated by streaks of sunlight refracted through the Earth’s atmosphere, we detect movement that is recognizably human and hear familiar voices. Those tiny figures bouncing around on that floating contraption — it looks like a mobile suspended from a child’s bedroom ceiling — are people. Scientists. Astronauts. Movie stars. (Sandra Bullock and George Clooney in spacesuits, as Mission Specialist Ryan Stone and Mission Commander Matt Kowalski; Ed Harris, unseen and unnamed, as “Houston” down below).

The defiance of impossibility is this movie’s theme and its reason for being. But the main challenge facing the director, Alfonso Cuarón (who wrote the script with his son Jonás), is not visualizing the unimaginable so much as overcoming the audience’s assumption that we’ve seen it all before. After more than 50 years, space travel has lost some of its luster, and movies are partly to blame for our jadedness. It has been a long time since a filmmaker conjured the awe of “2001: A Space Odyssey” or the terror of “Alien” or captured afresh the spooky wonder of a trip outside our native atmosphere.

Mr. Cuarón succeeds by tethering almost unfathomably complex techniques — both digital and analog — to a simple narrative. “Gravity” is less a science-fiction spectacle than a Jack London tale in orbit. The usual genre baggage has been jettisoned: there are no predatory extraterrestrials, no pompous flights of allegory, no extravagant pseudo-epic gestures. Instead, there is a swift and buoyant story of the struggle for survival in terrible, rapidly changing circumstances. Cosmic questions about our place in the universe are not so much avoided as subordinated to more pressing practical concerns. How do you outrun a storm of debris? Launch a landing module without fuel? Decipher an instruction manual in Russian or Chinese?

It has recently been observed that not all of the film’s answers to these questions are strictly accurate. The course that Stone and Kowalski plot from the Hubble Space Telescope to the International Space Station would apparently not be feasible in real life. (On the other hand, I was relieved to learn that a fire extinguisher really can serve as a makeshift zero-G jetpack. Not a spoiler, just a word to the wise.) Surely, though, the standard for a movie like this one is not realism but coherence. Every true outlaw has a code. The laws of physics are no exception, and Mr. Cuarón violates them with ingenious and exuberant rigor.

The accidental explosion of a communications satellite silences Houston and, what’s worse, sends a blizzard of shrapnel hurtling toward the astronauts. Quite a bit goes wrong. Straps connecting astronauts to the relative security of their spacecraft are severed. Parachute lines foul engines. Fires break out inside vessels, and stuff outside is smashed to pieces. Not everyone survives. All of it — terrifyingly and marvelously — evades summary and confounds expectations. You have to see it to believe it.

And what you see (through the exquisitely observant lenses of the great cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki) defies easy description. Stone and Kowalski’s orbital path is perched between the inky infinite and the green, cloud-swept face of home. The perspective is dazzling and jarring, and Mr. Cuarón allows a few moments of quiet, contemplative beauty to punctuate the busy, desperate activity of staying alive. Kowalski, generally an irreverent joker, pauses to savor the sun over the Ganges, and you may find yourself picking out other geographical details. Look, there’s Italy, and the Nile Valley. These reference points are as unsettling as they are reassuring, because they are glimpsed from a vantage point that is newly and profoundly alien.

That sense of estrangement owes a lot to Mr. Cuarón’s use of 3-D, which surpasses even what James Cameron accomplished in the flight sequences of “Avatar.” More than that film (and more than “Hugo” or “How to Train Your Dragon” or any other high-quality recent specimens), “Gravity” treats 3-D as essential to the information it wants to share. The reason for that is summed up in the title, which names an obvious missing element. Nothing in the movie — not hand tools or chess pieces, human bodies or cruise-ship-size space stations — rests within a stable vertical or horizontal plane. Neither does the movie itself, which in a little more than 90 minutes rewrites the rules of cinema as we have known them.

But maybe not quite all of them, come to think of it. The script is, at times, weighed down by some heavy screenwriting clichés. Some are minor, like the fuel gauge that reads full until the glass is tapped, causing the arrow to drop. More cringe-inducing is the tragic back story stapled to Stone, a doctor on her first trip into orbit. We would care about her even without the haunting memory of a dead child, who inspires a maudlin monologue and a flight of orchestral bathos in Steven Price’s otherwise canny and haunting score.

I will confess that the first time I saw “Gravity,” I found its talkiness annoying. Not just Ms. Bullock’s perky-anxious soliloquizing, but also Mr. Clooney’s gruff, regular-guy wisecracking. Doesn’t Stone say her favorite thing about space is the silence?

But a second viewing changed my mind a bit. It’s not that the dialogue improved — it will not be anyone’s favorite part of the movie — but rather that its relation to that silence became clearer. Stone and Kowalski jabber on, to themselves and each other and to Houston “in the blind,” partly to keep the terror of their situation at bay, to fight the overwhelming sense of how tiny and insignificant they are in the cosmos.

This assertion of identity is ridiculous and also, for that very reason, affecting. For all of Mr. Cuarón’s formal wizardry and pictorial grandeur, he is a humanist at heart. Much as “Gravity” revels in the giddy, scary thrill of weightlessness, it is, finally, about the longing to be pulled back down onto the crowded, watery sphere where life is tedious, complicated, sad and possible.

“Gravity” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Existential terror and the salty language it provokes.

Gravity

Opens on Friday.

Directed by Alfonso Cuarón; written by Alfonso Cuarón and Jonás Cuarón; director of photography, Emmanuel Lubezki; edited by Alfonso Cuarón and Mark Sanger; music by Steven Price; production design by Andy Nicholson; costumes by Jany Temime; visual effects by Tim Webber; produced by Alfonso Cuarón and David Heyman; released by Warner Brothers Pictures. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes.

WITH: Sandra Bullock (Ryan Stone), George Clooney (Matt Kowalski) and Ed Harris (Voice of Houston).

Whose Islam?

By Mark Steyn

From National Review's "Happy Warrior"

October 21, 2013

http://www.steynonline.com/

The "war" part of the war on terror is pretty much over, and we're now fighting it culturally, rhetorically. Which is not something we do well. Take the British prime minister and his traditional nothing-to-do-with-Islam statement, issued in the wake of the Kenyan shopping-mall carnage:

These appalling terrorist attacks that take place where the perpetrators claim they do it in the name of a religion: They don't. They do it in the name of terror, violence and extremism and their warped view of the world. They don't represent Islam, or Muslims in Britain or anywhere else in the world.

Same with the Muslims who beheaded a British soldier, Drummer Rigby, on a London street in broad daylight. On that occasion, David Cameron assured us that the unfortunate incident was "a betrayal of Islam. . . . There is nothing in Islam that justifies this truly dreadful act."

How does he know? Mr. Cameron is not (yet) a practicing Muslim. A self-described "vaguely practicing" Anglican, he becomes rather less vague and unusually forceful and emphatic when the subject turns to Islam. At the Westgate mall in Nairobi, the terrorists separated non-Muslim hostages from Muslims and permitted the latter to leave if they could recite a Muslim prayer—a test I doubt Mr. Cameron could have passed, for all his claims to authority on what is and isn't Islamic. So the perpetrators seem to think it's something to do with Islam—and, indeed, something to do with Muslims in the United Kingdom, given that the terrorists included British subjects (as well as U.S. citizens).

It was a busy weekend for Nothing to Do with Islam. Among the other events that were nothing to do with Islam were the murder of over 85 Pakistani Christians at All Saints' Church in Peshawar and the beheading of Ricardo Dionio in the Philippines by BIFF, the aggressively acronymic breakaway faction (the Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters) from the more amusingly acronymic MILF (the Moro Islamic Liberation Front). Despite a body count higher than Kenya, the Pakistani slaughter received barely a mention in the Western media. You'd be hard put to find an Anglican church in England with a big enough congregation on a Sunday morning to kill 85 worshipers therein, but in Peshawar, a 99 percent Muslim city, the few remaining Christians are not of the "vaguely practicing" Cameron variety. Viewed from London, however, they've already lost: One day there will be no Christians in Peshawar and the city will be 100 percent Muslim. It may be "nothing to do with Islam," but it's just the way it is: We accept the confessional cleansing of Pakistan, as we do of Egypt, because it's part of "the Muslim world." Nairobi, on the other hand, is not, and a murderous assault on an upscale shopping mall patronized by Kenya's elite and wealthy secular expats gets far closer to the comfort zone wherein David Cameron "vaguely practices": In a "clash of civilizations" in which one side doesn't want to play, a shattered church has less symbolic resonance than a shattered frozen-yogurt eatery.

On this side of the Atlantic, meanwhile, the Canadian branch of the Islamic Society of North America lost its charitable status after it was revealed to be funding all that jihad stuff that's nothing to do with Islam. This presented a small problem for Justin Trudeau, leader of the Liberal party, son of Pierre, and on course to be the Queen's dimmest prime minister of her six-decade reign: Where David Cameron is a silky, slippery deceiver who surely knows better, young Justin seems genuinely to believe the mush he serves up. Asked to explain his recent photo-op at the now-discredited ISNA, he replied: "Part of my job is to speak with as many Canadians as possible and talk to people about the kinds of shared values we have."

I don't suppose M. Trudeau really means he "shares values" with terrorism supporters, but he does get to the heart of the problem: To put it at its mildest, there seem to be insufficient "shared values" between Western societies and a not-insignificant number of young Muslim men who are nominally and legally citizens thereof. One survivor of the Westgate mall said, "I don't understand why you would shoot a five-year-old child." But what's to understand? The child was shot because he was not Muslim. Five-year-olds died at All Saints' Church for the same reason—because, even in a town that's 99 percent Muslim, a non-Muslim kindergartner is a provocation. Crazy, huh? Yet it is not inconceivable that the man who executed the five-year-old at the Westgate mall was one of those "British subjects" or "U.S. citizens." That's to say, he's not some primitive from the fringes of the map but someone who has grown up in the same society as Justin Trudeau and decided that Justin's "shared values" are worthless.

To be charitable to Mr. Cameron, he is trying to point out that very few Muslims want to stare a five-year-old in the eye and pull the trigger. But, likewise, very few of them want to do anything serious—in their mosques and madrassahs—about the culture that incubates such men. The prime minister is betting that all the clever chaps like him can keep the lid on and hold things to what, at the height of the Northern Irish "Troubles," cynical British officials privately called "an acceptable level of violence." A combined weekend corpse count of 150 is, apparently, "acceptable"—or at any rate not sufficiently unacceptable to prompt any reconsideration of a British, Canadian, and European immigration policy that makes Islam the principal source of Western population growth.

But don't worry: As John McCain says of our Syrian "allies," "Allahu akbar" simply means "Thank God." Thank God for that.

Chagall's Crucifixions

By Deidre Good
http://www.episcopalcafe.com/daily
October 21, 2013


Marc Chagall, The White Crucifixion, 1938, Art Institute of Chicago

In preparation for this piece I asked FB friends what images the name Marc Chagall (1887-1985) conjured up for them. “Blue,” someone said. “Windows at the Paris Opera and the Chicago Museum” said someone else. “Murals at The Metropolitan Opera” others said alluding to the giant murals hanging at the entrance to the opera house visible to the Lincoln Center Plaza and from Columbus Avenue. Heidi Shott said, “Windows in the Fraumünster Church in Zurich. First trip to Europe at 20. Took my breath away.”
Someone else quoted lines from the movie Notting Hill: “happiness isn't happiness without a violin-playing goat.” Another lent me Chagall’s illustrations of the Bible. Still others spoke of exhibits of his work they attended: at a Chagall retrospective in Paris, for example, Jane Redmont remembers a video in which the interviewer asked Chagall a question like "why are there so often cows inside women" or "women inside cows" or "why is there a cow inside that woman.” Chagall smiled and said "They're just there!" “I've never forgotten that,” Jane said. Several people mentioned crucifixion scenes, and one person posted Chagall’s painting “The White Crucifix.”

We went to see the current exhibit “Chagall: Love, War and Exile” at the Jewish Museum in New York City last week. It’s on until Feb 2, 2014. I was astonished to discover that the focus of the exhibit is on a roomful of paintings featuring Crucifixion scenes drawn and painted within a short time span. Chagall apparently produced over 100 paintings and drawings of the crucifixion. So I tried to find what he wrote about them. Of his first crucifixion scene he explains: “for me Christ has always symbolized the true type of the Jewish martyr. That is how I understood him in 1908 when I used this figure for the first time…I was under the influence of the pogroms.”

“Rarely exhibited and often misunderstood,” the catalog says, the Crucifixion scenes in the exhibit were produced in the years surrounding World War II when Chagall lived in France, then briefly in the US to escape the war in Europe, and then again after the war in France. By concentrating on Chagall’s work during the Holocaust years, and on the Crucifixion scenes in particular, the exhibit shows a darker side of the artist. What does any visitor to the exhibit, regardless of religious conviction, make of these paintings and drawings? I found them riveting. To exhibit images of the Crucified Christ by a Jewish artist in the context of the Holocaust raises fascinating questions: what makes an image of the Crucifixion theological? How and in what ways is the image of a crucified Christ a non-Christian symbol?

The exhibit’s Crucifixion scenes are very different: there are paintings including figures with halos, as in “Exodus” (1952-66), and “Christ in the Night” (1948). In a self-portrait, “The Artist With Yellow Christ” (1938), Chagall turns the face of himself as artist at the foot of the cross away from the figure on the cross. In “Descent from the Cross” (1941), the letters “MARC CH” replace the traditional “INRI” on the cross, and an angel holds a palette and brush. In most paintings, Jesus hangs upon the cross with a tallit, a Jewish prayer shawl around his waist. And there are other figures in the scene: figures at the foot of the cross including a person with a ladder, a mother and child Madonna type, angels and Torah scrolls.

The number and intensity of paintings produced in 1941, “Christ Carrying the Cross,” “Descent from the Cross,” and “The Painter Crucified,” makes that year a turning point, I think. In 1941 Chagall was preparing to leave Europe. By June of that year he was in New York. An ink drawing “Christ carrying the Cross” of that same year drawn before leaving Europe shows other crucified figures, pogroms and smoke in the background towards which a figure helping Christ carry the cross is looking.

By painting Crucifixion scenes, many Jews believed Chagall had rejected Judaism. And it seems that some Christians regarded his recourse to Christian symbolism as “naïve and misguided.” Yet Chagall’s electric choice of the image of a crucified Jewish Jesus to express the suffering and slaughter of Jews and others in the Second World War not only claims the Crucified Jesus as Jewish but reverses the mistaken trope in which Jews were blamed for the death of Jesus by presenting a Crucified Jesus to personify Jewish suffering and bring it to the attention of the world. Chagall’s images of a Crucified Jewish Jesus reach out and present to any who care to see embodied images of both suffering and atonement at the darkest hour of the Holocaust.

Dr. Deirdre Good is professor of New Testament at The General Theological Seminary, specializing in the Synoptic Gospels, Christian Origins, Noncanonical writings and biblical languages. Her blog is called On Not Being a Sausage.

Posted by Ann Fontaine on October 21, 2013 7:04 AM | Permalink | Digg this

Russia's Demographic Revolution

The growth of an increasingly confident Muslim population is the source of major tension. 

By Daniel Pipes

http://www.nationalreview.com/

October 22, 2013

The stabbing murder on October 10 of an ethnic Russian, Yegor Shcherbakov, 25, apparently by a Muslim from Azerbaijan, led to antimigrant disturbances in Moscow, vandalism and assaults, and the arrest of 1,200. It brought a major tension in Russian life to the fore.

Not only do ethnic Muslims account for 21–23 million of Russia’s total population of 144 million, or 15 percent, but their proportion is fast growing. Alcoholism-plagued ethnic Russians are said to have European birth rates and African life-expectancy, with the former just 1.4 per woman and the latter 60 years for men. In Moscow, ethnic Christian women have 1.1 children.

In contrast, Muslim women bear 2.3 children on average and have fewer abortions than their Russian counterparts. In Moscow, Tatar women have six children and Chechen and Ingush women have ten on average. In addition, some 3 to 4 million Muslims have moved to Russia from ex-republics of the USSR, mainly Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan; and some ethnic Russians are converting to Islam.

These trends mean that Christians are declining in numbers by 0.6 percent a year and Muslims increasing by that same amount, which will have dramatic effects over time. Some analysts foresee Muslims becoming a majority in the 21st century — a demographic revolution that would fundamentally change the country’s character. Paul Goble, an expert on Russian minorities, concludes that “Russia is going through a religious transformation that will be of even greater consequence for the international community than the collapse of the Soviet Union.” A Russian commentator he quotes envisions a mosque on Red Square in Moscow. The facile assumption that Moscow is and will remain Western-oriented “is no longer valid,” he argues. In particular, he predicts that the Muslim demographic surge “will have a profound impact on Russian foreign policy.”

Within a few years, Muslims will make up half the conscripts in the Russian army.Joseph A. D’Agostino of the Population Research Institute asks: “Will such a military operate effectively given the fury that many domestic Muslims feel toward the Russian military’s tactics in the Muslim region of Chechnya? What if other Muslim regions of Russia — some of which contain huge oil reserves — rebel against Moscow? Will Muslim soldiers fight and kill to keep them part of the Russian motherland?”

Russia’s increasingly confident Muslims, who constitute the majority of 57 of the country’s 182 ethnic groups, have started to use the term “Muslim Russia” to signal their ambitions. According to Muslim analyst Daniyal Isayev, this term affirms that Islam is “an inalienable part of Russia” and that “Russia as a state and civilization could not exist without Islam and the Muslims.” He notes that Muslims preceded ethnic Russians in much of the territory that is now Russia. His sweeping claims for Muslims include the exaggerations that they made critical contributions to Russia’s culture and its military victories.

Such talk can cause ethnic Russians to shudder over the country’s population lossof at least 700,000 people a year. Some have returned to their faith and some have turned against Muslims. The reactions against a “Muslim Russia” include biased media portrayals of Muslims, attacks on mosques and other crimes, efforts to block Muslim immigration, and the rise of extreme Russian nationalist groups such as Alexander Belov’s “Movement against Illegal Immigration.”

The Kremlin has responded to the issue in contradictory ways. Then-president Dmitri Medvedev tried appeasement in 2009 by stressing the importance of Islam to Russia, noting that “Muslim foundations are making an important contribution to promoting peace in society, providing spiritual and moral education for many people, as well as fighting extremism and xenophobia.” He also announced that, because of its large Muslim population, “Russia does not need to seek friendship with the Muslim world: Our country is an organic part of this world.”

But, as Ilan Berman of the American Foreign Policy Council points out, “the Kremlin has discriminated against its Muslim minority and ignored (even abetted) the rise of corrosive xenophobia among its citizens. This has bred resentment and alienation among Russia’s Muslims — sentiments that radical Islamic groups have been all too eager to exploit.” Added to existing Islamic-supremacist attitudes, this results in an increasingly restive Muslim minority.

Discussions of Islam in Europe tend to focus on places like Britain and Sweden, but Russia, the country with the largest Muslim community in both relative and absolute terms, is above all the place to watch. The antimigrant violence this week will surely be followed by much worse problems.

— Daniel Pipes is president of the Middle East Forum. © 2013 by Daniel Pipes. All rights reserved.