Thread: Birth of a boom

The FresnoMexicanBee trying to make it sound like a good thing.

Birth of a boom
Valley hospitals are setting records for numbers of babies born.
By Tracy Correa / The Fresno Bee
09/27/07 23:44:32
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1.5%

Growth of births predicted this year in Fresno and Tulare counties, according to the California Department of Finance.

1.9%

Growth of births prediccted this year in Madera County.
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New home sales may have dipped recently, but effects of the Valley's housing boom are apparent in some local hospitals.

Many saw a surge in births in recent months, including record-setting numbers at Clovis Community Medical Center, Saint Agnes Medical Center and Madera Community Hospital.

Clovis hit a record with 350 births in August -- the first time it surpassed 300 in a single month and 31% more than August last year.

Saint Agnes had a record 386 births in August, and Madera had a record number of births in July with 193, topping its monthly average of 170 births.

The trend is reflected in statistics from the California Department of Health, which show births in Fresno County were mostly constant from June through October of 2006 but have been increasing since June of this year.

Dr. Stewart Mason, an obstetrician and gynecologist in Fresno, said the increase has been dramatic and has doctors and hospitals busier than ever.

"My practice has almost doubled in a year," he said. "We're noticing [more patients] in our office, in labor and delivery, in just sheer volume."

Mary Heim, chief of the demographic research unit at the California Department of Finance, said the sharp increase in births at some hospitals is likely linked to new housing development in the areas they serve.

This would include northeast Clovis, as well as Selma -- as home buyers migrate from Fresno to the affordable bedroom community -- and Madera.

"If it's an area where there's a lot of new development, younger people tend to move into those areas," Heim said.

Fresno mom Kasie Valdez said she noticed something was going on when she gave birth at Clovis Community.

When she checked in for a scheduled Caesarean section early in the morning Aug. 17, she and several other women had to wait in the lobby for beds to become available.

Valdez had given birth at the hospital before -- four years ago to son Palmer and more than a year ago to daughter Ava -- but this time was different. She said staff were running around and were being paged left and right.

Even so, the surgery that led to daughter Reece's birth was only delayed by about 30 minutes. "I have no complaints," she said.

She said she was in the hospital for three nights: "The babies just kept coming the whole time. They had something like 15 babies one day."

The surge built over several months at Clovis, which typically sees births rise in the summer. Several other hospitals also had busier-than-usual maternity wards.

Selma Community Hospital experienced a 60% increase in births in July compared with the same period last year.

Selma's sister hospital, Central Valley General in Hanford, saw only a slight increase in August births and a slight drop in July births.

This wasn't the case for Kaiser Permanente's Fresno Medical Center and Saint Agnes, which both saw the number of births rise substantially.

Kaiser saw a 31% increase in August compared with the same month last year.

Saint Agnes saw a nearly 21% increase from August 2006 and a 10% increase from July to August this year.

Mason, the OB-GYN, said Saint Agnes is on track to have a record number of births this year.

The California Department of Finance projects births in Fresno and Tulare counties will grow by 1.5% this year from 2006. Madera County's births are projected to grow 1.9%. But hospital representatives say the number of babies they are delivering is exceeding predictions.

Mason said hospitals also are feeling the pinch because the number of maternity beds hasn't kept pace with demand. While there are plans to add more labor and delivery beds, including at Clovis Community, the beds won't be added for a few years.

Not every hospital followed the upward trend. Births at Community Regional Medical Center in downtown Fresno dipped between July and August this year. Data for 2006 were not available.

And Kaweah Delta Hospital in Visalia saw a dip of about 3% in August births this year compared with last. It also saw a July-to-August drop this year of about 5%.
The reporter can be reached at tcorrea@fresnobee.com or (559) 441-6378.

http://www.fresnobee.com/263/story/150522.html

That's part of how they plan on conquering us...They are having lots of babies so they can out number us!

to say these people are nothing more than breeders looking for anchor baby stus is a misnomer ... dang... do they ever keep thier legs closed.

I am sorry, not trying to be rude.. this is coming out of our pockets and I am 1 mad camper reading this mess

Americans, consider yourself warned! This is exactly what happened to Serbians in Kosovo, the heart of Serbia and the place of immense importance for Europe as the place of major battle between Serbs and the hordes of Turkish conquerors.

Muslim Albanians were small minority in this land 50 years ago but now they constitute 90% + majority setting remaining Christian churches a fire, attacking and beating Serbian children in schools and their gangs torturing and killing defenseless Serbian pensioners. But this racist violence is not reported in our newspapers or TV stations.

Apparently, this is not problem for the EU, USA and UN.

It will happen to us in our homelands if we allow the invaders to take them over.


An article on ethnic cleansing directed on Serbs in Kosovo from the year 1999. Now the situation is far worse. Albanians racists won even though multinational forces are present. Both USA and EU pushes for an independent Albanian state in Kosovo. Kosovian/Albanese mafia is probably the most feared around Europe because of its cruelty.

Violence against Serbs escalates

A NEW spate of violence is erupting in Kosovo, including grenade attacks, bombings, shootings, and civil unrest. Separate grenade attacks on Serb-run bars in the capital, Pristina, and the nearby town of Obiliq injured 10 people late on Saturday night, while a bomb exploded on Sunday night in a travel agency close to the Pristina headquarters of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

A bomb threat against Pristina's Grand Hotel, popular with international officials and journalists, was made to K-For, the Nato- led peace-keepers, in the Serbian language, but no bomb was found. The hotel was until recently under Serbian management, but is now run by the brother of the Kosovo Liberation Army commander Agim Ceku.

Meanwhile, ethnic Albanians and French peace-keepers clashed for the third day running yesterday in the ethnically divided northern city of Kosovska Mitrovica. Ethnic Albanians are angry that the French troops are blocking their march across the bridge, which now partitions the city's Albanian and Serb communities. The Albanians accuse the French of sympathising with Mitrovica's Serbs, among whom, the Albanians say, are paramilitaries guilty of war crimes. In addition, the Albanians say the French are preventing them from reclaiming property on the less heavily destroyed northern side of the city, which is divided by the River Ibar.

The spokesman for the French troops in Mitrovica, Captain Bertrand Bonneau, says if the French soldiers allowed the Albanians to march en masse into the Serb side someone would be likely to get killed. They are allowing small groups of women, children and the elderly to cross from either side, but men of military age cross at their peril.

Violence continues to be directed at Kosovo's dwindling Serbian community. The last Serbian paediatrician said to be working in Pristina was shot while treating patients in his town-centre clinic, and is reported to be critically injured. Zlatoje Gligorijevic was taken to a Pristina hospital with injuries to his kidneys, spleen and stomach. British K-For troops in Pristina are reported to have started a "granny patrol" intended to help to stop the spate of attacks against elderly Serbian women in Kosovo.

Fewer than 50,000 Serbs remain in Kosovo, whose pre-war Serb population was estimated to be 200,000. The largest number remain in the northern part of Kosovska Mitrovica (20,000), the southeastern Gnjilane area (10,000), in a Serbian ghetto in the southwestern Kosovo city of Orahovac (3,000), and in Pristina (1,000).

In the Serbian capital, Belgrade, the Yugoslav President, Slobodan Milosevic, warned against Serbian traitors destroying the country, while urging Serbian diaspora members to invest in the reconstruction of their homeland.

"It would be sad if the long hand of the evil inflicted by Nato on our country were a hand of our citizens," he told those gathered for the three- day Diaspora '99 meeting.

While Mr Milosevic tried to gain support and funds from the diaspora, the head of the Serbian Orthodox Church embarked on an ambitious schedule of meetings with the political opposition.

Yesterday Patriarch Pavle was due to meet Mladjan Dinkic, the co- ordinator of the Group of 17, which has proposed that Mr Milosevic step down, to be replaced by a provisional government made up of technocrats, economists, and other experts. Patriarch Pavle was also expected to meet Zoran Djindjic and Vuk Draskovic, leaders of two opposition political parties.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_q ... _n14242586

Originally Posted by Molly

That's part of how they plan on conquering us...They are having lots of babies so they can out number us!

There is no surer way to remain mired in poverty and on the public dole than to have swarms of kids that you cannot afford.

And it goes on for generation after generation of these people, AND THEY STILL HAVE KIDS THEY CAN'T AFFORD! What they don't tell you is how much they are already spending on the kids in so-called poverty.

Veto would hurt kids
Expected Bush rejection of health bill could leave many in state uninsured.
By Barbara Anderson / The Fresno Bee
09/28/07 23:51:24
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An expected presidential veto of a bill that would boost spending on a children's health insurance program could leave hundreds of thousands of California children without coverage, health experts say.

The result would be disastrous for California, said Anthony Wright, executive director of Health Access California, a nonprofit organization that advocates for affordable health care. Without additional funding for the program next year, as many as 250,000 California children could be dropped, he said.

The federal government's State Children's Health Insurance Program, or SCHIP, provides low-cost health coverage for about 6.6 million children nationwide.

More than 831,000 children from working families statewide are covered by the program, known in California as Healthy Families. More than 53,000 children in the central San Joaquin Valley are enrolled.

The children are from families who cannot afford private insurance but earn too much for Medi-Cal, the state's insurance program for the poor. In California, children are eligible in families with earnings of up to 250% of the federal poverty level, or about $52,000 a year for a family of four.

The program expires Sunday, but state officials said they expect Congress to provide money to continue services at current levels though the end of November.

The worry is that flat funding could continue well beyond that -- even as the cost of health care rises and the number of eligible children grows.

Without extra federal money, "we will have to look seriously at disenrolling children next year," said Amy Palmer, associate secretary for external affairs at the California Health and Human Services Agency.

President Bush has vowed to veto a bill approved Thursday by the Senate and earlier in the month by the House that would give the children's insurance program $60 billion nationwide over the next five years, an increase of about $35 billion. The increase would have covered an additional 4 million of the nation's 9 million uninsured children.

The president has said the increase is too costly. He has proposed giving the program $30 billion, an increase of $5 billion.

California officials say the president's proposed $30 billion would not be enough for California to sustain its program.

"That just doesn't cut the mustard for California, and it doesn't cut the mustard for most of the states in the country," said Lesley Cummings, executive director of the Managed Risk Medical Insurance Board, which oversees California's Healthy Families program.

Without adequate funding, "we're going to have to look at options for cutting back the program," Cummings said.

California was counting on federal funds of $6.7 billion to $8.1 billion over the next five years to maintain the program. The bill approved in Congress would provide that. The program cost about $1.1 billion this year.

The state had hoped for even more so that eligibility requirements could be loosened.

About 763,000 California children were without insurance in 2005, according to California Health Interview Survey conducted by the University of California at Los Angeles. Of that number, about 200,000 were eligible for Healthy Families but were not enrolled.

State officials also could be scrambling to rewrite the governor's health-reform plan if the Healthy Families budget remains flat, said Wright of Health Access.

"It means health-care reform is going to be tougher," Wright said. "We have to raise money from other places -- raise more dollars in-state."

Continued on the next page >

The governor's health-reform proposal includes an estimated $42 million in extra children's insurance money from the federal government to insure about 50,000 children. But the children's health money is only a small part of the billions in federal funds the governor hopes to tap for health-care reform, Palmer said.

The bigger issue, she said, is the potential for children to be dropped from the program for a lack of funding. "At a time when we are moving to cover all children in California, anything that undermines our Healthy Families program -- whether it is a reduction in funding or stricter program rules -- is a problem for us in California."

The budget fight in Washington could unravel the program in California, said Bill Knezovich, pastor of Our Saviour's Lutheran Church and a leader in Faith in Community, the Fresno arm of People Improving Communities Through Organizing, an interdenominational group with about 20 churches in the Fresno area.

Knezovich has traveled to Washington four times to seek more funding for the children's insurance program. Knezovich's church is a registration site for Healthy Families. About 50% of his congregation has children enrolled in Healthy Families, he said.

"These people are hardworking people who a lot of times have to make a choice between food, clothing and health care," he said.

"Healthy Families has been one of the best programs that has come about," he said. "I just don't understand how we can't seem to do something that is good and just for hardworking people."

Rosalinda and Jesse Cabrera of Fresno enrolled their three children in Healthy Families four years ago.

"We couldn't afford the insurance by ourselves, coming out of our pockets," said Rosalinda Cabrera. "We're not that well off right now."

Cabrera, 31, works part time at three jobs, one at a school and the others at retail stores. Her husband is a truck driver. Together, their income is about $2,500 a month, she said.

Jesse Cabrera's employer offers health insurance, but the family cannot afford the monthly premiums, Rosalinda said. Her employers do not provide insurance to part-time employees, she said.

Healthy Families is a good program, she said. "If I didn't have this, what would I do?"

The reporter can be reached at banderson@fresnobee.com or (559)441-6310.

http://www.fresnobee.com/263/story/151518.html

"Healthy Families is a good program, she said. "If I didn't have this, what would I do?""

HOW ABOUT STOP HAVING KIDS!

That is their plan. BREED, BREED, BREED. That's why we HAVE TO MAKE SURE THAT HR 1940 PASSES!

How can they leave out WHO these babies are -- babies of illegal immigrants no doubt -- I mean, we all know this, but they don't mention it in the story. Ridiculous.

If hospitals just "keep expanding," where is that money coming from to expand??

There is NO WAY SCHIP or any other program is going to cover this amount of children being born like this and all their healthcare!! We have got to STOP THIS. If they want to have children, they go home to have them .. .and stay home!!

NOT AT OUR EXPENSE!!!!

The problem with this country is we should never reward illegals with tax payers money for having children, for that matter we shouldn't be rewarding anybody, even Americans for having large families they can't afford!

Originally Posted by Lugundum

Yesterday Patriarch Pavle was due to meet Mladjan Dinkic, the co- ordinator of the Group of 17, which has proposed that Mr Milosevic step down, to be replaced by a provisional government made up of technocrats, economists, and other experts. Patriarch Pavle was also expected to meet Zoran Djindjic and Vuk Draskovic, leaders of two opposition political parties.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/i_qn ... _n14242586[/quote]

So this is why there are so many Serbians in the US now. That's terrible. It's
even worse because I seem to remember Clinton bombed the Serbians to help out the Albanians.