When Health Behavioral Health IT Turns Children Into Targets

Republished with permission from AbleChild

America has built a behavioral-health system for children that is increasingly driven by data collection, diagnosis, digital tracking, and prescription management, yet lawmakers and parents still struggle to get basic answers about who is being labeled, medicated, and targeted for intervention.

Epic Systems is often presented as a neutral software company. But public reporting, court filings, and Epic’s own product materials show something far more consequential: one dominant health IT company now sits at the center of how sensitive behavioral-health information is stored, shared, and used for outreach across major health systems.

That concentration creates two urgent public risks: security and the marketing of diagnosis.

The security risk is straightforward. Behavioral-health records are among the most sensitive files in medicine, and EHR-related breaches remain a widespread problem across healthcare. When Medicaid and behavioral-health records for large child populations are concentrated in a small number of digital systems, the issue is no longer just privacy.

The public should also understand who holds this influence. Epic is privately controlled by founder and CEO Judy Faulkner, who was appointed by President Barack Obama in 2009 to the federal Health IT Policy Committee and served until 2014 as the representative of health IT vendors. This is not a partisan point. It is a power point. Faulkner had a seat inside the policy process while the modern national health IT framework was being built, and public reporting has described her as a major political donor with a net worth estimated at about $7.8 billion.

The second risk is how diagnoses become the basis for data-driven outreach. Epic has openly expanded into healthcare “consumerism” through its Cheers CRM platform, marketed as a tool for health systems to run campaigns using thousands of EHR data points. That may be called patient engagement. But when the underlying data include mental-health diagnoses, psychotropic medication histories, missed appointments, crisis visits, or suicide-risk flags, the line between care coordination and diagnosis-based marketing becomes dangerously thin.

This matters most in Medicaid behavioral health. Children in Medicaid often move through fragmented systems involving hospitals, school-based clinics, community mental-health centers, telehealth programs, and public agencies. Their records can travel across multiple settings while families have little visibility into how those records are used to trigger reminders, prompts, referrals, and program enrollment. This is a looks like a major breach on informed consent and certainly would be why HIPPA exists in the first place to protect the consumers medical records.

The national numbers are staggering. CCHR reports that FOIA requests to 32 states found roughly 2,999,084 Medicaid-covered children ages 0 to 17 on psychiatric drugs. AbleChild’s Wyoming advocacy brought the issue down to the state level by submitting FOIA-derived CCHR data showing that 5,986 Wyoming children ages 0 to 17 were prescribed psychiatric drugs under Medicaid. Those numbers did not come from routine public dashboards generated by the health IT systems lawmakers are told to trust. They came because advocates forced the data into the open through FOIA.

The money is enormous. MACPAC reported that Medicaid spent about 8 billion dollars on psychotropic medications in 2011, roughly 30 percent of fee-for-service drug spending. The Commonwealth Fund reports that Medicaid now spends more than 58 billion dollars a year on mental-health care, with almost 43 percent of that spending going to people under age 20.

That is how the model sustains itself. More screening produces more labels. More labels produce more data. More data allow more targeting, more outreach, and more behavioral-health “engagement” campaigns. In a system built around scale, every new diagnosis can become both a treatment pathway and a data point.

Publicly documented philanthropy adds another layer of influence. Epic says it gives annual donations to hundreds of nonprofits. Atrium Health Foundation publicly highlighted Epic Systems’ support for school-based behavioral health and telehealth in under-resourced districts. That does not prove misconduct. It does show how one company can influence both the data infrastructure of care and the expansion of programs that identify and manage children inside schools.

This is the question policymakers should be asking: how will this model ever be broken if the same IT systems that collect diagnoses also help drive the outreach, the segmentation, and the expansion of behavioral-health programs for more children?  Lawmakers should be deeply alarmed not only by the vast sums being spent on psychotropic drugs for children, but by the behavioral health industry’s failure to provide meaningful data to those responsible for oversight. Instead of ensuring transparency and accountability, the industry collects and leverages this data for its own marketing and expansion, leaving policymakers in the dark while vulnerable children are increasingly exposed.

A serious response would begin with evidence, not slogans. Lawmakers should require independent audits of how pediatric Medicaid behavioral-health data are used in CRM tools, predictive analytics, and school-linked interventions. They should require clear disclosure when a child’s diagnosis or risk profile is used to trigger outreach or enrollment activity. And they should treat concentration of sensitive behavioral-health data in a handful of private platforms as both a child-protection issue and a security issue.

AbleChild is a 501(3) C nonprofit organization that has recently co-written landmark legislation in Tennessee, setting a national precedent for transparency and accountability in the intersection of mental health, pharmaceutical practices, and public safety.

What you can do.  Sign the Petition calling for federal hearings!

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The post ABLECHILD: When Health Behavioral Health IT Turns Children Into Targets appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

War Secretary Pete Hegseth delivered the commencement address at the US Military Academy in West Point, New York, on Saturday, where he torched woke identity politics and gave advice to the newly commissioned Army Lieutenants.

Hegseth, who was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in 2003 through Princeton University’s ROTC program and retired from the US Army National Guard as a Major, completed three active-duty deployments in Guantanamo Bay, Iraq, and Afghanistan and received two Bronze Star medals.

During his remarks to the graduating class of 2026, Hegseth harkened back to his days leading his first air assault mission, targeting Al-Qaeda in Baghdad, to share advice for the Army’s newest Lieutenants.

“Plan and rehearse for contingencies every time. There’s no substitute for preparation ever. Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. Plan for recovery, resupply, alternate communications, rehearse, and refine,” he told the graduates.

“Take care of your soldiers, take care of their families and each other. If you never leave a fallen comrade, you’ve done your job. If you’re in trouble, if your men are in trouble, your women are in trouble, you are en route,” Hegseth continued, pointing to the flawlessly executed April rescue mission of two airmen in Iran.

“Ask Dude 44 Alpha and Dude 44 Bravo how grateful they are that this spirit is alive and well,” he said. “Downed pilots, two missions, seven hours in downtown Iran, straight up the middle, one in the middle of the day, one in the middle of the night, two American pilots home. Never leave a fallen comrade behind. Last, and most importantly, seek God, and know that we are not Him.”

WATCH:

Hegseth also delivered an incredible rebuke of the US military’s abolished woke policies and the current ideas circulating on college campuses, telling graduates, “The battlefield does not grade on a curve, and you can’t throw your pronouns at the enemy.”

“Social engineering and woke ideology are fine for Harvard, silly but fine,” he said. “On the battlefield, there is no place for them.”

WATCH:

Hegseth: The battlefield does not grade on a curve, and you can’t throw your pronouns at the enemy. Combat is the ultimate test, and our best Americans must ace it. Our competitors, near-peer adversaries, across the globe are trying to best us. They want to out innovate us, out build us, and defeat us by whatever means necessary. They are watching us, and they are testing us. When the call comes, either we’re ready, and your soldiers are ready, or you are not.

And our army, it must learn, and it’s learning quickly, Drones, AI, and air defenses, and we must learn fast, and I need you to lead and lean into that learning. That is part of the snapback as well, at the small unit level, innovating every way possible in a world where, on the battlefield, innovation at a moment’s notice is the difference between success and failure. While, social engineering and woke ideology are fine for Harvard, silly but fine, on the battlefield, there is no place for them.

Hegseth also did a near-perfect Trump impersonation, granting a “Complete and Total Pardon” for any infractions to the West Point grads, leaving them all laughing out loud.

WATCH:

Hegseth For all those cadets who’ve committed minor infractions or violations of the regulations of the United States Military Academy, for which ordinary and special punishment has been imposed or is being considered to the Corps of Cadets, as President Trump might say: A Complete and Total Pardon.

The post WATCH: War Sec Pete Hegseth Drops Epic Line Torching Wokeness at West Point Commissioning Ceremony, Does Trump Impression appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

Jon Samuelson, 33, a decorated La Porte County Sheriff’s Deputy, was shot three times inside an Indiana hospital emergency room Friday morning after he stopped to help a stranded motorist on the side of the road.

The deputy, a 12-year veteran and third-generation law enforcement officer, was airlifted in critical condition after being repeatedly shot at close range.

Sharod Grafton Jr., a 22-year-old man from Chicago, was captured minutes later hiding in nearby woods with the handgun believed to be the murder weapon.

Around 6:45 a.m., Deputy Samuelson was driving to a training session when he spotted a disabled vehicle on the side of the road.

Deputy Samuelson stopped to assist the driver, who claimed he was stranded and needed help.

The deputy ended up driving Grafton to the hospital at his request.

Once inside the hospital, Deputy Samuelson learned that Grafton “may have been involved in an earlier criminal incident,” so he went to the emergency room to speak with him.

“Once at the hospital, the officer learned that the subject may have been involved in an earlier criminal incident,” Indiana State Police Sgt. Glen Fifield said during a press briefing. “The officer returned inside the hospital where an altercation took place in the emergency room between the suspect and himself, which resulted in the suspect producing a firearm and shooting the officer.”

Deputy Samuelson was stabilized at the scene, then airlifted to Memorial Hospital in South Bend, where he underwent emergency surgery.

“This is a senseless shooting that didn’t have to take place,” Fifield said. “Our officers and deputies from the La Porte County Sheriff’s Department and all over the state of Indiana and Illinois risk their lives every day. This officer thought he was helping a stranded motorist, and it turned into this. So once again, he was out helping somebody, and it turned into this.”

As of the latest reports, Samuelson remains in critical condition.

No other patients, staff, or members of the public were injured.

Law enforcement has not publicly released what earlier crime Grafton was believed to be tied to.

Grafton is currently being held in Porter County Jail pending charges.

The post Indiana Deputy in Critical Condition After Being Shot Three Times in Hospital ER By ‘Stranded Motorist’ He Stopped to Help appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

A 50-year-old Florida woman was mauled to death by two pitbulls who had already bitten other people and were known for terrorizing the neighborhood.

Jodi Cowan took her dog for a walk on Tuesday when she was viciously attacked by the pitbulls.

Cowan’s longtime husband, Donnell Smith, said he saw the dogs “dragging” his wife down the street.

“It was brutal. Seeing the same woman I’ve loved for the last 25-30 years just ripped apart by two animals was just … I’ll never get that image out of my mind,” Smith said to WESH 12.

Smith said he pulled out a knife and tried to save his wife, but she was severely injured and had to be airlifted to the hospital, where she succumbed to her injuries.

The two pitbulls terrorized the community and were known to the Brevard County Sheriff’s Office. Neighbors said they were afraid to leave their homes sometimes because of the dogs.

A neighbor said surveillance cameras caught the grisly attack on video.

The deadly dog attack is under investigation.

WESH reported:

The Brevard County Sheriff’s Office is investigating a dog attack early Tuesday that left a woman dead, according to a spokesperson.

Donnell Smith said his partner, 50-year-old Jodi Cowan, was mauled by two dogs that belong to a neighbor on Blue Bonnet Drive near Cocoa.

“She was a great woman. She just loved people, loved dogs more than people, and for her to go out that way, it’s not right,” Smith said.

Smith said he had just returned home shortly after 1 a.m. after helping neighbors across the street when he realized Cowan and one of their dogs had disappeared. Then, he heard a faint cry for help.

“I saw the silhouette of the two dogs dragging my wife down the road, off into the grass in front of the truck down there,” Smith said.

Smith said he found Cowan lying in a pool of blood with bites all over her body. He said the dogs then came back and tried to drag her away from him.

“I pulled my knife out, you know, just swinging with it one hand and holding the blood with the other, trying to stop her from bleeding,” Smith said.

The post HORROR: Florida Woman Mauled to Death by Two Pitbulls – Dogs Drag Her Body Down the Street appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

President Trump kept his commitment to seal the border when he returned to office in January of 2025. Since then, illegal border crossings are down over 99 percent.

During the previous four years under Biden, an estimated 15 million illegal aliens flooded the United States with a wide-open border. The effect this has had on the country will be felt for years to come as law enforcement agencies have to deal with human smugglers and illegal aliens.

Texas DPS arrested a human smuggler in a hotel parking lot in Del Rio this month who attempted to flee on foot after being stopped and questioned. He was caught shortly after attempting to evade authorities.

The accused smuggler was identified as Wilber Adonay Serrano Ruiz, who was from Houston. He was driving a red Chevy Colorado pickup truck.

The DPS troopers found four illegal aliens from Mexico hiding in the vehicle. The illegals were handed over to the Border Patrol.

Ruiz was charged with human smuggling.

Watch:

On 5/10/26, a @TxDPS Trooper received information on a possible vehicle involved in human smuggling and located the suspect vehicle at a hotel parking lot in Del Rio.

As the trooper made… pic.twitter.com/xFHZ4Drfu1

— Chris Olivarez (@LtChrisOlivarez) May 16, 2026

TGP reported earlier this month of another human smuggler that was arrested. Numerous illegals bailed from the vehicle.

Watch:

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On 5/5/26, a @TxDPS Trooper stopped a white Jeep Cherokee on US-277 in Maverick Co. During the stop, the driver allowed several passengers to bail out… pic.twitter.com/8ItS3Ly0E5

— Chris Olivarez (@LtChrisOlivarez) May 8, 2026

Article IV, Section 4 of the US Constitution gives the federal government the authority and responsibility to protect the country from an invasion.

“The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence.” Article IV, Section 4 of the US Constitution.

Rule of law has been restored under President Trump.

The post Texas DPS Arrest Human Smuggler in Hotel Parking Lot Attempting to Flee on Foot; Four Illegal Aliens Found in Suspect’s Vehicle (VIDEO) appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.