Posts Tagged ‘cancer’

LinkSwarm for April 28, 2017

Friday, April 28th, 2017

It’s been a week, so enjoy an extra-late Friday LinkSwarm

  • There’s lots of meat in President Trump’s tax reform proposal:

    Individual Reform

    Tax relief for American families, especially middle-income families:

  • Reducing the 7 tax brackets to 3 tax brackets of to%, 25% and 35%
  • Doubling the standard deduction
  • Providing tax relief for families with child and dependent care expenses
  • Simplification:

  • Eliminate targeted tax breaks that mainly benefit the wealthiest taxpayers
  • Protect the home ownership and charitable gift tax deductions
  • Repeal the Alternative Minimum Tax
  • Repeal the death tax
  • Repeal the 3.8% Obamacare tax that hits small businesses and investment income
  • Business Reform

  • 15% business tax rate
  • Territorial tax system to level the playing field for American companies
  • One-time tax on trillions of dollars held overseas
  • Eliminate tax breaks for special interests
  • Texas House passes anti-Santuary City bill that fines officials for violating federal immigration laws.
  • North Korean ballistic missile test fails. Cue the sad trombone.

  • Obama’s Iran deal was even worse than we thought. “By dropping charges against major arms targets, the administration infuriated Justice Department officials — and undermined its own counterproliferation task forces.”
  • If Democrats keep moving left, they could experience another election like 1972:

    The highest-profile Democratic-party supporters are increasingly smug Hollywood actors, rich Wall Street and Silicon Valley elitists, and embittered members of the media, along with careerist identity groups and assorted protest movements — a fossilized 1972 echo chamber.

    Democrats’ politically correct messaging derides opponents as deplorable racists, sexists, bigots, xenophobes, homophobes, Islamophobes, and nativists. That shrill invective only further turns off Middle America. Being merely anti-Trump is no more a successful Democratic agenda than being anti-Nixon was in 1972.

  • If the election were held today, Trump would still beat Clinton.
  • Former Mayor of Hubbard, Ohio pleads guilty to raping a four year old. Go ahead, guess which party he’s a member of.
  • The Other McCain does his part for sexual assault awareness month.
  • The media does indeed live in a bubble, both geographic and ideological, of its own making.
  • Hundreds of illegal voters in North Carolina. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Nancy Pelosi: tried, drunk or stroke? (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • 107 Cancer Papers Retracted Due To Peer Review Fraud. But don’t worry: All climate science is completely on the level…
  • When Democratic Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke swore up and down he never hire any campaign consultants, what he meant was he’d hire some.
  • “Facebook and Google confirmed as victims of $100M phishing scam.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • President Trump as a systems thinking President.
  • NYPD corruption scandal. Bribes? Check. Guns? Check. Prostitutes? Check. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Marine Le Pen heads to a runoff with Emmanuel Macron on May 7. Is there a better figurehead for modern Globalism than a Socialist investment banker?
  • Dishonest medical equipment startup Theranos used a shell company to secretly buy outside lab equipment to actually run the lab tests they were faking as coming from their own equipment. And check out that picture caption: “[CEO] Elizabeth Holmes speaks at the Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting.” Because of course she did.
  • Liberals love denouncing the imaginary Christian theocracy of The Handmaid’s Tale (now a miniseries) because it keeps them from having to think about the real Islamic ones oppressing women all over the world right at this very moment.
  • Related: “Lesbian Couple Discover Islamic Culture During Exciting International Trip.”
  • “When God sends a Plague of Wild Boars against you, he’s done sending messages, and is now sending armored bacon.”
  • Less than half of Democrats know a gun owner.
  • Richard Gere blacklisted in Hollywood on China’s orders.
  • Sonny Bunch has some “helpful” advice for Democrats. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Nordstrom selling $425 fake muddy jeans. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • You too can own a baseball inscribed to Justice Antonin Scalia by Joe DiMaggio.
  • “My Boyfriend Ate Nothing But Pineapple For A Week And Now His Dick Is Covered In Bees.”
  • ObamaCare to Houston Cancer Patients: Drop Dead!

    Thursday, November 5th, 2015

    The latest ObamaCare exchange plans are out, and if you’re a cancer patient in Houston, you’re screwed:

    The healthcare marketplace is open once again, but if you look closely at the offered insurance plans you might find something lacking: coverage for specialized treatments.

    Preferred Provider Plans, or PPOs, often do cover specialized treatment like care for cancer patients.The loss of individual-market plan PPOs will affect tens of thousands of people who buy their insurance privately rather than through an employer. Before the Affordable Care Act, it was the way most people who did not have employer insurance got coverage.

    Jenny Deam, with the Houston Chronicle, investigates the disappearance of these plans. She says there will no longer be any plans, by any carrier on the federal exchange for the Houston area, that cover treatment at the MD Anderson Cancer Center.

    If you’re unfamiliar with MD Anderson, they’re one of the best cancer treatment centers in the world. For many cancer patients, the difference between MD Anderson and another cancer treatment center is quite literally between life and death.

    Remember “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor”?

    Not so much.

    The media mocked Sarah Palin for using the phrase “death panels,” but in the name of cost controls, they’re already implementing them at the provider level.

    (Hat tip: ColorMeRed’s Twitter feed.)

    Cancer and ObamaCare

    Thursday, March 20th, 2014

    Evidently ObamaCare is just a bottomless well of suck. The news is bad and getting worse, especially for cancer patients and Democrats.

    First up: 15 of 19 nationally recognized cancer centers are not in ObamaCare. Let me tell you that this is a big, big deal for cancer patients.

    My father is currently battling stage 3 esophageal cancer, and is having surgery next week. (Prognosis at this stage looks very good.) After his initial diagnosis, it took him something like a month to take all the tests and see all the specialists to go over the results of the tests, followed by radiation and chemo (which was every bit as fun as you imagine).

    After finding the tumor was still there (but thankfully not metastasized), my father wondered if it might be possible to undertake experimental drug treatments rather than surgery, and I found them the number of MD Anderson‘s cancer study hotline ((800) 392-1611, just in case you need it).

    MD Anderson got all their medical stuff, had them come early the next week, and completed all the consultations and tests (including EKG, X-Ray, CAT scan, PET scan) in a single day. Boom, boom, boom, boom.

    “it was like night and day.”

    Mortality for this type of surgery can be as high as 19%. At MD Anderson? 2%.

    Cancer is a scary thing under the best of circumstances; ObamaCare makes it a whole lot scarier, especially when “bending the cost curve” involves eliminating the most effective treatment.

    More ObamaCare news:

  • Getting ObamaCare in parts of Oklahoma means having to drive more than an hour for treatment
  • “If Obamacare isn’t a disaster, what does a disaster look like?”
  • And here are four more reasons premiums will be going up.
  • Enjoy your 47% insurance rate hike thanks to ObamaCare, 27-year olds!
  • Think it’s hard to enroll in ObamaCare? It’s even harder to un-enroll.
  • Democrats choices on handling ObamaCare? Not good.
  • Christopher Hitchens on His Battle Against Cancer

    Friday, August 6th, 2010

    As always, an interesting essay. Including wondering why cancer is the one malady people always battle. “You don’t hear it about long-term sufferers from heart disease or kidney failure.”

    I previously talked about Hitchen’s cancer about a month ago.

    (Hat tip: Diana Fleischman’s Facebook feed.)

    LinkSwarm for Saturday, July 3, 2010

    Saturday, July 3rd, 2010

    A few tidbits to tide you over the Independence Day weekend:

    • Dwight over at Whipped Cream Difficulties has a very interesting post up on Maywood, California closing their police department down. Summary: It has less to do with the budget crunch than with the entire department acting like corrupt, out-of-control thugs running roughshod over innocent people. Dwight and I both though of the similar situation in the (now thankfully dissolved) township of New Rome, Ohio.
    • “I don’t know whether the Tea Party movement will die out. But I sure hope it hangs on long enough to take down Lindsey Graham.” (Yeah, this was already on Fark, with that exact headline, but since I was the submitter…)
    • Former leftist, opponent of jihad, devout atheist and relapsed smoker Christopher Hitchens has suspended his book tour to be treated for esophageal cancer. Hitchens intellectual journey from being a (mostly) far-leftist to being a (mostly) neo-conservative has been deeply gratifying to those of us on the right, and as a voice sounding the alarm against radical Islam he’s probably only second (at least in the U.S.) to Mark Steyn. (So yes, the two most powerful voices against jihad in the U.S. are a Brit and a Canadian.) As an agnostic, I have no particular stance on the metaphysical certitude of Hitchens’ atheism, but I do believe he’s underestimated the vital role religion plays as a binding agent in a free society, as those societies which made atheism a central tenant (the Soviet Union and its ilk) don’t seem to have profited by it. (To paraphrase the late Octavia Butler, “I don’t believe in God, but the people growing up today don’t seem to believe in anything at all, and it’s scary.”) I always thought it would be interesting to debate Hitchens on the issue from the viewpoint of the social utility of religion rather than its metaphysical truth. BattleSwarm Blog wishes him a speedy recovery.

    (Hat tips: Whipped Cream Difficulties, the Bookfinder Insider Mailing List)