Unless you follow general health care issues, you might have missed the outrage expressed by the head of the California Insurance Commission, when it came out that nurses rather than doctors were making insurance coverage decisions about expensive medical procedures, and for high cost procedures, denial of coverage means denial of care.

Here is an article explaining it.

https://www.newsmax.com/thewire/aetna-medical-director-nurses-decide/2018/02/12/id/842821/

At least Aetna had nurses reviewing the medical records before they denied coverage (FYI: I hate health insurance companies. See Chapter 2 my book for why)

SB 276 is even worse.

First, the bill doesn’t require that the public health official rejecting or revoking the exemption has to be a doctor, a nurse or even a witch doctor. Second, medical records aren’t reviewed, just an application.

As I’ve previously stated, there is a reason they’re called medical exemptions. See http://rickjaffeesq.com/2019/03/26/cali-sb-276-moves-to-eliminate-physician-medical-exemptions-but-hey-numb-nuts-theres-a-reason-theyre-called-medical-exemptions/

Could it possibly be because the decision involves making a medical judgement about whether, for example, a close relative’s family history of an autoimmune disease suggests that the risks of continued vaccination might outweigh the benefits?

Isn’t it a shame that we don’t have experts to study these issues on individual cases?

But of course, we do; they’re called medical doctors, and to reiterate, SB 276 doesn’t require these medical decisions to be made by physicians or even nurses.

Based on the Insurance Commissioner’s outrage when it came out that medical doctors were not making coverage decisions, I’m not understanding why the medical board sits silently. How can it accept a law which doesn’t require its licensees to make decisions which could severely injure children.
I exaggerate you think?

A few posts ago, I quoted from a recent appellate court judge’s dissent in the affirmance of the denial of compensation by the vaccine court The case is Oliver v HHS and Judge Newman’s words and his quote from the legislative history should be repeated to the medical board and legislators who consider SB 276.

“The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986
It had long been known that a small percentage of childhood vaccinations have led to grave injury and permanent disability, as discussed in the legislative record:
‘Childhood vaccines are essential to maintain the health of our society. They have been invaluable weapons against the dread diseases that used to kill or injure hundreds of thousands of children every year: polio, measles, pertussis, diphtheria, tetanus, rubella, mumps, and smallpox. But while these vaccines have brought the gift of life and health to millions, there are a very small number of children every year who are injured by unpredictable side effects of the vaccines through no fault of their own or the vaccine manufacturers.
132 Cong. Rec. S17,343–02 (1986) (statement of Sen. Kennedy).’ The House Report reiterated the concern for unforeseeable injury flowing from compulsory vaccinations:
‘While most of the Nation’s children enjoy greater benefit from immunization programs, a small but significant number have been gravely injured. . .
. . ..
But it is not always possible to predict who they will be or what reactions they will have. And since State law requires that all children be immunized before entering school, most parents have no choice but to risk the chance—small as that may be—that their child may be injured from a vaccine.
H.R. Rep. No. 99-908, at 4–6 (1986), as reprinted in 1986 U.S.C.C.A.N. 6344, 6345–46.’

The legislative record states that about one half of one percent of children each year experience vaccine-related injury;1 and with four million births each year in the United States, this is about 20,000 vaccine injuries per year.2″
(emphasis added; footnotes omitted).
Here is the decision again. If you haven’t read it, you should.

Decision – 2019 – oliver – scn1a – dissent in fed cir – 17-2540.Order.1-9-2019.1

So back in 1983 Congress acknowledged that 20,000 kids would suffer grave injury and permanent disability from vaccines. And that was when kids got seven vaccines in 20 shots, now the number is between 69 and 74 shots.

And this is big: We know a little (or actually a lot) more about predicting who might become vaccine injured than we did in 1983.

And who might these people be who might have that knowledge?

It’s not a trick question.

It’s the physicians. It’s not public health officials.

Let’s go sideways to consider something else:

What about all these fake SB277 medical exemptions?

Unless I’ve been in a catatonic trance these last three years and missed basically everything, as of today, April 9, 2019,
there has not been a single board adjudication that any SB 277 exemption has been unjustified, false or fraudulent and I repeat, not one. (The one board case which did involve vaccines was a consent order for Bob Sears, but that was a custody, litigation-related letter he wrote for a non-school age child prior to the enactment of SB 277.)

So, there is no evidence that there have been even a single fraudulent or incorrect SB 277 medical exemption written by a California physician.

What is the purported evidence that is the basis of SB 276?

The fact that the medical exemption rate has gone up three or four times, from under a thousand prior to SB 277 to around 4,000 in 2018. The assumption is that the difference is parents switching from PBE’s (personal belief exemptions) to medical exemptions.

What’s the evidence for that? Maybe I’m still catatonic, but I haven’t heard any. There’s no data, just the raw numbers.

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that the unsupported assumption is true, namely that every child who had a PBE is now under a medical exemption and that’s why the numbers went up by a few thousand (and that’s not a big number relative to the size of the state. I’ve heard it went from 0.2 to 0.7 percent of school age kids.) That still doesn’t prove anything to anyone who understands what the word proof or evidence means.

How do the SB 276 authors know that all these kids didn’t have family history issues exemptable under SB 277, but the families didn’t need to get the medical exemption before SB 277, and only sought it out as a result of 277? How do the legislators know that’s not the case? There’s no data. It’s just a second level assumption.

So, let’s tie these two threads together:

We know to a congressional certainty that vaccines will seriously harm and permanently injury tens of thousands of children nationally. But we have some information that we didn’t have thirty-five years ago, about which kids might be most likely to be gravely injured and permanently disabled.
The professionals who have that information and make similar medical decisions all day, every day are …. Hey, it’s not a hard question ….

Right, it’s the doctors.

But doctors won’t be able to make that decisions because the number of medical exemptions went up by one half of one percentage point. And that in spite of the fact that there’s not a single confirmed case of a fraudulent 277 medical exemption.
And from all that you get what? Doctors can’t be trusted to decide on medical exemptions?

Maybe it’s just me, but I’m not seeing how that makes any sense. (common or even regulatory sense, the half-witted, “special” brother of common sense) I’m also not understanding why the California Medical Board isn’t jumping up and down, or at least quietly telling the legislators, that they are going too far on this one.

Here’s hoping for some well-deserved outrage from the regulators. But maybe I’m being overly optimistic.

Rick Jaffe, Esq.
rickjaffeesquire@gmail.com