Rachel Varley

Be the change you wish to see in the world

[Rodney Smith Jr @iamrodneysmith]

Dear @WhiteHouse, my name is Rodney Smith Jr., founder of Raising Men & Women Lawn Care Service in Huntsville, Alabama. Through our 50 Yard Challenge, over 6,000 kids across the country have signed up to mow free lawns for the elderly, disabled, veterans, active-duty military, first responders, and single parents. With America celebrating its 250th birthday this year and me also being born on July 4th, I wanted to humbly ask if a few kids from our program and myself could travel to Washington, D.C. to help mow the White House lawn for this historic celebration.

More than anything, I want these kids to see how a simple act of service something as ordinary as mowing a lawn for someone in need can lead to extraordinary places. What better lesson in community service than showing them that helping others can take them all the way to our nation’s capital? I’d also love to bring my American flag-themed mower in hopes that the President might sign it, so I can later auction it off and donate 100% of the proceeds to a nonprofit supporting veterans. It would be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to highlight the importance of service, patriotism, and the impact young people can have when they choose to make a difference. 🇺🇸

[Thomas Massie @RepThomasMassie]

I’m flattered, but imagine the horror if I were to be elected as the tax assessor in Orange County, California!

[HustleBitch @HustleBitch_]

🚨 UNITEDHEALTHCARE DENIED A PREMATURE BABY’S NICU COVERAGE — AND THE LETTER WAS ADDRESSED TO THE BABY

A father is going viral after revealing that he and his wife received a letter denying coverage for their twins' NICU stay.

But that's not the part that has people furious.

According to him, the denial letter wasn't addressed to either parent.

It was addressed directly to the baby.

The father says his premature newborn's first piece of mail was a healthcare coverage denial.

His response?

“If the baby was still in the womb, would you have sent the letter to my wife and had her eat it so the baby could read it?”

The clip is now exploding online as people debate:

• how insurance companies handle claims
• who is actually making these decisions
• and whether the healthcare system has completely lost its humanity

The comments are pouring in:

• “This can't be real.”
• “We've become numbers, not people.”
• “The baby got denied before it could even talk.”
• “Healthcare in America is broken.”

At what point does an insurance company stop feeling like a healthcare provider and start feeling like a claims-denial machine?

📹: Instagram/blakewexler

[Dutch Rojas @DutchRojas]

You’re worried about the debt.

Fine.
Name the line item.

It’s healthcare.
It has always been healthcare.

The federal government does not buy healthcare like a market.

It buys healthcare like a Soviet planning committee with lobbyists.

CMS sets prices.
Congress creates carveouts.

HHS writes rules nobody understands.

Then every trade association in Washington shows up to turn one sentence into a billion-dollar reimbursement advantage.

Friends on Ways and Means?
Congratulations. You found margin.

Protected category?
Congratulations.
You found a moat.

Special payment model?
Congratulations. You found a taxpayer-funded annuity.

Everyone wants to argue about Medicaid fraud in California or Minneapolis because it makes for a clean villain.

The real villain is bigger.

It is the entire healthcare bureaucracy pretending central planning becomes moral because the acronym is federal.

Medicare and Medicaid keep growing faster than the economy.

Healthcare already consumes roughly a third of federal spending.

Zero out foreign aid.
Zero out culture-war nonsense.
Zero out half the things cable news screams about.

The debt still wins because the machine keeps writing healthcare checks nobody priced in a real market.

This is why every serious debt conversation eventually ends in healthcare.

Not tanks.
Not Iran.

Not some DEI grant your uncle found on Facebook.

Healthcare.

The deficit is a hospital bill with a flag on it.

[Neurosurgery @neurosurgery]

🚨 REPORT: 82% of physicians are now employed by hospitals or corporate entities. Nearly two-thirds of practices are no longer physician-owned.

This outcome should not surprise anyone.

For more than a decade, Medicare payment cuts, mounting administrative burden, growing insurer oligopolies, and policies that disadvantage independent practices have made this outcome entirely predictable.

If lawmakers want more competition, lower costs, and better access to care, preserving independent practice must be part of the conversation.

No single reform will reverse decades of consolidation. But policymakers can start by fixing Medicare, fixing prior authorization, expanding physician-owned hospitals, and strengthening antitrust enforcement.

Dive into the full study 👉
https://t.co/FJ227IpoHa

@AANSNeuro @CNS_Update @spinesection @AANSCNStrauma @painsection @councilsns @physicianhosp

[Ohio State Medical Association @OhioMedicine]

82% of U.S. physicians are now employed by hospitals or corporate entities, according to a new report from @PhysAdvocacy.

The issue isn't where physicians work. It's who gets the final say in patient care.

Physician advocacy is patient advocacy.

https://t.co/gO7CLMn1IJ

[Sally Pipes @sallypipes]

Nearly 30% of British patients wait more than two months to begin cancer treatment after referral. When bureaucrats control the health system, patients are forced to wait.

https://t.co/kgS4iVDZWm

[Christine Price @HEALTHCOSTtruth]

$5,614.12 saved on a single CT scan.
Same procedure code (74177 — CT abdomen and pelvis with contrast). Two hospitals. One bill.

Physician-owned hospital (pays real estate taxes, gets no grants): $951.38 self-pay.

Non-profit hospital (pays no real estate taxes, receives federal and state grants): $6,565.50 cash price.

There's a lot of discussion lately about whether physician-owned hospitals inflate charges as massively as non-profits. This is one example from my personal experience. The "non-profit" charged nearly 7x more for the same scan than the for-profit physician-owned hospital.

Section 6001 of the ACA froze new physician-owned hospitals in 2010. The hospital lobby called it patient protection. The data calls it competition suppression.

We all got screwed when they stopped physicians from owning hospitals.

Section 6001 should be repealed.

Do your homework. Support the hospitals that help us. Avoid the ones that don't. Simple as 1-2-3.

#healthcarecosts #POH

[Paleoncologist @JOSEPH45075332]

The sad fact is, EMRs did not ruin medicine

The HITECH act ruined EMRs

By ossifying EMRs in the technology of the 2010s; aided and abetted by Epic and Judy Faulkner, we ensured that EMRs would evolve at the pace of a Washington bureaucrat

Never moving forward without their blessing

In the same time frame we have -

Smart phones that are light years ahead of 2010
AI
Self driving cars
Re-usable rockets
Robotic surgery

And

An EMR based on 1960s software that can only have one window functional at a time …

We’ll never know how awesome EMRs could have been right now

I have no doubt that in an alternate universe without the HITECH act, EMRs would be AI native and phenomenal tools for doctors, hospitals and patients

I mourn the loss of what could have been

But … they’ll *NEVER* move forward if lobbyists and Congress determine their parameters and we are FORCED to buy them no matter how bad they are

Where is the motivation to innovate when your “customer” will buy the product whether it sucks or is great???

[Surgery Center of OK @SurgeryCenterOK]

Whose idea was the EMR and have they apologized?

[WA Miscreant @bradsl]

@GadSaad Oh! I thought you were talking about our legislators! (Politics is war without bloodshed. -Mao Zedong)
Break out the tar and feathers!

[Dutch Rojas @DutchRojas]

I don’t know @MidwesternDoc or
@VigilantFox but I am thankful they posted on this essential topic to a whole group of people I’d never reach.

Physicians ownership leads to lower health insurance costs and higher quality outcomes.

Remember felons can own hospitals, MBAs can own hospitals, but the people doing the work may not.

[Classic Learning Test @CLT_Exam]

One reason classical education produces more mature young people is because it introduces them to greatness early.

Students spend years around saints, philosophers, statesmen, poets, generals, and missionaries.

They grow up reading about courage, sacrifice, honor, discipline, truth.

Modern education tries to protect students from greatness because greatness creates objective standards. But young people desperately want standards.

They want something higher than themselves to admire and live up to.

[Mark Cuban @mcuban]

I think the point was that when indie physicians close and or sell, one of the unintended consequences is that patients go to the ER. which Medicare pays more for. Costing taxpayers more money and making hospitals more money.

They rather than letting this happen , Medicare should pay those physicians more. It would end up costing taxpayers less

[Dutch Rojas @DutchRojas]

𝐌𝐚𝐧𝐡𝐚𝐭𝐭𝐚𝐧 𝐢𝐬 𝐨𝐟𝐟𝐢𝐜𝐢𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐫𝐮𝐫𝐚𝐥.

At least according to Medicare.
See what your lobby dollars can buy?

NewYork-Presbyterian.
2,850 beds.
$9.3 billion in revenue.
Classified as rural.

So is Cleveland Clinic.
$7 billion. Rural.

Cedars-Sinai, Los Angeles.
$4.3 billion. Rural.

UCSF San Francisco.
$6.1 billion. Rural.

AdventHealth Orlando.
$6.2 billion. Rural.

A Johns Hopkins researcher pulled a decade of CMS Medicare cost reports.

A 2016 CMS rule change let urban hospitals hold both urban and rural classifications simultaneously.
Urban wage index for Medicare payment.

Congress wrote the rural benefit for donations and to screw over the American people.

[Rachel Bovard @rachelbovard]

I’ve been saying “rise up, millennials” forever as a half joke but, uh, holy cow you guys. Spencer Pratt just spit out a more coherent, pragmatic, and compellingly articulated drug policy than anything I’ve heard from a decade of DC focus groups.

[AIPAC Tracker @TrackAIPAC]

@PopBase @RepMikeRogersAL @RepAdamSmith

[Dutch Rojas @DutchRojas]

$11 million in healthcare money flowed to the 45 members of the House Ways & Means Committee last cycle.

These are the people writing the tax code for 20% of the economy, including whether a “nonprofit” hospital keeps its exemption while your facility fee climbs.

The vote always has a donor behind it.

Drop your committee member’s name and I’ll show you theirs.

[Nicolas Hulscher, MPH @NicHulscher]

The LARGEST human ivermectin cancer study EVER conducted found 84% of cancer patients declared COMPLETE REMISSION, TUMOR SHRINKAGE, or HALTED TUMOR GROWTH.

Our study is now PEER-REVIEWED and PUBLISHED by the International Institute of Anticancer Research.

The tide is turning.

[Tony Seruga @TonySeruga]

🎯 Deep Dive: The Quiet Coup Inside the NDAA

The Responsible Statecraft piece has put its finger on something genuinely significant — and the fact that this is happening inside a must-pass $1.15 trillion defense bill, buried at Section 224, tells you everything about how the permanent national security apparatus operates when it wants to avoid a public fight.

🏗️ What Section 224 Actually Does

This isn’t a tweak. Section 224 — titled the “United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative” — is a structural rewiring of the U.S.-Israel military relationship.

The provision authorizes $150 million annually from FY2027 through FY2029, but the money is almost beside the point. What matters is the architecture it builds:

- Bilateral R&D across AI, quantum computing, autonomous systems, directed energy, cyber, biotech, counter-drone systems, and missile defense

- Co-production and joint ventures with Israeli defense firms on U.S. soil

- Licensing agreements that embed Israeli-origin intellectual property into Pentagon programs of record

- “Network integration” and “data fusion” — which means U.S. military data flowing into Israeli systems and vice versa

- Pathways from R&D straight into procurement, bypassing the normal foreign aid oversight channels

The key phrase in the legislative text: technologies are to be identified for “integration into United States systems and programs of record.” That’s not foreign aid. That’s making Israeli defense tech a backbone of the U.S. military.

🔄 The Strategic Shift: From Aid to Embedded Infrastructure

The Quincy Institute’s Steven Simon has been tracking this for months. His brief, The Disappearing Aid Check, lays out exactly what’s happening — and it’s more sophisticated than most people realize.

The current model: Israel receives Foreign Military Financing (FMF) through the State Department, voted on annually by Congress. It's visible. It's politically accountable. People can argue about it.

The new model: Phase out FMF grants and replace them with Pentagon procurement accounts, industrial partnerships, and sustainment pipelines. Same money, different door — one with vastly less transparency.

The logic, as Simon documents, is being sold under an “America First” framing: this isn’t a handout to Israel, it’s an investment in American military readiness, industrial capacity, and jobs. Israeli co-production facilities in Mississippi and Arkansas become political leverage — members of Congress protect the jobs in their districts, and the relationship becomes structurally impossible to unwind.

This is the same playbook the military-industrial complex always uses: distribute the subcontracts across as many congressional districts as possible so no one dares vote against the program. Now they’re doing it with a foreign country’s defense sector.

🕳️ The Transparency Problem

The shift from State Department-administered FMF to Pentagon procurement is the move that should alarm anyone who cares about accountability.

Under the FMF model:

- Congress votes on the aid package publicly
- The State Department provides human rights certifications
- There’s diplomatic oversight and policy conditionality
- Public debate is possible

Under the Pentagon procurement model:

- Funding moves through budget justification documents and program element descriptions
- Oversight is limited to “cost, readiness, and capability” — bureaucratic criteria
- The relationship gets evaluated like any other weapons program, not as a strategic political commitment
- No diplomatic strings attached

As the Responsible Statecraft piece notes, this would give Israel “a higher level of military-industrial integration than the U.S. has with any other country in the world” — including NATO allies. Not even the Five Eyes partners have this kind of embedded access to U.S. defense procurement.

🧬 The Legislative Genealogy

This didn’t come out of nowhere. H.R. 7540 (Rep. Ronny Jackson, R-TX) and S. 3855 (Sen. Ted Budd, R-NC) were introduced as standalone bills in February 2026 with nearly identical language. When a standalone passage looked difficult, the provisions got folded into the NDAA — the classic maneuver for legislation that can’t survive public scrutiny on its own.

The JINSA (Jewish Institute for National Security of America) influence is unmistakable. Their “Partners in Production” report explicitly recommended deeper industrial integration and the addition of Israel to the U.S. National Technology and Industrial Base (NTIB). The FY2026 NDAA had already directed DoD to establish a working group to assess exactly that. Section 224 is the next logical step — and JINSA’s fingerprints are all over it.

⚠️ Why This Matters More Than the Dollar Figure

$150 million a year is a rounding error in a $1.15 trillion defense bill. But the institutional architecture this creates is permanent.

Once Israeli firms are embedded in U.S. supply chains, once Israeli-origin IP is inside Pentagon programs of record, once U.S. and Israeli military data networks are fused — disentanglement becomes economically and institutionally impossible. You can’t just stop the aid check. You’d have to rip apart procurement programs, break contracts, and rebuild supply chains.

That’s the point. This is designed to make the relationship irreversible — at precisely the moment when a growing number of Americans are questioning unconditional support for Israel’s actions in the region.

The traditional Israel lobby works through campaign contributions and media influence. This is more sophisticated: it works through the defense procurement bureaucracy itself, creating material interests that guarantee political support regardless of public opinion.

🗳️ What Happens Next

The House Armed Services Committee markup is scheduled for June 4, 2026. After that, the bill moves to the full House, then reconciliation with the Senate version.

Section 224 is currently in the base text — meaning it was put there by committee leadership before amendments or broader debate. That’s how the most consequential provisions get through: bury them in the chairman’s mark, count on the must-pass nature of the NDAA, and dare anyone to hold up the entire defense budget over one section.

Members who want to stop this have a narrow window: force a floor amendment to strike Section 224, or demand recorded votes that put colleagues on the record supporting the fusion of U.S. and Israeli militaries. The question is whether anyone has the stomach for that fight when the pro-Israel apparatus in both parties remains largely unchallenged.

The Responsible Statecraft piece is right to flag this. The quiet ones are always the ones that matter most.