From the very beginning, the Affordable Care Act, better known as ObamaCare, has been a fraud. This revolutionary healthcare legislation was passed by the Obama-controlled Congress in 2010 without a single Republican vote. That should tell you something about this legislation right away since Republicans rarely ever agree on anything. But they certainly agreed this was bad for healthcare and bad for the country.

I have written three books about ObamaCare including The ObamaCare Train Wreck, The ObamaCare Reality, andChanging Healthcare – so I know a thing or two about this subject. Yet even I was appalled to learn the latest news about the fraud that has been perpetrated by the Biden administration.

Brian Blasé, writing in The Wall Street Journal, tells us, “The Biden administration has made ObamaCare even more wasteful than it already was. A new Paragon analysis estimates that five million enrollees are receiving health-insurance subsidies well above the amounts to which they are legally entitled. The subsidy amount is largely determined by income, so that brokers and insurers alike financially benefit if applicants misstate their incomes. The administration, seeking to inflate coverage numbers, has prioritized enrollment over the program’s integrity. That has fostered fraudulent spending, which we estimate at $20 billion in 2024.”

How could this happen?

In August 2022, President Biden signed legislation increasing subsidies through 2025. In states that haven’t adopted ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion, taxpayers pay the entire plan premium for enrollees with income between 100% and 150% of the federal poverty level. ObamaCare bars federal assistance to people with incomes below the poverty line who live in states that haven’t expanded Medicaid.

That creates an incentive to submit applications estimating income between 100% and 150% of the federal poverty level. Such misestimates of income, whether intentional or accidental, cost taxpayers thousands of dollars per enrollee. The average annual subsidy for this income group is about $6,000 per adult.

Most people who sign up for insurance-exchange plans are counseled by brokers and agents. Customers provide personal information because they are told the coverage is free. Many people wouldn’t pay any of their own money for this coverage and enroll if they weren’t told there is no financial cost.

Blasé says, “Many more enrollees than are eligible are reporting income within narrow ranges that leave them with zero premium for a plan. The scope of this problem suggests something akin to organized fraud. Reports indicate that unscrupulous agents and brokers aiming to maximize their commissions are switching many ObamaCare enrollees into new plans without their consent.”

In several states, the number of people signed up for coverage with an application listing income between 100% to 150% of the federal poverty level exceeds the number of working-age adults with income in that range. Children and seniors in this income range aren’t eligible for exchange plans. In Florida, 2.7 million people who reported income between 100% and 150% of the federal poverty level signed up for an exchange plan this year. Yet our analysis found that only about 700,000 Floridians with income in this range are eligible for such coverage. In Georgia, the respective figures were 830,000 and 340,000.

Who benefits from this fraud?

Insurers benefit because the Treasury pays ObamaCare subsidies directly to them. Hospitals benefit because more of their patients have healthcare insurance, reducing their charitable treatments. Patients in the system benefit from free or nearly-free healthcare. Politicians benefit because they can brag to their constituents about lowering the cost of healthcare insurance. But they won’t brag about lowering your taxes because taxpayers have to pay for all this government largess.

Blasé makes three recommendations to eliminate this fraud:

• Refrain from enacting legislation renewing the enhanced ObamaCare subsidies after 2025.
• Significantly increase the amount of subsidies that insurers and brokers must repay if income is misstated.
• End auto-reenrollment into plans from one year to the next and reverse Biden administration actions that enabled such widespread fraud.

Progressives have been trying to implement socialized medicine – complete government control of healthcare – since the days of President Teddy Roosevelt. ObamaCare has taken them one step closer to their goal and Biden has enabled this latest step forward through widespread misstatements of income while government looks the other way. It’s time to put a stop to this.

The U.S. Surgeon General and I are on the same page. Recently I warned about the dangers of smart phones to our youth (Smart Phones Destroying Our Youth). This week Dr. Vivek Murthy, the U.S. Surgeon General agreed.

Dr. Murthy has called for warning labels on social-media platforms, saying urgent action is needed to address a mental health emergency involving young people. Gareth Vipers, writing in The Wall Street Journal, tells us Dr Murthy says warning labels, similar to those on alcohol and tobacco products, should accompany platforms to “regularly remind parents that social media has not been proved safe,” in an op-ed for The New York Times.

Murthy cited research showing that social media was an important contributor to a growing mental-health crisis among young people. “Adolescents who spend more than three hours a day on social media face double the risk of anxiety and depression symptoms, and the average daily use in this age group, as of the summer of 2023, was 4.8 hours,” Murthy said.

Four point eight hours! If you sleep eight hours, that leaves 16 hours for an average day awake. These young people are spending more than 25% of their waking hours on social media! Is there any wonder we have a problem?

The surgeon general didn’t name any social-media companies in the article. TikTok, Snapchat, X and Meta Platforms, which owns Facebook and Instagram, didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

Murthy has long warned of the risks of social media to young people, urging policymakers and technology companies to increase safeguarding efforts and strengthen standards for younger users. ​​“We are in the middle of a national youth mental health crisis,” he said in a report published last year. “I am concerned that social media is an important driver of that crisis—one that we must urgently address.”

The report pointed to several studies examining a range of adverse effects of social media on adolescents. Those include online harassment, increased exposure to content related to self-harm and racism, and negative impacts on sleep, body image and physical activity.

The Wall Street Journal’s Facebook Files series in 2021 showed internal research at the company found Instagram was harmful for a percentage of young users, primarily teenage girls with body-image concerns. The research reviewed by the Journal showed the platform made body-image issues worse for a third of teenage girls. Facebook, which became Meta in 2021, scrapped plans to create an Instagram platform tailored to children after lawmakers and others raised concerns over the popular app’s impact on young people’s mental health.

Government officials, lawmakers and technology companies have for years grappled with how best to manage the issue. Lawmakers in the U.S. and Europe are weighing plans to tighten online age restrictions. Last year, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican, signed a law requiring social-media companies to verify users are 18 years or older, and require those under age 18 to receive the consent of a parent or guardian to open an account.

It is encouraging to see our U.S. Surgeon General take a stand on this issue of great significance to the health of our youth. Perhaps his action will give parents the motivation and encouragement they need to set standards for their children and enforce them.

Nearly seven million Americans are living with Alzheimer’s Disease. Approximately one in three seniors dies with Alzheimer’s or another dementia. It kills more than breast cancer and prostate cancer combined. Over eleven million Americans provide unpaid care for people with Alzheimer’s or other dementias. In 2024, Alzheimer’s and other dementias will cost the nation $360 billion. By 2050, these costs could rise to nearly $1 Trillion. These are just some of the alarming statistics about this disease from the Alzheimer’s Association website.

With that background, the good news is there is progress in developing new medicines to treat this dreaded disease.  The editorial board of The Wall Street Journal tells us a Food and Drug Administration advisory committee just unanimously recommended approval of a new Alzheimer’s disease treatment called donanemab, manufactured by Eli Lilly Pharmaceuticals.

Lilly has spent more than 30 years and $8 billion working on Alzheimer’s treatments. Four clinical trials with another experimental drug had failed. After one pivotal trial in 2016 disappointed, some dismissed Lilly’s strategy of targeting amyloid plaque in the brain—a signature of the disease—and urged the company to abandon its Alzheimer’s drug research.

Instead, Lilly learned from earlier trials and made a major bet on donanemab, another anti-amyloid drug. Some patients in earlier trials suffered from other forms of dementia. Advances in brain imaging enabled Lilly to accurately diagnose and screen Alzheimer’s patients for its donanemab trial. Lilly also used brain scans to track disease progression.

Donanemab clears amyloid that had built up over decades and slows decline by an average of 35% over 18 months. While such benefits are modest, the drug can extend patients’ ability to function independently by months and, possibly, years. Patients also get precious more time with loved ones.

Catching and treating Alzheimer’s early, as with many diseases, improves the prognosis. Patients in earlier stages of the disease notably showed greater benefits from the drug. Nearly half experienced no decline after one year. Among those in the earliest stage, donanemab slowed decline on average by 60%.

Donanemab’s benefits continued even after patients stopped taking the monthly infusions. Nobody wants to be on a drug for the rest of their lives, especially one that carries a small risk of brain bleeding that must be continuously monitored. The FDA panel unanimously agreed that donanemab’s benefits exceed the risks.

Scientists disagree about Alzheimer’s causes, but many believe that amyloid drives a degenerative neurological cascade, which results in brain inflammation and neuron death. Amyloid develops decades before patients show cognitive symptoms. Donanemab is the third drug to show that removing amyloid early in the disease can slow decline.

If approved, donanemab will compete with the anti-amyloid lecanemab by Biogen and Eisai, which showed somewhat fewer side effects in trials. Donanemab requires an infusion only once a month compared to twice for lecanemab. Patients can weigh the risks against the benefits with their doctors and caregivers.

Meantime, artificial intelligence is accelerating the development of blood tests that can diagnose Alzheimer’s and predict it years before patients show cognitive problems. This holds the promise that anti-amyloid treatments might soon be used for prevention, as statins are for heart disease.

After Lilly’s major trial ended in failure eight years ago, many scientists declared Alzheimer’s untreatable. They were wrong. Lilly shows that perseverance can pay off. Let’s hope others will follow their lead and continue the fight to treat this dreaded disease that affects so many of our elderly citizens.