COVID is now the excuse for ANYTHING that people don’t want to do. After nearly 2 years being paid not to work, people don’t want to work. Surprise! Well, not really. If you reward people for something, that’s what you get!

Some want to just work at home (read: stay at home). They are sick of working in the Cube—or just sick of working.

The service industries (banks, bars, restaurants, shop attendants, etc.) are having trouble recruiting staff—or recruiting good, conscientious staff. The whole culture has drifted in the directions of nihilism (posh Latin word for NOTHING IS ANY GOOD: nihil means “nothing”).

I don’t think society is rotting from the top down; I think it’s rotting from the bottom up! While people don’t want to work, to contribute and create, nothing much is going to happen. You have a moribund society (and we have just that).

You’ve run into this, I’m sure:

  • The line at the Post Office (“We are short staffed because of COVID”)
  • The plumber who doesn’t show up on the agreed day “Because of COVID.”
  • The parcel that goes missing in customs “Because of COVID.”
  • The delivery that’s weeks late “Because of COVID.”
  • The office that just doesn’t open for the day “Because of COVID.”

Vivien ran into an unpleasant variant of this in the UK recently. She wanted to visit a lifelong friend who was in a care home with dementia. But the day before the agreed visit, she was told they were not allowing any visitors “Because of COVID.” One of the inmates had tested positive and so they locked down the facility. Why? Clearly the disease is already inside—and visitors are exposed daily on the outside! Duh!

The truth is, of course, they just wanted an easy time and this was a great idea: claim it’s COVID and that we have to prevent the spread; not so much work to do (this is long after public restrictions and the need for any isolation measures were officially lifted).

This is happening everywhere and there is little sign of it going away.

What really slammed it home to me was to see that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) trying to get a new regulation approved that will allow them to deliberately suppress public reporting of key measures of preventable hospital-caused harms, such as pressure ulcers or falls resulting in hip fractures.

They were trying to engineer this sneaky rule under the “excuse” of COVID!

“Well, it was a bad time, see. A lot of problems. So we should not be made publicly accountable for our blunders and patient deaths…

How sick is this? I’ve said before that doctors and hospitals are often sicker than the people they treat! It’s mind-boggling.

If the rule is finalized, hospitals would still report on “some” safety measures, but certain scores would be hidden from public data files and would not appear on the CMS Hospital Compare website.

It’s exactly what I’m billing this piece as: COVID used as an excuse for bad work, laziness, incompetence, dishonesty and—yes—killing people. Avoidable medical deaths, as they call it euphemistically.

There’s More

The CMS agency gave several reasons why hospitals need to be let off the hook, all related to COVID-19. Ha!

They want a massive “off-the-hook” get out clause, to cover all their sins and errors. Not everyone is happy about this.

The CMS proposal is “outrageous”, Bill Kramer, executive director for health policy at the Purchaser Business Group on Health, told the journal MedPage Today.

“Patients will be unable to know whether the provider they want to go to has more patient safety problems, more risky providers, so clinicians as well as purchasers and policymakers will be unable to identify and help patients choose those hospitals with the best patient safety record,” he said. Without that information, patients are more likely to suffer from avoidable accidents, “and some of them will die as a result.”

James Gelfand, executive vice president of public affairs for the ERISA Industry Committee (a trade association representing about 100 of the nation’s largest self-insured employers who purchase health benefits for their employees and families), called the CMS proposed rule “ludicrous.”

“Essentially what they’re saying is that patients got treated badly, so they’re going to report badly, and so the hospitals are going to score badly. And, therefore, we have to keep the data secret,” he said acidly.

Leah Binder, president and CEO of the Leapfrog Group, which uses the CMS data to score hospitals with safety grades from A to F, told MedPage Today that she worries that not only will this proposed rule likely be finalized, but that CMS will extend the suppressed public reporting indefinitely, because they don’t want “to make hospitals unhappy with them.”

“It scares me,” she continued. “I know enough to be frightened … if hospitals are not able to manage their operations in order to protect their patients.”

The existing reporting system allows scoring for serious and potentially fatal hospital errors, such as pressure ulcers, falls resulting in hip fracture, and several preventable postoperative complications, such as sepsis, respiratory failure, and hemorrhage. Under the CMS proposed let-off, consumers would not be able to compare, for example, an individual facility’s postoperative pulmonary embolism rates or perioperative hemorrhage rates.

What Scares Me

The most troubling aspect of all this is that hospitals around the world, and many of them in the US, are dangerous. Don’t go there!

But they don’t want you to know the risks. They do everything to hide their dirty secrets.

Notwithstanding, in the year 2000, honored Harvard public-health expert, Dr. Barbara Starfield, published her shocking report in JAMA: “Is US Health Really the Best in the World?”

And her revelation was that, NO it is definitely not.

Every year in the US there are:

  • 12,000 deaths from unnecessary surgeries;
  • 7,000 deaths from medication errors in hospitals;
  • 20,000 deaths from other errors in hospitals;
  • 80,000 deaths from infections acquired in hospitals;
  • 106,000 deaths from FDA-approved correctly prescribed medicines.

The total of medically-caused deaths in the US every year is 225,000. Notice the 106,000 patients who die from correctly prescribed medicines! Go figure.

As ace-investigative reported Jon Rappoport quipped: “This makes the medical system the third leading cause of death in the US, behind heart disease and cancer.” (nomorefakenews.com)

The late Barbara Starfield

Now CMS wants to hide the facts, so they can go on raking in the loot, killing people (who cares, it’s a crapshoot) and being among the worst healthcare systems in the world (38th at the last estimate).

It’s easier than trying to put right the deficiencies, of course.

AND IF YOU HAVEN’T SPOTTED IT: THAT MEANS THAT THE PUBLISHED “COVID DEATHS” SHOULD BE REDUCED BY ABOUT HALF A MILLION (2+ year’s worth of medical deaths). That doesn’t make it less scary but it does take attention away from the media COVID fear-mongering.

To your good health,


Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby
The Official Alternative Doctor

SOURCE:

https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/exclusives/98843