Friday, June 7, 2024

America2100: THE CENTURY: Everyday Tyranny

1. EVERYDAY TYRANNY
 
President Joe Biden's Department of Justice has indicted a Texas doctor/whistleblower who uncovered how Texas Children Hospital allowed so-called "gender-affirming" procedures on children, despite the hospital's public statements that those procedures had been discontinued. 
  • "On the morning in June 2023 that [Dr. Ethan] Haim was to graduate from Texas Children Hospital's residency program, federal agents knocked on his door. They had identified him as a potential 'leaker,' presumably through forensic examination of the hospital's computer systems. Shortly thereafter, Assistant U.S. Attorney Tina Ansari began threatening Haim with prosecution. Now, Ansari has made good on those threats. Earlier this week, U.S. marshals appeared at Haim's home and summoned him to court to face an indictment on four felony counts of violating HIPAA. His initial appearance is next Monday, where he will learn more about the charges against him." 
City-Journal initially reported last year on the controversy surrounding the Hospital:
  • "Another doctor at Texas Children's, a Harvard-trained surgeon and assistant professor at Baylor College of Medicine named Kristy Rialon, has also been involved in conducting transgender surgical procedures on minors. The records indicate that Rialon inserted and removed 'non-biodegradable drug delivery implant[s]' for 'gender dysphoria in pediatric patient[s]' throughout 2022 and 2023—including one procedure on an 11-year-old 'female-to-male transgender person,' listed in records for three days after the hospital had announced that it had stopped performing 'gender-affirming care.' The patients getting implants (or removals) from Rialon were 11, 12, 13, 14, and 15 years old. Other medical records confirm that Rialon has administered the drug Supprelin LA, an implantable gonadotropin releasing hormone (GnRH) medication that is one of the most commonly used drugs for blocking puberty in transgender-identified children." 
According to Health and Human Services, their Office for Civil Rights "has received over 358,975 HIPAA complaints and has initiated over 1,188 compliance reviews. We have resolved ninety-nine percent of these cases (356,075)." 
  • Additionally, according to the same website, "OCR refers to the Department of Justice (DOJ) for criminal investigation appropriate cases involving the knowing disclosure or obtaining of protected health information in violation of the Rules. As of the date of this summary, OCR made 2,197 such referrals to [the] DOJ." 
In other words, an infinitesimal 0.58% out of 358,975 HIPAA cases were ultimately referred to the Department of Justice. 

The cases that have been brought for referral have involved egregious violations of the HIPAA law, as was the case brought by the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Western District of Tennessee in April this year.
  • "According to United States Attorney Ritz and the information presented in court, between November 2017 and December 2020, Harvey paid Kirby Dandridge, 38, Sylvia Taylor, 43, Kara Thompson, 31, Melanie Russell, 41, and Adrianna Taber, 26, to provide him with names and phone numbers of Methodist patients who had been involved in motor vehicle accidents. After obtaining the information, Harvey sold the information to third persons including personal injury attorneys and chiropractors." 
Another case involved a Des Moines resident, who was "sentenced to 27 months in prison for criminal HIPAA violations" 
  • "According to court documents, Dustin James Ortiz, 49, conspired with a then employee of the Veterans Affairs Medical Center (VAMC) in Des Moines to obtain individually identifiable health information of an individual which were maintained by the VAMC. The records Ortiz sought to and did obtain pertained to the victim's mental health conditions and medications. Ortiz obtained this information without authorization required by law. Ortiz then disclosed the records to a third party. Because the conduct involved the intent to transfer and use the health information for personal gain and malicious harm, it was a felony under federal law." 
Once again, the Biden administration and the Justice Department have no qualms in utilizing the power of the state for political reasons; to intimidate and silence Mr. Haim for trying to protect children from gaining access to body mutilating surgeries and drugs, which would permanently damage their physical and emotional well-being. Using HIPAA to do so is particularly odd considering, as City-Journal reported , no names were released and there was nothing that "identified any individual; all the documents were, in fact, carefully redacted." 
 
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2. NVIDIA'S CHINA LOOPHOLE
 

Chinese tech firms have exploited loopholes allowing those companies to get their hands on Nvidia's AI chips as long as "they're used within the U.S.," The Information reports. 
  • "Some big Chinese tech firms have taken advantage of that loophole, or tried to. ByteDance, owner of TikTok, has been renting Nvidia's best chips from Oracle for AI computing, according to two people with knowledge of the arrangement. China Telecom, a large state-owned wireless carrier, has sought a similar deal with other cloud providers, said two people who were involved in the talks. Meanwhile, Chinese cloud providers Alibaba and Tencent have held discussions with Nvidia about potentially obtaining such chips for data centers they would operate in the U.S., according to a person who has been involved in the talks." 
The Information additionally reports: 
  • "These deals could reduce the effectiveness of the U.S. chip restrictions, which aim to protect American national security. If Chinese firms use these chips to develop AI in the U.S., it could be difficult to stop them from sending the models they produced back to their headquarters in China, according to three managers at U.S. cloud providers and a person who has worked at Nvidia."
The Biden administration has previously announced it would cut China off from more Nvidia chips, expanding restrictions to other countries as well, Reuters reported last October.  
 
Last summer, multiple chip leaders headed to Washington to try to dissuade the Biden administration from issuing harsher export restrictions, sensing what they termed a "window of opportunity." One of those companies was Nvidia, Bloomberg News reported:
  • "While they don't expect to stave off all the actions, the companies are sensing a window of opportunity to convince the Biden team that an escalation would hurt the current diplomatic efforts by the White House to engage Chinese officials and establish a more productive relationship, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the trip isn't yet public."
3. GREED IS BAD?
 

"Progressives Urge Biden to Push Harder on 'Greedflation'," declares a headline from The New York Times.
  • "And while Mr. Biden delights in telling a folksy anecdote about Snickers bars shrinking in size without doing the same in price, other Democrats have sounded far more aggressive on the issue. The push to blame corporations has united many factions of the Democratic Party, including progressives, swing-state populists, union leaders and environmentalists." 
Biden and other Democrats like Senators Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and Bob Casey (D-PA) have denounced 'shrinkflation' as part of a tactical strategy to win voters' trust and support on their handling of the economy.
  • "Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pennsylvania, has introduced a bill that would ban shrinkflation by ordering the Federal Trade Commission to treat it as an unfair or deceptive practice, enabling the government to pursue civil penalties in court against companies that do so. Biden gave the measure a full endorsement in his speech. 'Pass Bobby Casey's bill and stop this,' he said." 
New research from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, however, casts doubt on the notion that corporate greed is a main driver behind inflation, CNN reported. 
  • "When zooming out and looking at markups across the economy, the SF Fed economists found little evidence that price gouging was the main culprit. 'Aggregate markups – the more relevant measure for overall inflation – have stayed essentially flat since the start of the recovery,' the paper concluded. 'Rising markups have not been a main driver of the recent surge and subsequent decline in inflation during the current recovery.' In fact, the SF Fed found that the path of collective markups over the past three years 'is not unusual compared with previous recoveries.'" 
4. NAVIGATING THE AMERICAN HEALTHCARE SYSTEM
 

As consolidation within the healthcare industry expands, competition, naturally, has decreased, contributing to higher healthcare costs for patients, The Wall Street Journal reports.
  • "Rising costs don't just lead to alarmingly high medical bills—they also make all of us worse off by increasing premiums, the bulk of which are paid by the nation's employers. That affects even people who rarely visit a doctor. As those premiums soar and employers look to offset the cost, they indirectly eat into people's paychecks . Over the past two decades, there have been more than 1,000 mergers among the country's approximately 5,000 hospitals, according to a forthcoming paper in American Economic Review: Insights. During that period, the Federal Trade Commission took action against only 13 transactions, even though more than 200 of the deals would have met the FTC's bar for lessening competition." 
Unregulated hospital mergers contributed to higher healthcare costs, new analysis from the American Economic Review found, according to Axios. 
  • "Between 2010 and 2015, the FTC's average annual budget for antitrust enforcement was $136 million, according to the report. Meanwhile, hospital mergers during that period raised health spending on privately insured people by $204 million on average in the year following those deals." 
These business structures undergirding the American healthcare system exist primarily to make short-term profits for their beneficiaries, but in the long-run wind up draining hospitals and other healthcare facilities of crucial resources while saddling them with crushing debts. 

The Journal additionally reported on the influence of private equity within the healthcare system: 
  • "In the U.S., many doctors used to work for physician-owned businesses. These days, about three-quarters work for a hospital or a corporate owner . As for your hospital, a private-equity firm or a larger medical system probably owns it. There are massive incentives to consolidate. At nearly $5 trillion, U.S. healthcare's gross domestic product would rank it third in the world if it were a country. And there is a reason smaller practices want to sell: Regulations have become increasingly cumbersome, and dealing with insurers as a small entity isn't a rewarding experience." 
5. "HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT"
 

"Office Building Losses Start to Pile Up, and More Pain Is Expected," declares a headline from The New York Times.
  • "While the number of office buildings reaching critical stages of distress remains small, the figure has increased sharply this year. And investors, lawyers and bankers expect the pain to grow in the coming months because demand for office space remains weak and interest rates and other costs are higher than they have been in many years. The problems could be especially severe for older buildings with lots of vacant space and big loan repayments coming up…'There is a lot more trouble coming,' said Mark Silverman, a partner and leader of the CMBS Special Servicer group at the law firm Locke Lord, who represents lenders in disputes with commercial mortgage borrowers. 'If we think it's bad now, it's going to get a lot worse.'" 
"A commercial real estate crisis is hiding in plain sight," argues Paul Kupiec in The Hill.
  • "My estimates suggest that commercial real estate loan losses as small as 10 percent could render over 700 banks holding more than 6.5 percent of all banking system assets market-value insolvent. Larger commercial real estate loan losses would inflict greater carnage on the banking system. Should the widely anticipated wave of bank commercial real estate loan defaults materialize, it could easily overwhelm the federal deposit insurance safety net. The FDIC deposit insurance fund balance of $121.8 billion is equivalent to only 0.51 percent of the banking system's total assets." 
Fortress co-CEO predicts bank failures will continue with additional stresses in the commercial real estate market, Bloomberg News reported in February: 
  • "More than $900 billion of debt on US commercial and multifamily real estate will require refinancing or property sales this year as building values fall and credit costs remain much higher than they were when the loans were taken out, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association. Smaller banks are particularly vulnerable after they increased their CRE lending during the pandemic, boosting their market share, and leaving themselves vulnerable to soaring interest rates."
6. A FAMILY-UNFRIENDLY CULTURE
 

"Japan's birth rate fell to a new low for the eighth straight year in 2023," reports The Associated Press. 
  • "According to the latest statistics, Japan's fertility rate — the average number of babies a woman is expected to have in her lifetime — stood at 1.2 last year. The 727,277 babies born in Japan in 2023 were down 5.6% from the previous year, the ministry said — the lowest since Japan started compiling the statistics in 1899." 
Japanese men are facing an "identity crisis," according to The Economist.
  • "In Japan, relations between men and women are shifting as marriage rates decline and more women enter the workforce. But the idea that men are breadwinners remains deeply entrenched. In 2022 only 17% of eligible men took parental leave, compared with 80% of women. Japanese women spend five times longer doing chores than men. A survey in 2022 by Lean In Tokyo, an activist group, suggested that over 60% of Japanese men feel awkward at work because of pressure to behave in a manly way. In Japan, which has the highest suicide rate in the g7, men are twice as likely to kill themselves as women." 
For other countries like South Korea, declining birth rates have become a 'national emergency,' according to The Financial Times. 
  • "It was as long ago as 2005 that the birth rate of 1.2 first startled South Korea, causing the government to realise the extent of the problem and begin working on it. The Presidential Committee on Ageing Society and Population Policy was established. It is still at the helm of national policy. But despite these efforts, South Korea has reached a point where the problem is becoming more of a national emergency." 
Birth rates have continued declining around the world "with economic, social and geopolitical consequences," The Wall Street Journal reports. 
  • "'The demographic winter is coming,' said Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, an economist specializing in demographics at the University of Pennsylvania. Many government leaders see this as a matter of national urgency. They worry about shrinking workforces, slowing economic growth and underfunded pensions; and the vitality of a society with ever-fewer children. Smaller populations come with diminished global clout, raising questions in the U.S., China and Russia about their long-term standings as superpowers."
Conservative writer and author Timothy Carney argues "How a Family-Unfriendly Culture Has Left Us with Fewer Children." 
  • "Demographers talk about the current 'demographic transition': a shift to high wealth and low birth rates as we 'increase investment' in each child. We now take 'quality' over 'quantity,' sociologists say. 'Investment' in our children means driving ourselves crazy, and while it does reduce the quantity of children we have, it doesn't actually help us or the children we do have. If it did, we wouldn't see the record rates of childhood anxiety and depression that have defined the 21st century. Of course we have fewer kids when the time demands of parenting have skyrocketed."
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