The Health System, Federal Courts, U.S. Congress Have Let Us Down!
These and other institutions have grown fat, lazy, unresponsive, and worse. Hence, President-Elect Donald J. Trump.
A key turning point in the recent presidential election was GOP Donald J. Trump’s embrace of independent Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a lifelong Democrat.
Kennedy went on to make speeches and social media posts describing the abysmal state of U.S. healthcare. Many Americans had no idea it was so bad.
Kennedy, who has been vilified by the media for years, said the U.S. has the highest chronic disease burden in the world. This despite the fact the U.S. is spending 4.3 trillion annually on healthcare, more than 3x the national defense budget. How could this be? Why didn’t we know this?
In 2022, the U.S. spent $12,555 per person on health care, which was over $4,000 more than any other high-income nation. Yet, the U.S. has a lower life expectancy than most other countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), plus higher infant mortality rates, higher avoidable mortality rates, and higher rates of death from violent injuries.
The U.S. ranked 32nd out of 38 OECD countries in life expectancy in 2021, with 76.4 years.
Check the news today.
Here is the headline from The New York Times: “Kennedy’s Views Mix Mistrust of Business with Unfounded Health Claims.”
Why isn’t the NYT asking itself how our Cadillac system has so badly failed Americans? Why is our health care system so atrocious? And, by the way, what has the NYT been doing for decades while American’s were dying at disproportionate rates?
Read this from National Public Radio: “If confirmed, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will have broad influence over federal agencies and health care policy — a prospect that worries many in public health given his history of conspiracy theories.”
Instead of mischaracterizing Kennedy’s concerns about vaccines, why doesn’t our publicly funded radio station investigate America’s broken health care? Why was it only Kennedy has raised the alarm? For the past year, NPR has been touting a rainbow of genders and the evils of Western civilization. Why didn’t it investigate our train wreck of a health system?
Federal Courts
It is less well known that the federal court system in the past year has been exposed as a rats’ nest of corruption.
Bloomberg Law wrote an exceptional series about a sex scandal in Texas that illustrates a complete lack of effective oversight of the country’s leading bankruptcy court. The corruption was going on for years. Several federal judges covered it up (but, of course, have faced no consequences).
Here’s the abbreviated version — Chief Bankruptcy Judge David R. Jones was living with a partner in a leading Houston bankruptcy firm, and allegedly gave preference to cases from that firm. Gross injustice ensued. Finally, a “disgruntled litigant” tried to blow the lid but several judges in this district kept putting his evidence under seal from public view.
When it finally leaked out, Priscilla Richman, the Chief Judge of the Fifth Circuit, decided an investigation was in order. Three days later, Jones retired with a fat pension.
I discovered the federal judiciary in 2022 ignored recommendations from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to establish an independent investigative body to police abuse and corruption in the federal courts. It refused.
The judiciary nixed the idea on the grounds it would hamper judicial independence - never mind that litigants are being abused and cheated by corrupt judges.
So here’s how complaints are now handled.
Chief Judges, like Richman, accept misconduct complaints and decide whether they are meritorious. There is no independent investigation. It doesn’t matter if the chief judge is friends with the accused judge, or would just prefer to cover up any unpleasantness.
Falsified Evidence
Earlier this year, I filed a misconduct complaint against a judge in Nevada who falsified evidence in my age discrimination case - literally made stuff up (and I would not say this if there wasn’t clear evidence to back it up). She then committed “perjury” by signing her decision containing the false evidence.
A Pasadena, CA-based three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco dismissed the appeal without addressing the issue of the falsified evidence, despite having an ethical obligation to report it to the Chief Judge.
Then the Chief Judge of the Ninth Circuit dismissed my complaint of judicial misconduct against the panel and the Nevada judge. There was no independent investigation.
There is one last recourse that seems utterly pointless - a request for reconsideration by a Ninth Circuit Judicial Council that has issued formulaic one-page dismissals for virtually every one of the dozens of requests for reconsideration that it has received in the past year.
Bottom Line
The bottom line is that Americans have been paying doctors and judges huge salaries to do vital work. We have trusted the U.S. Congress to provide serious oversight of how our tax dollars are spent by these institutions. But every year the plight of Americans grows worse and worse.
I applaud Kennedy for targeting industry capture of our publicly funded medical institutions, like the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, National Institutes for Health, Food and Drug Administration, and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and Indian Health Services. God bless him for persisting in the face of abuse by the media.
Many Americans voted for President-Elect Trump in the hopes that Kennedy will improve our health and that of our children.
Now who will tackle the corruption in the federal courts?