June, 2017, Part 5, Political Class Insanity: Medical Ripoffs, NATO Ripoffs and Education Taxpayer Ripoffs

As we do every month, we review the latest idiocy, lunacy, ineptness, and general insanity from the American political class. We are getting started as little late this month since we needed to review the latest global warming.climate change insanity from the likes of Al Gore, culminating in our review of the 26 reasons why it was appropriate and necessary for Trump to pull us out of the Paris Climate Agreement:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2017/06/june-2017-part-4-i-am-global-warming.html

But let’s quickly get into this month’s political class insanity because over the past month or so there has been a lot of it was Washington implodes into a useless pile of incompetence:

1) We have often pointed out how horribly most public schools educate our kids these days. Despite spending trillions of dollars at every level of government over the past few decades to educate our kids, the results have almost always been abysmal. Our kids usually rank behind the kids of dozens of other countries whenever scores on standardized tests are compiled despite the trillions of dollars spent, and wasted, on education in this country.

And apparently things do not get much better for many of our college graduates either. Consider a recent report by Douglas Belkin, writing for the Wall Street Journal:

• The College Learning Assessment Plus test (CLA+) is administered to freshmen and seniors at about 200 U.SA. college across the country.
• After four years, the test results are compared between the freshmen test results and the senior year test results.
• The test is meant to determine the critical thinking skills of our college graduates, not what they think or know but how they think and reason.
• The latest results show that at more than half of the 200 schools using the test, more than a third of college graduates “were unable to make a cohesive argument, assess the quality of evidence in a document and interpret data in a table.”
• At some of the most prestigious, and expensive colleges, in the testing program, the ability to improve thinking skills from freshman year to senior year showed little or no improvement.

As the world and technology change more and more rapidly, those college graduates that have no ability to think clearly, reasonably, and logically will not only leave themselves behind but also help the country remain more and more uncompetitive vs. the rest of the world. All of this despite trillions and trillions of dollars wasted in this country on educating our kids.

And when an outsider comes into the picture, someone like Betsy DeVos, to try and change what is obviously a failed approach to education, from Head Start through college, the political establishment players go crazy. They would prefer the failed, expensive and current policies then even try to do something different.

What did Einstein say once: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” We are truly insane then when it comes to education.

2) Some people both in this country and in Europe got really upset when Trump dared to suggest that most members of NATO were not living up to their commitment to defend themselves and the NATO alliance. Given that Obama allowed these European allies to slide by for eight years without doing what they committed to do trained the Europeans to lash out when someone actually told them the truth.

But Trump was right when you consider the numbers and realities. As the U.S. continues to spend more than half a trillion dollars a year to defend itself and NATO allies during the Obama regime, consider what the Europeans were doing, as reported in a recent Wall Street Journal article:

• Although during the Cold War the Netherlands maintained a tank force of 445 tanks, by 2015 they had put its last 60 tanks up for sale and had sold off all of its helicopters and most of its minesweepers.
• During the Cold War, Germany had over 2,100 tanks but now has only 244 of which about half actually work.
• As of last year on average, 9 of German’s 48 NH-90 transport helicopters and 40 of its just 123 jet fighters were usable at any one time.
• Today, European NATO forces have less than half of the number of soldiers today vs. 1983 and less than half the number of tanks.
• The European NATO forces had 84 destroyers in 1983 but only 54 today, it had 2,672 fighter planes in 1983 but only 1,897 today, and it had 173 frigates but only 92 today.

This the reality that Trump was talking about and why he was looking out for the American taxpayer: why should we continue to pay for a defense of Europe when Europe is not willing to pay for a defense of itself. Trump was doing what all American Presidents should be doing: looking out for the welfare of Americans and America.

3) We recently reviewed the reality that the Federal government wastes or criminally loses at least $144 billion a YEAR from its government programs with Medicare and Medicaid, the main Federal health insurance programs, wasting the vast majority of that $144 billion. 

A recent article in the AARP magazine described a medical scam that was going on in California and illustrated that it is not always seedy street criminals who are stealing money via health care scams, those stealing of money from insurance companies and Medicare and Medicaid are often doctors themselves. 

While the article’s details, highlighted below, are not directly connected to Medicare and Medicaid and taxpayer ripoffs, it does illustrate what is likely going on within the criminal activities relative to those programs also:

• California state officials recently announced that a group of doctors, pharmacists, and others were arrested for ripping off $40 million from state insurance companies.
• Twenty six people were arrested in the fraud investigation.
• 13,000 victims were ripped off as were 27 insurance companies.
• A husband and wife couple who owned a medical billing and medical management companies allegedly recruited doctors and pharmacists to provide unnecessary treatments and medicine that were illegally billed through insurance companies.
• Part of the scheme involved pharmacists creating medicinal and unnecessary ointments, ointments that had no medical value, that cost very little to produce but were billed anywhere from $200 to $750 per ointment tube.
• Another part of the scheme had doctors prescribing unnecessary urine tests that were, of course, criminally billed to insurance companies.

You get the idea. If the insurance companies could not catch the criminals before $40 million was ripped off, you can imagine how many billions of dollars are currently be ripped off by doctors and pharmacists via Medicare and Medicaid using similar scams. That is how easily inept Federal government programs can lose tens of billions of dollars over the years.

That will do it for today’s insanity: medical and insurance ripoffs, European nations using American taxpayers to fund their defense, and trillions of taxpayer dollars spent but our kids are still massively under educated. More insanity to follow.

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