Booming Black Market For Human Organs

No price tag can be put on human life.  But, theoretically, your body could be worth as much as $45 million. You would have to sell every organ, tissue and usable chemical in your body to reap that bounty. However, there are no shortage of buyers, especially on the burgeoning black market.

Although trafficking in illegally harvested organs is a crime in most countries, the practice continues to flourish.  The reason the murky business has grown is the mushrooming demand for organs and tissues coupled with the shortage of legal donors.  That gap is being filled on the black market.

Consider in the United States alone there are more than 122,000 people on an organ waiting list.  That is more than triple the number in 1993. Every ten minutes a new person is added to that waiting list. The biggest demand is for kidneys, fueled by the increase in diabetes and related diseases.

There were 33,595 transplant operations performed in the country last year, according to data from the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.  That represents an almost nine percent increase from 2015.

Worldwide the latest figures for 2014 show organ transplants reached a record of 119,873, reports the Global Observatory on Donation and Transplantation.  The biggest percentage of the transplants, 41.6 percent, were for kidneys.  But this data doesn't tell the whole story.

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that current organ transplants cover only about 10 percent of the global demand.  A report by Global Financial Integrity revealed that black market organ sales generate between $600 million and $1.2 billion in profits annually worldwide.

Impoverished nations, including Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe, are hotbeds of unscrupulous organ harvesting.  Gangs in China, India and Pakistan often dupe or coerce poor people to surrender their kidneys. Wealthy patients around the globe are paying as much as $191,000 for a kidney.

In China, there are reports that members of dissident groups are executed by the government, but not before harvesting their organs.  In Egypt, young men are tricked into showing up for a job, only to have their kidneys surgically removed by crooked doctors for sale on the black market.

There have been few arrests because illegal organ transactions are often laundered through mainstream health care organizations, including hospitals, clinics and medical professionals.  Once the organs enter the system, they become legitimate and are thus nearly impossibly to trace.

Without some way to identify black market organs, there is no way to police the practice.

At least the United States has begun to prosecute a few cases.  Five people in New Jersey were arrested for illegally obtaining kidneys for $10,000 and selling the organs for up to $160,000 to patients in need. But this is only the tip of a large and expanding iceberg of corruption.

For instance, in 2013 there were 121,272 Americans waiting for an organ.  A total of 28,954 received a transplanted organ.  However, there were only 14,257 donors recorded.  That means 14,000 people may have received organs that were obtained on the black market.

The U.S. is one of nearly 100 nations that have signed on to a statement banning global organ exploitation.  Despite the agreement, there has been no dent in the illegal trade of organs.  One way to attack the problem is to increase the supply of organs from living and deceased donors.

In the U.S., surveys show overwhelming support among Americans for organ donation.  Research puts the number as high as 95 percent of adults.  However, only 48 percent have signed up as organ donors in event of their death.  Closing that gap could help reduce the black market for organs.

However, more donors won't end the practice.  Nations must develop sophisticated means to trace the origin of every transplanted organ before it reaches the patient.  By vetting each organ, it will staunch the worldwide racketeering of body parts.

VA Scandal: The Stain on America's Soul

After major scandals shuddered the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Obama Administration pledged to improve health care for America's military men and women.  More than two years have passed and nothing has changed, except the media and politicians have developed amnesia.

The shame of dozens of retired military men and women dying while they waited for treatment should have awakened the government to the urgency of the situation.  Instead, the plodding VA bureaucracy has shuffled top administrators, but done little else to address the shoddy treatment.

For those with short memories, the Department of Veterans Affairs was jolted in 2014 when a congressional investigation uncovered malfeasance at the Phoenix VA Hospital.  It found at least 40 cases where the wait times "contributed to the deaths" of military people. 

The actual number of deaths remains in dispute.  Some outsiders believe the number may be closer to 83.  The outcry prompted the VA's chief watchdog to launch an investigation.  The probe found wait time problems at 51 of the 73 VA hospitals that were reviewed by investigators. 

After those findings were made public, there was a universal cry for change.  Instead of a sweeping housecleaning, the VA brushed the scandal under the rug. Even worse, soulless executives rewarded themselves with $3.3 million in bonuses in 2015 instead of lopping off the heads of the guilty.

An independent review of the Veterans Affairs' health care, released in September of 2015, found a "significant leadership crisis" at the agency and called for a complete overhaul of the system.  The report's collaborators included Rand Corp., McKinsey Company and the Institute of Medicine. 

Nowhere is the management crisis more evident than at the beleaguered Phoenix VA Hospital.  It is now operating under its seventh director in the past three years.  The last head of the giant VA department was Bob McDonald, an Obama appointee who was a retired consumer product executive.

Now President Trump has rattled the calcified culture at the department with the nomination of David Shulkin, a hospital chief executive with private sector experience in health care. Shulkin, unanimously approved by the Senate, becomes the first non-veteran to lead the VA in 86 years. 

Most of the previous VA department heads were plucked from the military.  However, they had no experience in running a behemoth medical organization.  Veterans Affairs is the largest integrated health care system in the U.S. with 1,233 facilities, including 168 medical centers.

Nearly nine million veterans were served last year, according to the department.  The VA not only offers health care, but also provides counseling, operates community living centers, distributes financial benefits and oversees 128 national cemeteries. 

The job requires a gargantuan workforce of 325,935, earning the VA the title of the largest non-military department in the massive federal government.  This sprawling bureaucracy, founded in 1930, has grown too unwieldy and unresponsive to serving veterans.  It must be streamlined.    

The new VA chief needs to carve up the department, creating a new stand-alone agency to deliver health care to veterans.  Under the current organizational structure, health care is just one cog in a bloated department.  It deserves its own chief executive, reporting directly to the president.   

Once the new agency is birthed, the top echelons of the organization need to be staffed with professionals with hospital and medical operational experience.  Too often in the past, the VA has hired veterans for jobs that should be occupied by those with health care credentials.

In Washington, the knee-jerk response to any crisis is to throw money at the problem instead of dealing with the underlying issues.  On cue, the Congress increased the department's budget for fiscal year 2017 to $182.3 billion.  That's a hike in discretionary spending of 4.9 percent from 2016.

Although money can buy new equipment for hospitals and fund increased hiring, it does not guarantee America's veterans will get better health care.  That's why one of the first steps of the new administrator should be to conduct a third-party assessment of the current performance.

The days of asking the VA to evaluate itself are over.  Civilian medical professionals need to do a thorough evaluation of the department's facilities, treatment and follow-up procedures, bench marked against the nation's best integrated medical facilities.   

As part of this process, new standards for care should be adopted.  Pay for employees and executives alike should be tied to meeting goals for timely, professional health care delivery.  If implemented correctly, this pay-for-performance package will shake-up the department's fossilized culture.    

America has turned its back on the brave men and women who served in the nation's armed forces for too long.  The country must never again accept any excuses for shabby treatment of veterans. America's veterans deserve nothing less than the best health care the country has to offer.     

Exposing Silicon Valley's Dirty Little Secret

No group has howled louder about President Trump's executive order on refugee vetting than the elitist eggheads in Silicon Valley.  Their uproar has earned them lavish media praise as compassionate humanitarians. But there is nothing altruistic about their support for open borders.

Profits not patriotism motivates these honchos of high-tech who are exploiting the nation's immigration system to hire thousands of foreign workers to replace higher-paid Americans who toil in the bowels of their cash-flush firms.  

These businesses take advantage of a little known program, called H-1B Visa.  Under this scheme, American firms can temporarily employ foreign nationals in select occupations for three years with the ability to extend the period to six years.  After that, workers return to their native country.

Current immigration law requires these foreign H-1B visa employees to hold a bachelor's degree or higher from an accredited university.  In addition, they must be hired for critical occupations in fields such as mathematics, biotechnology, science and computer engineering, to name a few.

In 2014 and 2015, the government issued 591,174 visas to foreign workers to immigrate to the United States. More than 60 percent of the individuals admitted under the visa program were computer programmers or were recruited in related fields.

The statistics cited above were culled from reports compiled by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service, an agency of the Department of Homeland Security.  Although cumulative data is nonexistent, there are estimated 800,000 H-1B visa holders working in the country on any given day.

Among the top 100 companies sponsoring H-1B visa immigrants, Americans will discover the names of some of the country's premier firms, including Apple, Amazon, Intel, Qualcomm Technologies, IBM, Google, Microsoft and scores of Silicon Valley start-ups and stars.

These firms justify their hiring of foreign workers by claiming there aren't enough American workers with degrees in science, technology, math and engineering.  That's not true.  For instance, American colleges graduate twice as many students with degrees in those fields than there are available jobs.

In fact, a study by the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C., think-tank, found more than one third of recent computer science graduates are not working in their chosen field because they are unable to find jobs. Yet Silicon Valley complains they cannot find enough highly-specialized workers.

The Department of Labor has the responsibility for ensuring these firms do not displace American employees with lower-paid foreign workers. Under Mr. Obama, the agency failed to address documented cases of abuse after wizards of high-tech pored millions of dollars into his campaign.

In one instance, Southern California Edison laid off about 400 information technology employees and replaced them with foreign workers from India with H-1B visas in 2015. The displaced workers' annual pay averaged $110,000, while the foreigners' compensation averaged $75,000.

Many other companies, including Disney, New York Life, Toys R Us and Eversource Energy, have used the same sleazy strategy.  More often than not, these firms not only offer lower wages to the H-1B workers, but they dole out reduced benefit packages.

American workers are beginning to fight back.  Fourteen former employees at Abbott Laboratories, a health care conglomerate, filed a federal suit last year claiming they were sent packing so their jobs could be appropriated by foreign workers with H-1B visas.

There would be more legal battles but often displaced workers are strong-armed by their former employers to sign an agreement not to file suit as a condition for receiving their severance pay.

Some firms are using subterfuge to dodge public criticism over hiring foreigners. For example, American companies outsource the hiring of foreign workers to Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services, both India based companies with satellite offices in the United States.

Not surprisingly,  Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services are the top two H-1B employers in America. They recruit lower-paid professionals from India and other countries, obtain H-1B visas for the workers, then outsource the newly arrived foreigners to American firms.

This insidious practice, which robs Americans of jobs, needs to be halted immediately.  President Trump has promised to deal with the issue soon through executive action.  Given its importance to American workers, the president's initiative deserves bi-partisan support.

But, of course, it will never happen.  Silicon Valley and the other corporate abusers of the visa program are big donors to Democrats, who will obstruct any changes in the current scheme. American workers will be the big losers if they succeed in maintaining the status quo.

Refugee Hysteria: The Truth About Tump's Order

President's Trump executive order to protect the American people from terrorist attacks has been the subject of a disinformation campaign engineered by Democrats and their media co-conspirators.  As a result, many Americans have been brainwashed into believing the order is harsh and xenophobic.

The deliberately false propaganda blitzkrieg has described the executive order as a ban on Muslims, an attack on American values and the scapegoating of immigrants.  Not a single one of those labels is factual.  It makes you wonder if the opponents have even read the president's order.

In the rush to judgment, Democrats and the media have accused Mr. Trump of hanging out a shingle at U.S. borders that reads, "Americans Only."  That is among the kinder smears from these apostles of indoctrination.  Apparently, they not only are unintelligent, but have no knowledge of history.

America has been and will continue to be the world's top resettlement country for people living in repressive, terrorist-plagued nations. However, the explosion of refugees, particularly from worn torn Syria, has created a security nightmare for every potential resettlement country.

More than 4.1 million Syrians are looking for new homes, a human tragedy of biblical proportions that could have been prevented by the United States and its allies.  Dealing with the outfall will require an overhaul of the refugee procedural process of not only the U.S. but the entire world.   

Mr. Trump's executive order addresses this issue, directing a review of the refugee admissions program.  Included is a call for greater involvement by states and cities in the resettlement process, which should facilitate the placement of refugees.

To set the record straight, here are facts about Mr. Trump's action as well as actual data about the resettlement of refugees in America to counteract the media's lies: 

LIE: The Order Bans Muslims.  Untrue.  There is no reference to Muslims in the order.  It puts a temporary, 90-day halt to resettlement of refugees from seven countries, including Syria.  During the pause, the president has asked the national intelligence community to develop a uniform screening standard and procedure. However, Muslims from other countries such as Indonesia, home to the world's largest Muslim population (202.9 million), may apply for refugee status.  Only refugees from the seven countries are impacted by the order.

LIE: The President Singled Out Muslim Countries.  The seven countries effected are Syria, Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen.  These same nations were placed under travel restrictions by Mr. Obama, who signed the Visa Waiver Program Improvement and Terrorist Travel Prevention Act on December 18, 2015.  Under the law, travelers from these countries are no longer eligible to be admitted to the United States under the Visa Waiver Program.  The stated reason for the move was to prevent travelers from those countries from coming to America "at the behest of violent extremist groups." Mr. Trump's order broadens the law to include increased scrutiny for refugees from these countries.

LIE: The Order Unduly Slows Refugees Entry. The system in place under former President Obama was tortoise like, too.  Currently, the normal vetting time for Syrian refugees is 18 to 24 months, according to the State Department.  After this process, the refugee must still pass a physical exam.  The United States has always employed a prolonged, deliberate process for refugees from foreign countries. Additional vetting may add a few months to the operation because of the difficulty in establishing each refugee's identity.  

LIE:  No Other President Has Issued A Refugee Freeze.  False.  The last six U.S. presidents have issued executive orders to block the entry of certain classes of immigrants.  The most recent example is President Obama who halted visa processing for Iraqi refugees in 2011 after two former Al Qaeda terrorists were found living as refugees in Kentucky. The temporary freeze lasted six months so the Obama Administration could reexamine the records of 58,000 Iraqis being considered for resettlement. The order caused hardship and heartbreak for families, but the media ignored it.    

LIE: It is un-American to limit refugees coming to the U.S.   Mr. Obama used his authority, just as other presidents did, to establish an annual ceiling on the number of refugees the United States would admit.  In 2012 and again in 2013, the former president lowered the number from 80,000 to 76,000 and then reduced it again to 70,000.  In the last year of George W. Bush's presidency, the refugee cap was 80,000 after it had climbed as high as 152,000.  In his order, Mr. Trump temporarily suspended the ceiling for refugees while vetting measures are developed.  Refugee limits have always been a part of U.S. policy.  

LIE: Mr. Trump Falsely Claims Christian Refugees Have Been Treated Unfairly.  Based on the data, not media fabrication, President Trump's assertions are accurate.  The Obama Administration resettled more than 12,000 Syrian refugees last fiscal year; 99 percent of them were Muslim. Although Christians represent 10 percent of the Syrian population, only one-half of one percent of Syrian refugees who gained entry into the U.S. were Christians.

Once Americans know the facts they will grow weary of the choreographed protests, the media's fake stories and Democrat's crocodile tears. America still embraces the huddled masses.  However, polls show Americans want to be protected from terrorism.

Who can blame them after five terrorists attacks on American soil under Mr. Obama?