Company teams up with one of the U.S.’s largest health systems in ‘Project Nightingale’
BY ROB COPELAND November 12, 2019
Google is engaged with one of the U.S.’s largest health-care systems on a project to collect and crunch the detailed personal- health information of millions of people across 21 states.
The initiative, code-named “Project Nightingale,” appears to be the biggest effort yet by a Silicon Valley giant to gain a toehold in the health-care industry through the handling of patients’ medical data. Amazon. com Inc., Apple Inc. and Microsoft Corp. are also aggressively pushing into health care, though they haven’t yet struck deals of this scope.
Google began Project Nightingale in secret last year with St. Louis-based Ascension, a Catholic chain of 2,600 hospitals, doctors’ offices and other facilities, with the data sharing accelerating since summer, according to internal documents.
The data involved in the initiative encompasses lab results, doctor diagnoses and hospitalization records, among other categories, and amounts to a complete health history, including patient names and dates of birth.
Neither patients nor doctors have been notified. At least 150 Google employees already have access to much of the data on tens of millions of patients, according to a person familiar with the matter and
the documents.
In a news release issued after The Wall Street Journal reported on Project Nightingale on Monday, the companies said the initiative is compliant with federal health law and includes robust protections for patient data.
Some Ascension employees have raised questions about the way the data is being collected and shared, both from a technological and ethical perspective, according to the people familiar with the project. But privacy experts said it appeared to be permissible under federal law. That law, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, generally allows hospitals to share data with business partners without telling patients, as long as the information is used “only to help the covered entity carry out its health care functions.”
Her financing and savings ideas for Medicare for All bear no relation to reality.
By the Editorial Board November 4, 2019
EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE: There’s a reason every government-run health system in the world rations care. Ms. Warren won’t admit this explicitly about her brave new health world, but she comes close. If U.S. health-care spending exceeds GDP growth, she says, “I will use available policy tools, which include global budgets, population-based budgets, and automatic rate reductions, to bring it back into line.”
In a word, rationing. And that’s no surprise, since she credits the advice for developing much of her plan to Donald Berwick. He was an advocate for ObamaCare’s Independent Payment Advisory Board—known uncharitably as the death panel—that Congress repealed last year in a bipartisan vote.
Now we know why Elizabeth Warren took so long to release the financing details of her Medicare-for-All plan. The 20 pages of explanation she released Friday reveal that she is counting on ideas for cost-savings and new revenue that are a fiscal and health-care fantasy.
You certainly can’t criticize the new Iowa Democratic caucus front-runner for lack of ambition. Despite criticism from fellow Democrats, she is sticking to her plan for a government takeover of American health care, including the elimination of private insurance that 170 million or so Americans now have. She continues to claim that this will cost “not one penny in middle-class tax increases.” She walks on water too.
Start with the overall fiscal math, which by itself is staggering. She concedes that her plan will cost only “slightly” less than the $52 trillion that the U.S. is expected to spend on health care in the next 10 years. She deducts from that what the feds now spend on Medicare and Medicaid, plus $6 trillion that the states contribute to Medicaid, the state-federal children’s health program and government worker benefits.
That leaves $30 trillion to finance, but Senator Warren waves her wand and says the bill will really be $20.5 trillion. She makes the rest vanish by positing magical savings from things like “comprehensive payment reform.” One of her ideas is the hardy perennial known as “bundled payments,” which have failed to reduce costs as promised by Obama Care.
The Immigration and Nationality Act mandates that all immigrants and refugees undergo a medical screening examination to determine whether they have an inadmissible health condition. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has technical instructions for medical examination of prospective immigrants in their home countries before they are permitted to enter the U.S. They are screened for communicable and infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, malaria, hepatitis, polio, measles, mumps and HIV. They are also tested for syphilis, gonorrhea and other sexually transmitted diseases. The CDC also has medical screening guidelines for refugees. These screenings are usually performed 30 to 90 days after refugees arrive in the United States.
But what about people who enter our country illegally? The CDC specifically cites the possibility of the cross-border movement of HIV, measles, pertussis, rubella, rabies, hepatitis A, influenza, tuberculosis, shigellosis and syphilis. Chris Cabrera, a Border Patrol agent in South Texas, warned: “What’s coming over into the U.S. could harm everyone. We are starting to see scabies, chickenpox, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus infections and different viruses.” Some of the youngsters illegally entering our country are known to be carrying lice and suffering from various illnesses. Because there have been no medical examinations of undocumented immigrants, we have no idea how many are carrying infectious diseases that might endanger American children when these immigrants enter schools across our nation.
Here are two articles from England regarding euthanasia without permission from the patients and their families. Truly amazing how long the killing of these helpless patients was covered up. Nancy
Members of the families of people who died at Gosport War Memorial Hospital outside Portsmouth Cathedral after the disclosure of the Gosport Independent Panel’s report.
The staff at Gosport War Memorial Hospital in the U.K. had a nickname for the Daedalus Ward. They called it the “Dead Loss” ward because so many of the patients assigned to it died untimely deaths. From 1989 to 2000, it’s also where medical staff at the hospital pursued a mercenary policy of euthanasia, killing patients by administering overdoses of opioids and other drugs in what a recently issued independent investigation into the hospital’s practices called an “institutionalized regime.”
The panel found “a disregard for human life and a culture of shortening the lives of a large number of patients” at the hospital. As the Right Reverend James Jones, KBE, the head of the investigatory panel, notes, “The shocking outcome of the Panel’s work is that we have now been able to conclude that the lives of over 450 patients were shortened while in the hospital.” Some critics have suggested the number is much higher.
Many of the victims were admitted to the hospital with recoverable conditions such as a broken bone. Elsie Devine was one such patient; the 88-year-old grandmother went to Gosport to recover from a mild infection; a few weeks later, she was dead, the victim of a powerful and medically unnecessary cocktail of fentanyl and diamorphine. The same was true of 78-year-old Ethel Thurston; sent to Gosport to recover from a fractured femur, she was labeled “aggressive” by nursing staff because she wouldn’t eat the hospital food and “has been known to strike staff.” Nurses noted her treatment: “Syringe driver started diamorphine 90 mg. Midazolam 20 mg.” She was dead by that evening.
As the health care debate goes on, Senator Bernie Sanders will toss in a socialized medicine bill.
Bernie’s bill won’t be a realistic piece of legislation. The 1 percenter Socialist from Vermont has three successful bills to his name. Two of those involved renaming post offices. He was a marginal figure during the ObamaCare debate. The financials of the plan won’t work. But they never do.
ObamaCare insurers are losing billions. Aetna pulled out after $700 million in losses. United Health jumped after losing $720 million. The single-payer that Bernie wants to propose will be even worse.
Vermont’s single payer experiment cost $4.3 billion out of a $4.9 billion state budget. The California Senate passed single-payer with no way to cover the $400 billion cost in a $183 billion budget.
Democrats who wouldn’t vote for it faced death threats and accusations that they were “murderers”.
That’s what every argument about socialized medicine comes down to. Either you support it or you want people to die.
Bernie Sanders has been accusing Republican repealers of killing thousands. If ObamaCare is repealed, “36,000 will die yearly”. Then he claimed, “up to 28,000 Americans every single year could die.”
Is it 36,000 or 28,000? Who cares? The point is, if you’re against socialized medicine, you’re a murderer. The right numbers, either the budget or the casualties, don’t matter. Emotions trump statistics.
In 2015, the year after ObamaCare took effect, the death rate rose for the first time in a decade. 2,471,984 deaths occurred in this country in 2008. In 2014, we were up to 2,626,418.
That’s a difference of 150,000. And going up, not down.
You would think that if the ObamaCare mandate is saving so many lives, we ought to be seeing fewer deaths, not more of them.
Remember the IPAB, Independent Payment Advisory Board (Death Panel as Sarah Palin so lovingly called it !). We haven’t heard much about it in the last few years but the deadline to kill it is coming up by August 15.
Please call your representatives and tell them that it is very important to kill IPAB before the deadline. Nancy P.S. Your very life may depend on it being killed !!!!
If the House acts fast, it can abolish a bad ObamaCare provision.
By
Grace-Marie Turnerand
Doug Badger
Ms. Turner is president, and Mr. Badger a senior fellow, at the Galen Institute.
July 25, 2017 6:47 p.m. ET
All eyes are on the Senate as it debates what to do about ObamaCare. But the House has a last chance this week to abolish one of the law’s most dangerous creations: a board with sweeping, unchecked power to ration care.
The Independent Payment Advisory Board—what critics call the death panel—would be an unelected, unaccountable body with broad powers to slash Medicare spending. But the law contains a living will for IPAB. If the president signs a congressional resolution extinguishing the panel by Aug. 15, it will never come into existence.
The real deadline is closer, since the House plans to recess Friday and not return until Sept. 5. But if the House does act, the Senate will have time to follow, since it plans to remain in session until mid-August.
The IPAB’s powers would be vast. If government actuaries find that Medicare spending would exceed caps established by ObamaCare, the board is required to write a plan to stay under the caps. Congress can pass its own bill to reach the target if it acts promptly—but if not, the secretary of Health and Human Services must implement IPAB’s plan, which would be exempt from judicial review.
Paul Rexton Kan is Professor of National Security at the U.S. Army War College and the author ofDrugs and Contemporary Warfare(Potomac Books, 2009) and Cartels at War (Potomac, 2012). His forthcoming book isDrug Trafficking and International Security(Rowman and Littlefield, 2016). The views expressed do not represent the U.S. government.
MARCH 7, 2016
Santa Claus is commonly imagined as a jolly, benevolent figure who delivers presents to deserving children all over the world. However, another version of Santa Claus exists in the organized crime underworld of Belgium where a Moroccan namedKhalid Zerkaniis commonly known as “Papa Noel.” Before his arrest, Zerkani would routinely handout money and presents to at-risk youth in the Molenbeek neighborhood of Brussels, luring them into his organization. Unlike ordinary organized crime groups that engage in illegal activities for personal enrichment, Zerkani’s group used its criminal proceeds tofinance trips of recruitsfrom Europe to join the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). One notorious recruit of Zerkani’s wasAbdelhamid Abaaoud— the ringleader of the Paris terrorist attacks.
The link between crime, radicalism, and ISIL has only recently come into greater focus. Oil smuggling, extortion, and sex trafficking in ISIL-controlled territory are well-known, yet other crimes like drug production, trafficking, and consumption are not. It is important to better understand drug use and the drugs trade because both are helping ISIL commit atrocities and wage its campaign of terror. Viewing ISIL and other jihadist groups as mere collections of drug-crazed fanatics, however, would be a caricature. Organizations like ISIL use drugs for tactical, operational, and strategic reasons that are historically consistent with the behavior of other violent groups in the past. It is worth considering drug consumption within ISIL and other jihadist groups as we consider how to fight them.
It is appalling that these institutions are letting themselves be intimidated by the Human Rights Campaign which is peddling the political agenda of the LGBTQ community. Nancy
The grievance-industry racket is as old as the culture war itself. But rarely has it been practiced as transparently as it was this past week by the Human Rights Campaign.
You may recall the Human Rights Campaign from its two-decade drive to legalize same-sex marriage, which HRC cleverly packaged as an apolitical, universal “human right.” Having won their victory through the majesty of Anthony Kennedy’s pen, however, the folks at HRC decided not to press on for same-sex marriage in, say, Saudi Arabia and China, but rather to throw themselves fully into shakedown mode here at home, where they make busy with corporate outreach (companies pay them to achieve bronze, silver, gold, or platinum “partnerships”) and fundraising (you can get a specialty HRC Visa card to automate donations) and bullying the occasional doctor or scientist who will not parrot the current orthodoxy on human sexuality.
Last fall, for instance, Lawrence Mayer and Paul McHugh published a report on sexuality and gender in theNew Atlantis, a journal on technology and society. Mayer is an epidemiologist trained in psychiatry who is a resident scholar at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Paul McHugh is a professor of psychiatry at Hopkins. Their report, a review of the scientific literature on the nature of sexual orientation, sexuality, and gender identity, was a detailed yet accessible document written for a general audience. (We covered it in these pages at the time, “Studying the Unstudiable,” September 12, 2016.)
Right from the start, the Human Rights Campaign was unhappy with the report. The HRC began warning Johns Hopkins that it would take action against the institution if it did not take significant steps to distance the medical school from McHugh and Mayer’s report. The big threat: If Hopkins didn’t punish Mayer and McHugh, the school’s intransigence would hurt its rankings in HRC’s next Healthcare Equality Index (HEI).
