Medicare Pays for Programs That May Not Help After Serious Hospitalizations

 

• CMS reimburses for remote patient monitoring, which grew 10-fold from 2019 to 2022, in an effort to cut hospital readmissions.
• In this randomized trial of patients hospitalized for sepsis or serious respiratory infections, remote monitoring interventions failed to outperform usual care, with similar proportions of patients alive and out of the hospital at 90 days postdischarge.
• CMS should rethink the role of remote monitoring, according to the researchers.

Remote patient monitoring (RPM) programs after hospitalization for sepsis or lower respiratory infection -- an approach increasingly reimbursed for by Medicare -- didn't beat usual follow-up care when it came to increasing the number of days patients spent at home after discharge, according to a randomized trial.

At 90 days, the median number of days alive and at home post-discharge was 90 days across study arms, regardless of whether patients were assigned to one of four RPM interventions or to usual care, reported researchers led by Sachin Yende, MD, of the H. John Heinz III Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Pittsburgh.

The lack of effectiveness was consistent across secondary outcomes as well, the study in JAMA Network Open showed.

In fact, "in patients 65 years and older, remote monitoring reduced days spent at home and increased readmission rates compared with usual care," Yende and co-authors wrote. "These findings suggest that the CMS should reassess the role of remote therapeutic monitoring in reducing readmissions and underscore the value of tailoring remote monitoring in post-acute care for serious infections."

Sepsis, influenza, and COVID-19 lead to 3 million hospitalizations annually in the U.S., and more than 60% of hospital readmissions are caused by infections and heart and lung disease exacerbations. To cut readmissions, CMS reimburses for remote monitoring telehealth approaches, which grew 10-fold for Medicare beneficiaries from 2019 to 2022.

In the study, the rates for 90-day mortality and hospital readmission were similar across the four RPM arms, with varying levels of monitoring intensity, versus usual care:

• RPM-low standard response: 8.8% and 39.7%
• RPM-high standard response: 5.4% and 44.2%
• RPM-low enhanced response: 6.3% and 37.3%
• RPM-high enhanced response: 8.2% and 36.3%
• Usual care: 6.5% and 37.8%

"Our findings highlight the challenges of implementing and scaling remote monitoring across health systems and among patients recovering from serious illness who are managing complex care needs, including medications, follow-up appointments, and ongoing symptoms," the researchers wrote.

Yende's team assessed interventions that used remote therapeutic monitoring to collect health data through smartphone-application questionnaires and text messages to identify signs of clinical deterioration.

The open-label, randomized trial included 1,286 western Pennsylvania patients 21 years or older who had been hospitalized for sepsis or a lower respiratory tract infection, had a smartphone or internet-connected device, had no cognitive impairment, and were at moderate to high risk for hospital readmission based on a predictive model. Patients were insured through traditional fee-for-service Medicare or the UPMC Health Plan.

The trial tested four RPM interventions that combined low-intensity or high-intensity patient questionnaires with either standard or enhanced response teams, while usual care involved care managers or nurses calling patients in the week after discharge to assess their condition and coordinate follow-up care.

In the RPM arms, standard care utilized four remote monitoring nurses who responded to alerts and coordinated care with patients' clinicians. Enhanced care consisted of two nurses and two certified registered nurse practitioners with palliative care expertise and access to social workers who could diagnose and implement a treatment plan, order and perform diagnostic tests, and deliver other healthcare services.

Median patient age was 63 years, 52% were women, 80% were white, 16% were Black, and 1% were Hispanic. Nearly half of the patients (47%) had been hospitalized for sepsis, 29% for lower respiratory tract infection, and 24% for COVID-19. Median Charlson Comorbidity Index was 6, and 33% had been in the intensive care unit.

Within 30 days after discharge, 79% of the usual-care group had completed a primary care visit, a percentage virtually identical to the rates among the four RPM groups (77% to 81%).

"This level of timely outpatient engagement likely exceeded routine practice and addressed many issues targeted by remote monitoring, making additional benefit difficult to detect," Yende and colleagues noted.

Study limitations included that the findings were from a single health system, which may limit generalizability. Use of symptom-based monitoring rather than remote physiologic monitoring could limit understanding of patients' experiences in home-based settings. In addition, engagement with RPM was modest, with only 60% of the 887 patients in the four intervention arms enrolling in remote monitoring.

Disclosures

The Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute supported the study.

Yende had no disclosures. Co-authors reported relationships with the UPMC Center for High-Value Health Care and Berry Consultants.

Primary Source

JAMA Network Open

Source Reference: Yende S, et al "Remote monitoring approaches to reduce readmissions after infection and sepsis -- a randomized clinical trial" JAMA Netw Open 2026; DOI: 10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2026.16641.

https://www.medpagetoday.com/criticalcare/sepsis/121735

CFTC Considers Blocking CME’s 24/7 Oil Contract Bid

 

The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission is considering whether to block CME Group Inc.’s bid to launch a round-the-clock oil contract, heightening tensions between the market stalwart and its regulator.

CME Group Inc. announced on Thursday that it would debut 24-hour, seven-days-a-week trading in some crude and gold futures contracts. The news caught the US derivatives regulator by surprise, a senior agency official said, who asked not to be identified discussing confidential deliberations.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-12/cftc-considers-blocking-cme-s-24-7-oil-contract-bid

A Conservative Audit Of The Left's Ruling Assumptions

 by Stu Cvrk via American Greatness,

There is a particular kind of intellectual dishonesty that does not know it is dishonest. It wraps itself in the language of compassion, hides its power hunger behind slogans of liberation, and mistakes its own cultural preferences for universal moral law. American progressivism, in its current form as embodied by the Democrat Party, has become a nearly perfect specimen of this condition.

The clichés, observations, and aphorisms collected here are not talking points manufactured in a think tank. They are the distilled residue of lived political experience—hard-won pattern recognition from citizens, scholars, commentators, and statesmen who have spent years watching the same contradictions repeat themselves under different headlines.

Victor Davis Hanson notices that progressive hierarchy licenses progressive hypocrisy. Don Surber reminds us that incentives are more reliable than ideology. Ian Bremmer, borrowing from Thucydides, warns us what civilization looks like when law gives way to appetite. A Daily Signal headline captures in nine words what a criminology textbook takes nine chapters to prove. Together, these observations form a mosaic: a portrait of a political movement that has systematically abandoned the constitutional, cultural, and civilizational foundations that made ordered liberty possible in America.

What unites every entry on this list is a single underlying tension—between what the Democrat Party and its fellow travelers say and what they do; between the principles it professes and the power it pursues; between the democracy it claims to defend and the control it refuses to relinquish.

The observations range from the rhetorical (“saving democracy” as a slogan for entrenching one-party dominance) to the philosophical (science as inquiry versus science as authority) to the civilizational (the corrosive effect of identity-group multiculturalism on constitutional self-governance). But every one of them points at the same fundamental evasion: a Democrat Party that will not submit itself to the standards it imposes on everyone else.

This is not merely a catalogue of political grievances. It is an argument that the American constitutional order, grounded in individual rights, equal justice, national sovereignty, and civic unity, is not simply one option among many on an ideological menu. It is the condition of possibility for everything else. When the rule of law becomes selective, when science becomes a permission slip for policy, when borders become negotiable, and prosecutors become partisans, what falls apart is not simply a political preference—it is the floor beneath everyone’s feet.

Read these observations not as cynicism, but as a diagnosis. The patient can recover. But only if enough citizens are willing to look honestly at what has gone wrong—and in whose interest it has gone wrong.

Left-Wing Cliches, Observations, and Aphorisms

These are just a sampling of what the Democrat Party and left-wingers in general bombard us with as they attempt to achieve complete political hegemony (i.e., totalitarianism with Democrat characteristics) in America:

1. “Equity means equal outcomes for everyone—except admission to their children’s schools.” The loudest advocates for dismantling merit-based admissions send their own children to highly selective private schools and elite magnet or selective-enrollment programs, insulating their families from the policies they impose on everyone else.

2. “Defund the police—but keep my security detail.” From city council members who voted to cut police budgets while retaining personal security to celebrities who lectured America on abolishing police while surrounded by armed private guards, elected Democrats and the movement’s leaders never intended the policy to apply to themselves.

3. “Follow the science—unless the science is inconvenient.” The same coalition that demands deference to scientific consensus on the climate refuses to acknowledge biological sex in medicine, opposes nuclear energy despite its carbon-free output, and spent two years dismissing the lab-leak hypothesis as racist misinformation—a conclusion most scientists now consider credible.

4. “Borders are immoral—except around Martha’s Vineyard.” The rapid busing of migrants away from progressive resort communities the moment they arrived demonstrated, to conservatives, that “sanctuary city” is a posture affordable only so long as the consequences land somewhere else.

5. “Speech is violence—but looting is speech.” A campus lecture by a conservative intellectual triggers emergency security protocols and administrative handwringing about “harm.” A night of smashed storefronts and burning police cars is described by news anchors as “mostly peaceful protest.” The asymmetry defines the Left’s actual hierarchy of protected and punishable expression.

6. “We must protect democracy—by criminalizing the opposition candidate.” The argument that democracy requires prosecuting the leading opposition candidate, removing him from state ballots, and deploying the federal justice apparatus against him—while insisting this is all norm-protection rather than norm-destruction—is precisely the kind of doublethink conservatives point to as proof the Democrats’ “saving democracy” slogan is purely instrumental.

7. “Billionaires are the enemy—now let’s hear from our billionaire donors.” The Democrat Party simultaneously prosecutes class warfare rhetoric and raises nine-figure sums from Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and Hollywood. George Soros, Reid Hoffman, and a constellation of tech oligarchs fund the very movement that campaigns against oligarchy. The Left’s billionaires are enlightened; the Right’s are existential threats.

8. “No one is above the law—unless you are in our administration.” Selective prosecution is the theme: a two-tiered justice system that indicts a former president on faux documents charges while closing a parallel case against a sitting president’s son and declining to charge a sitting president himself, with standards applied by prosecutors who publicly donate to the Democrat Party, is not equal justice—it is the law as a partisan instrument.

9. “It’s not about black and white; it’s about green.” The Left frames every policy dispute as a racial justice issue, but the real engine driving progressive politics is money—donor class cash, NGO funding, and government grants that keep the activist machinery running. Race is the Democrats’ go-to rhetorical weapon; wealth redistribution and institutional power are the actual prize.

10. “Hierarchy justifies hypocrisy.” Victor Davis Hanson’s razor: the progressive elite exempts itself from every rule it imposes on others. Private jets for climate summits. Gated communities for open-borders advocates. Elite private schools for the champions of public education. The higher one sits in the leftist hierarchy, the more license one has to ignore the ideology.

11. “Biden would never have stepped down had the assassin been successful.” A darkly ironic observation: the Democrat Party finally forced Biden out of the 2024 race only through intense backroom pressure—something a bullet would have denied them. It underscores the argument that the party’s concern was never about Biden’s fitness or the nation’s welfare but about electoral math and factional control. So much for “saving our democracy.”

12. “Saving democracy is a dead narrative.” When Democrats invoke “Our Democracy,” conservatives argue they mean institutional arrangements that keep their coalition in power—weaponized bureaucracies, legacy media gatekeeping, Big Tech suppression, and lawfare against opponents. Once voters recognized the slogan as a euphemism for their control, their courts, their narrative, or their unaccountable administrative state, the phrase lost its power.

13. “34 percent of registered Democrats believed the assassination attempt was staged.” Offered as evidence that media-driven conspiratorial thinking is not a monopoly of the Right. If roughly a third of one party’s own voters distrust a documented, publicly witnessed event, it suggests the Left’s media ecosystem has become as insular and reality-distorting as anything it accuses conservatives of inhabiting.

14. “A failure to deal with multiculturalism ideology is the issue more important than all others.” From this viewpoint, identity-group multiculturalism—the ideological version, not the simple demographic fact of diversity—is the solvent dissolving the common civic identity that the Constitution requires. When group grievance, as relentlessly pushed by the Democrat Party, supersedes individual rights and shared national purpose, constitutional self-governance becomes ungovernable.

15. “The silo effect of multiculturalism has driven wedges between people who should be accepting our Constitution.” The argument is that multicultural identity politics deliberately fragments the citizenry into competing, mutually suspicious tribes, each demanding group-specific rights rather than equal individual rights under a shared constitutional framework. E pluribus unum is replaced by e pluribus plures, which is exactly what the Democrat Party seeks.

16. “Marxism and communism thrive on diverse cultures that foment hatred—open borders increase the opportunity.” A classic conservative national-sovereignty argument: Marxist strategy has always depended on manufacturing class and group antagonisms. Mass unvetted immigration, which was the essence of Biden’s open borders policy, is not humanitarian policy at all but rather a mechanism for accelerating social fragmentation, straining civic institutions, and creating the conditions of dependency and conflict that collectivist politics require.

17. “Science is a mode of inquiry rather than a source of authority” (Green New Deal context). One of the most intellectually serious items on this list. Science produces provisional, falsifiable conclusions through open debate—it does not issue binding commands. When Democrats and their legacy media allies declare “the science is settled” to foreclose economic debate about energy policy, they are not following science; they are using its brand name to launder ideological mandates and bypass democratic deliberation.

18. “The law of the jungle: The strong will do what they will, and the weak will suffer what they must.” Adapted from Thucydides, Ian Bremmer’s formulation is offered as a warning about what happens when American deterrence and constitutional order erode. Conservatives apply it domestically as well: when the rule of law is selectively enforced (as it was throughout the Biden regime), it ceases to be law and becomes the will of whoever controls enforcement—the very definition of tyranny.

19. “A fellow just in it for the money still has value—just make sure someone else doesn’t make him a better deal.” Don Surber’s cynical but clear-eyed observation about political loyalty: you don’t need ideological converts, only aligned incentives. It’s a realist’s argument for why transactional politics can be more durable than moral crusades—and a warning that you must constantly tend to the economic interests of your coalition or watch it defect.

20. “Leniency to the guilty leads to cruelty to the innocent.” The policy logic of criminal justice conservatism in a single sentence. Democrat policies of catch-and-release prosecution, bail reform, and prosecutorial nullification do not reduce suffering—they transfer it from the criminal class to law-abiding citizens, who disproportionately tend to be lower-income and minority residents of high-crime neighborhoods: the very people the lenient policies claim to protect.

Concluding Thoughts

Taken individually, each of the observations in this collection might be dismissed as a talking point, a partisan barb, or the predictable grievance of the political opposition. Taken together, they constitute something more serious: a systematic indictment of a governing philosophy that has lost its accountability to the people it claims to serve, the Constitution it claims to defend, and the truth it claims to follow.

The theme connecting every item on this list is the abuse of asymmetry. Asymmetric justice—one standard for allies, another for enemies. Asymmetric speech—protected protest for the favored, prosecutable rhetoric for the disfavored. Asymmetric sacrifice—open borders for the interior, bused migrants away from the coastline. Asymmetric science—settled consensus when it empowers, negotiable data when it inconveniences. This is not the behavior of a movement confident in the justice of its principles. It is the behavior of a movement that has quietly stopped believing its own arguments and is now operating purely on the logic of power retention. This is the essence of fascism!

The constitutional conservative response to all of this is not, at its core, a counter-ideology. It is a demand for consistency. Apply the law equally. Subject every truth claim—including scientific ones—to open scrutiny and democratic deliberation. Judge citizens as individuals, not as representatives of racial or ethnic collectives. Enforce the borders that give national sovereignty its meaning. Hold the powerful to the same standards as the powerless. These are not radical propositions. They are the operating premises of the American Founding, tested across two and a half centuries and still the most durable framework for self-governance ever devised.

The Democrat Left’s great strategic gamble has been that enough Americans could be divided against one another—by race, by class, by grievance, by tribe—that the constitutional consensus holding the country together would simply dissolve, leaving in its place a manageable collection of dependent constituencies rather than a self-governing citizenry.

This is the essence of Obama’s ongoing drive to “transform America” (into something the Founders would not recognize).

The observations catalogued here suggest that the gamble is failing. When even a third of the Democrats’ own voters distrust the basic factual narrative their leadership provides, something has broken in the machinery of manufactured consent. When “saving democracy” lands as a punchline rather than a rallying cry, the narrative has exhausted itself.

What comes next depends entirely on whether enough Americans—left-wing, right-wing, and unaffiliated—are willing to reinhabit the common ground the Constitution provides. Not as a concession to the other side, but as a recognition that the alternative to constitutional order is not a more enlightened progressivism. It is the law of the jungle: the strong doing what they will, and the weak suffering what they must.

The floor (our constitutional republic) is worth saving. That is what every one of these observations, in its own way, is ultimately about.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/conservative-audit-lefts-ruling-assumptions

How Bad Is Foreign Influence In America's Nonprofit Universe?

 In February, the House Ways and Means Committee held a hearing titled "Foreign Influence in American Nonprofits: Unmasking Threats from Beijing and Beyond." While Democrats deflected and tried to make the hearing about MAGA and free speech, the underlying topic remains important.

🧵Senate Hearing Raises Alarms Over FOREIGN INFLUENCE Looting American Pockets 📢

During a Senate subcommittee testimony chaired by @HawleyMO, @seamusbruner connected government fraud, nonprofit funding networks, migrant-based money transfers from U.S. to overseas, and the… pic.twitter.com/4V7B6n8CKf

— Government Accountability Institute (@Govt_Acct_Inst) February 11, 2026

So how bad is foreign influence in America's nonprofit universe? It turns out: very bad.

The Muslim Brotherhood

Earlier this week, the New York Post published a story reporting that CAIR was under investigation by HHS for alleged fraud. The report referred to CAIR receiving $30 million in taxpayer dollars to resettle Afghan refugees, with little proof of how the money was spent.

In HHS letters to the governors of California and Washington, the states in which the alleged fraud occurred, the agency stated that it had been informed that "there may be connections between CAIR and the Muslim Brotherhood and its Palestinian branch, Hamas."

The governors of Texas and Florida have both designated the Muslim Brotherhood as a foreign terrorist organization and a transnational criminal organization in 2025, while also taking actions against CAIR.

If CAIR is, in fact, a terror-connected foreign influence operation operating under the guise of tax-deductible American 501(c)(3) nonprofits, that should be of great concern. A look at CAIR's current chapter directory shows approximately 30 active offices and chapters across the Homeland. That figure does not include affiliated mosques with overlapping leadership, nor former CAIR operatives who have gone on to work in government, politics, media, and related fields.

Cuban Intelligence

Just last week, Marco Rubio and the State Department sanctioned ICAP, a known front organization for the Cuban intelligence service. One might ask how this is connected to domestic nonprofits. The answer is: directly, and on a scale that is difficult for the public to understand.

Back in the 1960s, members of the radical-left student group SDS visited Fidel Castro's communist regime in Cuba. Some members of that delegation reportedly received training in guerrilla warfare, including bomb-making techniques. A few years later, some of those individuals went on to form the Weather Underground, America's most notorious domestic terrorist organization, which bombed nearly two dozen federal buildings.

We asked the simple question late last year:

• Is There A "Cuba Connection" Behind The Radicalization Of America's Nonprofit Left

While members of the Weather Underground were in hiding, they allegedly passed messages to one another through the Cuban Embassy.

These radical students were trained through ICAP, a Cuban front organization that has continued hosting American left-wing activist delegations since the 1960s. In the last decade, these efforts have reportedly expanded with assistance from the National Network on Cuba (NNOC), which holds meetings at the Cuban Embassy.

The NNOC website lists 77 American nonprofit organizations as members of its network. Some of these organizations have nationwide chapter structures and multi-million-dollar budgets.

The Neville Roy Singham Network

As has been widely reported, the nonprofit network associated with Neville Roy Singham is also national in scope.

The ANSWER Coalition, which organizes national protests, lists 14 chapters on its website.

The Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), the political party associated with this network, lists 66 chapters nationwide and is currently running candidates for public office.

CODEPINK, which has faced scrutiny regarding sanctions-related issues, lists 12 chapters on its website.

The network's headquarters is The People's Forum in New York City. In 23 cities, activists organize through "Liberation Centers," which serve as hubs for local organizing, protest activity, and support for PSL political campaigns.

Domestic Politics and the DSA

Perhaps the most significant avenue through which foreign influence affects American politics is the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which has increasingly become a coalition of organizations and interests with extensive international connections.

The DSA announced in January that it had surpassed 100,000 members in 2025, including an additional 5,000 members in New York City. The organization has also celebrated a series of electoral victories, including the election of New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani. The DSA estimates that roughly 250 elected officials nationwide are affiliated with the organization, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Where did the DSA's foreign influence begin? That is difficult to determine, but its international affiliations have expanded significantly over the last decade.

David Duhalde, who served as DSA Deputy Director from 2015 to 2018, is reportedly in a relationship with a member of Samidoun, an organization that has been designated in some jurisdictions as a front group for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

In 2017, the DSA passed a BDS resolution. Two months later, Linda Sarsour announced her membership in the organization.

In 2019, the DSA passed a Cuba solidarity resolution and joined the ICAP-connected National Network on Cuba (NNOC).

In 2023, the DSA joined Progressive International, a transnational political network whose board includes Fidel Castro's niece, Jeremy Corbyn, Colombian President Gustavo Petro, Wang Hui of Tsinghua University in Beijing, Yanis Varoufakis, and a variety of similar socialist politicians, academics, and diplomats from around the world.

Considering the scale of these networks and their ability to influence protests, elections, and public policy, the United States faces a significant challenge. The extent to which foreign actors and foreign-aligned organizations can shape domestic political movements raises legitimate questions about transparency, accountability, and national sovereignty.

Last month, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent hinted at a regular press briefing that a coming crackdown was nearing for dark-money-funded NGOs and alleged foreign influence operations routed through far-left activist networks.

Even the globalist at The Atlantic had to admit...  

Here, the exchange between a reporter and Bessent suggests the potential enforcement phase has already begun:

Reporter: "I want to ask you about Antifa. In October, the Treasury Department started working with the FBI to investigate who's funding Antifa. Can you give us an update on that investigation? How close are you guys finding out who is funding it?"

Scott Bessent: "It is ongoing. We made substantial progress, and I think in the weeks and months ahead, we are going to have a lot to report."

(Bessent continues on IRS guidance for nonprofits): "The IRS is now giving guidance on the Form 990, which nonprofits they have to file. We are going to demand that nonprofits know their grant recipients. So if a grant recipient is violent, if they are suppressing people's rights, then YOU are responsible for that. And I think that's a very good first step."

Watch the Exchange:

🚨 WOW! Scott Bessent just revealed the IRS has moved to make NGOs LIABLE for violent activity committed by their grant recipients like Antifa

George Soros has been put on NOTICE.

"The IRS is now giving guidance on the Form 990, which nonprofits they have to file. We are going… pic.twitter.com/15ToheHbwa

— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) May 28, 2026

Certain NGOs and left-wing activist networks have evolved far beyond traditional nonprofit missions of charity and public benefit, instead functioning as a permanent protest-industrial complex advancing anti-capitalist and anti-Western agendas. This has fueled unrest, mobilized protests, psyops, and worked to obstruct President Trump's pro-America agenda under the banner of social justice.

Way more than $100M of US taxpayer money

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 8, 2025

Bitcoin Policy Institute exposed:

All eyes are now on Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's expected crackdown.

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/how-bad-foreign-influence-americas-nonprofit-universe

AZN Truqap combo OKd in US as 1st, only targeted treatment for hormone-sensitive prostate cancer

 

Based on results of CAPItello-281 which prospectively defined PTEN-deficient disease and showed Truqap combination reduced risk of radiographic disease progression or death by 19%

First-in-class AKT inhibitor moves into second tumour type to address an aggressive form of prostate cancer associated with poor prognosis
 

AstraZeneca’s Truqap (capivasertib) in combination with abiraterone and prednisone has been approved in the US as the first and only targeted treatment for adult patients with PTEN-deficient metastatic androgen pathway modulation-naïve or sensitive (mAPMN/S) prostate cancer, previously referred to as metastatic hormone-sensitive prostate cancer (mHSPC), as detected by a US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-authorised test.1

The approval by the US FDA was based on positive results from the CAPItello-281 Phase III trial, presented at the 2025 European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) Congress and published in Annals of Oncology

https://www.astrazeneca.com/media-centre/press-releases/2026/truqap-approved-in-us-for-prostate-cancer.html