But hearing aids are still 'out-of-pocket'
[JustTheNews] Arizona latest state to approve plan.
Thirty-six states and Washington, D.C., either include or do not explicitly exclude healthcare coverage for transgender-related procedures for state employees, with Arizona becoming the most recent through an executive order by the state's Democrat governor.
Late last month, Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs removed an exclusion to the state healthcare plan that had prevented coverage of transgender-related procedures. This issue comes as at least 20 states have either restricted or banned such procedures for minors, with most of the states enacting laws this year.
According to an analysis by the independent, nonprofit group Movement Advancement Project of state healthcare plans, with some slight differences in execution, the states that include healthcare coverage for transgender-related procedures for state employees are Arizona, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Washington, D.C., Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Washington, and Wisconsin.
Idaho had excluded such procedures from its state healthcare plan before including them in 2020. North Carolina has included the coverage amid a lawsuit against the state for excluding the coverage, but its case is currently scheduled to be heard in September before the entire 4th Circuit Court of Appeals.
The court will hear the lawsuit against North Carolina along with a lawsuit against West Virginia, which currently has exclusions to the transgender-procedure coverage. Tennessee, which also excludes such coverage, is facing a lawsuit in federal court.
In 2018, the Wisconsin Group Insurance Board reversed Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) requested exclusion for transgender procedure coverage, allowing coverage for such procedures to be included.
The states that do not explicitly include or exclude coverage for these procedures are Alabama, Alaska, Colorado, Iowa, Michigan, Missouri, New Mexico, South Carolina, Vermont, Virginia and Wyoming, according to MAP's analysis.
Alaska had an exclusion that was ruled unlawful in federal court in 2020. Virginia had excluded state healthcare coverage for transgender procedures but then removed the exclusion in 2017.
The states that exclude transgender procedure coverage are Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and West Virginia.
At the end of June, Hobbs signed an executive order removing an exclusion that kept state employees from using their healthcare for gender-reassignment surgeries.
The order states the exclusion that began in 2017 was for “‘gender reassignment surgery’ … even in cases where the surgery is medically necessary.”
Hobbs’ order adds that the exclusion was “not consistent with the coverage offered by the state’s health insurance carriers’ standard benefit packages, which does not include any comparable exclusion.”
Humanitarian Parole process that allows up to 30,000 Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan citizens per month to request entry into the United States.
[Breitbart] Nicaraguan newspaper La Prensa reported Monday that communists supporting or belonging to the brutal dictatorship of Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega have entered the United States as beneficiaries of the Biden Administration’s humanitarian parole program.
La Prensa’s report is the latest in a series of investigations the newspaper has published detailing the alleged entry of pro-Ortega Nicaraguans into the United States.
Under the administration of leftist President Joe Biden, the Department of Homeland Security implemented a Humanitarian Parole process that allows up to 30,000 Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan citizens per month to request entry into the United States. Beneficiaries of the program are granted advanced authorization to travel to the United States and are allowed to stay and work for up to two years.
The parole is meant for victims of the repressive leftist regimes of Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, as well as those escaping near-anarchic gang violence in Haiti following the assassination of President Jovenel Moise in 2021 — not for those perpetuating the repression and violence.
According to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), beneficiaries must identify a financial sponsor, an individual with lawful status in the United States. Beneficiaries must also undergo a “clear and robust security vetting” and comply with USCIS’ eligibility criteria.
La Prensa’s report claimed that, although USCIS clearly requires beneficiaries of the Humanitarian Parole program to undergo security vetting, officials and sympathizers of the Ortega regime have nonetheless entered the United States through the program.
On June 30, La Prensa denounced that Nicaraguan citizen Gabriela Alejandra Rayo Castro had arrived in Miami with her husband Juan Alberto Soza Jarquín. Rayo Castro was described in the report to have acted as a witness of the Ortega regime in the trial against Monsignor Rolando Álvarez, bishop of the Diocese of Matagalpa.
Álvarez, arrested by the Ortega regime in August, was sentenced in February to 26 years in prison for “treason” and stripped of all citizenship rights. Last week, negotiations between the Vatican and the Ortega regime failed to secure the priest’s release.
Rayo Castro’s husband, Juan Alberto Soza Jarquín, was described as a known pro-Ortega paramilitary fighter who operates in the city of Matagalpa.
On Saturday, exiled Nicaraguan journalist Miguel Mendoza denounced that Sandinista activists Flor Vallejos Ávila and José David Gutiérrez Beteta had allegedly recently entered the United States as beneficiaries of the Humanitarian Parole process. Mendoza accused both of them of being “ears,” a term used to describe spies who supply the Ortega regime with pictures or information about dissidents abroad.
Mendoza, the journalist, was among the group of 222 political prisoners and dissidents that the Ortega regime banished from Nicaragua in February.
In a similar report, dated June 29, La Prensa denounced that Nicaraguan police sub commissioner María de Jesús Guzmán Gutiérrez had been granted entry into the United States. The U.S. Department of the Treasury, under the administration of former President Donald Trump, sanctioned the Nicaraguan National Police in March 2020 for the institution’s continued human rights abuses.
Similar to the reports of pro-Ortega officials entering the United States, exiled Cuban citizens have accused members of the Communist Castro regime of abusing the program to enter America. Among those the exile community has identified as suspects are Amalio Alfaro Matos, president of the Criminal Chamber of the People’s Provincial Court of Guantánamo, and Eduardo Velázquez Infante, an alleged member of Cuban State Security and former official of the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR) communist civilian spy network.
Venezuelan citizens have also denounced for many years that former members of the socialist regime of dictator Nicolás Maduro have stayed in the United States through programs such as the “Temporary” Protected Status granted by the Biden Administration in 2021.
In 2020, Martin Sanchez, a former Maduro regime diplomat, was discovered working at Facebook training the algorithms that automatically “classify” content posted by Facebook users.
In January, a group of 21 U.S. states led by Texas filed a lawsuit in Texas court to challenge the Humanitarian Parole program, claiming it failed to follow proper notice and comment procedures and was “arbitrary and capricious” under the Administrative Procedure Act. They also alleged that the federal government and the Department of Homeland Security had “exceeded [their] statutory authority under the program.” After several postponements, the trial is scheduled to take place on August 24.
#2
The "Humanitarian Parole process" is just one of the many administration mechanisms used to destroy our sovereignty and national identity. The second holocaust is well under way.
#3
brutal dictatorship of Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega
Man, I'm so old I remember when Danny and the Sandinistas were the darlings of the Left.
An article in the local paper on some imported Nicaraguan refugees used the phrase "the autocratic Ortega regime". Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
[Breitbart] House Republicans have slipped a massive foreign worker expansion into their Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spending bill, a blow to the GOP’s promise to protect the nation’s working class from powerful special interests.
After markups and hearings, Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee approved the DHS spending bill which would blow the lid off blue-collar migration caps to the United States, spurring an influx of foreign visa workers in the labor market with whom working class Americans would have to compete for jobs.
“Who represents the working class? This bill suggests it’s not necessarily Republicans,” Jeremy Beck of NumbersUSA told Breitbart News.
Specifically, the $91.5 billion funding measure would loosen H-2A visa rules so that more industries related to the agricultural sector could import foreign workers and rewrites the program so that jobs do not have to be seasonal or temporary.
The H-2A visa program, as currently implemented, allows U.S. farms to annually outsource an unlimited number of American agricultural jobs to foreign workers, who can extend their stay for up to three years.
Fraud and abuse are widespread across the program, with one recent lawsuit accusing a western Michigan farm of trafficking foreign H-2A visa workers into blueberry picking jobs where they were paid slave wages and housed in egregiously poor conditions.
Most notoriously, earlier this year, black Americans scored a settlement against two U.S. farms along the Mississippi Delta after they were fired and replaced with foreign H-2A visa workers from South Africa.
Beck called the H-2A visa program a “medieval system” that relies on “cheap back-breaking labor while other countries are mechanizing and workers are being paid high wages to man machines.”
“This is a way to push off mechanization indefinitely when you have relatively compliant, affordable labor,” he said. “The people who broker these visa programs advertise it as ‘It will save you money.'”
In addition, the DHS spending bill includes an expansion of the H-2B visa program which allows U.S. employers to import about 66,000 foreign workers for seasonal non-agricultural jobs in industries like construction, landscaping, hospitality, and food services, among others.
The provision included in the bill, though, ensures that foreign workers who arrived in the U.S. on H-2B visas in the prior three years would not count against the annual cap. Beck estimates that the provision could see at least 200,000 additional foreign H-2B visa workers in the labor market.
“Here we are at a time with some job growth and low unemployment. The conditions are there for wage gains … many are in good industries like construction and the service industry,” Beck told Breitbart News. “We’re seeing improvement in wages but nothing to indicate a massive labor shortage. We’re seeing a closing of the racial wealth gap and we’re getting Americans off the sidelines. This expansion cuts that off.”
Like the H-2A visa program, the H-2B visa program has long been documented for its history of displacing blue-collar Americans from their jobs and lowering wages.
Expanding the H-2A and H-2B visa programs flies in the face of House Republicans’ recent efforts to dramatically cut down unfair foreign workforce competition against working class Americans — a critical component of the party’s pitch to voters which vows to represent their interests over powerful, politically connected special interests.
In May, for instance, House Republicans passed H.R. 2, a sweeping border security and immigration control measure that includes mandatory nationwide E-Verify. The provision, which threatens companies with fines if they knowingly hire illegal aliens, was seen as a historic victory for the GOP after decades of business interests lobbying to keep E-Verify out of federal legislation.
Beck said the latest efforts to increase the number of foreign workers in the U.S. labor market, which has already reached a new high under President Joe Biden, are a major disappointment only weeks after Republicans united to fend off Democrats’ mass immigration agenda.
“That’s what makes this so deflating … it’s still about displacing American workers in favor of exploitable foreign workers,” Beck said. “For all the good that H.R. 2 would do, this would take all the wind out of that sail.”
#3
We do have a labor shortage and we do need more blue collar workers.
That being said, the way the H2-A/B laws are written, it is to lower labor costs for the business and make profits larger. All Americans that can/want to make a living in that line of work should get first go and imports make up the slack. Currently the Americans just get fucked, wages lowered or tossed into the unemployment line.
Thank you Chamber of Greed Commerce and your paid flunkies.
[FOX] The FBI colluded with a Ukrainian intelligence agency in an effort to disrupt Russian disinformation campaigns by flagging social media accounts in a failed effort that ensnared a verified Russian-language U.S. State Department account and others, the House Judiciary Committee said in a report released Monday.
The report said the FBI partnered with the SBU, one of Ukraine's intelligence agencies, to flag the accounts believed to have spread Russian disinformation. Both agencies flagged American accounts for removal, as well as those belonging to American journalists, the report said.
The FBI and SBU requested the removal or suspension of the accounts expressing pro-Ukrainian views or criticism of Russian President Vladimir Putin, the report said.
Fox News Digital reached out to the FBI regarding the report but has not yet heard back.
#3
When Musk took over Twitter he discovered the firm heavily infiltrated by "former" FBI personnel who had found their way into key leadership positions.
Ukrainian collusion? No, this is actually a finely tuned business practice.
#4
The FBI and SBU requested the removal or suspension of the accounts expressing pro-Ukrainian views or criticism of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
