Free Republic

Reforming health care is a signature issue with the current administration, but even the most ardent proponents of Obamacare would be reluctant to call it a success. Notwithstanding the well-publicized problems, of the countless billions spent on this program, precious little has gone into actual patient care. But really, what should we expect from a system designed by soulless bureaucrats such as “bioethicist” Ezekiel Emanuel and Donald Berwick, former Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services? Emanuel infamously suggested that doctors take the Hippocratic Oath too seriously, while Berwick intoned that the federal government must step in between...

America's crazy, patchwork health-care system just took another hit. Which would you prefer: to have the ability to decide for yourself and your family the type of coverage you want to purchase on a health insurance exchange—and having your premiums subsidized by a defined contribution or voucher from your employer—or to cede that ability to your employer entirely, having them pick your insurance for you, but empowering them to decide, based on their personal religious beliefs, which services to cover and which to exclude? After Monday’s Hobby Lobby decision, this is exactly the type of choice that more and more...

A key former adviser behind President Obama's healthcare law said the traditional role of health insurers would be "dead" by 2025, predicting massive changes in the industry. "By 2025, insurance companies as we know them — taking in premiums and paying out — dead," Ezekiel Emanuel ... Emanuel, the older brother of former White House chief of staff and current Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, has long argued that health insurers will shift away an employer-based system. By 2025.. ... Most Americans currently receive health insurance through their employers. ObamaCare includes an employer mandate, which requires companies with 50 or more...

Our recent interview with Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel about his provocative prediction that most employers will abandon health coverage by 2025 struck a nerve with You’re The Boss readers. It came as no surprise that Dr. Emanuel’s claim, first made in his new book, “Reinventing American Health Care,” would be swept up in the broader political and ideological debate about the Affordable Care Act. But in their many comments, readers raised interesting questions, and we took some of them back to Dr. Emanuel in another conversation that appears, edited and condensed, below. It’s worth noting that among those readers who...

"....As more people enter the A.C.A.’s new insurance exchanges, they will get to choose between a bronze plan with a narrow network and lower premiums and a platinum plan with a broader network and higher premiums. Inevitably,some insurance plans will offer narrow networks with poor-quality providers.However,there are four ways that we could reassure Americans that they are getting high-quality care despite choosing a narrow network.First,the exchanges should require that networks meet a minimum level of adequacy—meaning there are sufficient numbers of each type of practitioner in every geographic area. The National Committee for Quality Assurance, a nonprofit group, has already...

Ezekiel Emanuel—Rahm’s older brother and the man who, as far back as 2009, current Nebraska Senate candidate Ben Sasse warned was “quarterbacking the details” of Obamacare—has authored a New York Times op-ed in which he criticizes the proposed alternative released last week by Senators Coburn, Burr, and Hatch. Emanuel, a rather feisty fellow (see his Fox News exchange with Jim Capretta—during which he admitted that, under Obamacare, the “individual market is going away”), has written some, well, provocative things about what he calls the “allocation of scarce medical interventions.” For example, he’d prioritize the lives of the young over the...

In 2013, the American people learned what whoppers the key promises of ObamaCare turned out to be. But the biggest whopper about the Affordable Care Act is yet to be exposed: the tightening grip the federal government will have over your doctor — even if you’re paying with private insurance. Section 1311(h)(1)(B) of the health law gives the secretary of Health and Human Services blanket authority to dictate how doctors treat patients. Not just patients in government programs like Medicare and Medicaid, but patients with private plans they pay for themselves. On Dec. 2, 2013, we learned from the Federal...

Obamacare’s face has no bedside manner. Dr. Zeke Emanuel, brother of Obama’s previous Chief-of-Stiffs, Rahm who is currently the Mayor of the disaster called Chicago, showed what a petty, evil law the ACA truly is. As he abetted and added to 4 years of Obamacare lies by your president (not mine), he has become the face of the mad, self-proclaimed-genius-evil-doctor we all worry about who has the power of life and death over us. All that lacks are a deeply German accent, a wheelchair and an arm that flies uncontrollably into full Nazi salute while Zeke screams SEIG HEIL! SEIG...

THE BRIEFING ROOM • THE BLOG THE BLOG TUESDAY, AUGUST 4TH, 2009 AT 6:55 AM Facts Are Stubborn Things Posted by Macon Phillips Opponents of health insurance reform may find the truth a little inconvenient, but as our second president famously said, "facts are stubborn things." Scary chain emails and videos are starting to percolate on the internet, breathlessly claiming, for example, to "uncover" the truth about the President’s health insurance reform positions. In this video, Linda Douglass, the communications director for the White House’s Health Reform Office, addresses one example that makes it look like the President intends to...

CHRIS WALLACE, HOST: President Obama famously promised, if you like your doctor you can keep your doctor. Doesn't that turn out to be just as false, just as misleading, as his promise about if you like your plan you can keep your plan? Isn't it a fact, sir, that a number, most, in fact, of the Obamacare health plans that are being offered on the exchanges exclude a number of doctors and hospitals to lower costs? EZEKIEL EMANUEL: The president never said you were going to have unlimited choice of any doctor in the country you want to go to....

If you want to keep your doctor, you might have to pay more for it, Obamacare architect Zeke Emanuel said today on Fox News Sunday: The host, Chris Wallace, said: "President Obama famously promised, if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. Doesn't that turn out to be just as false, just as misleading, as his promise about if you like your plan, you can keep your plan? Isn't it a fact, sir, that a number, most, in fact, of the Obamacare health plans that are being offered on the exchanges exclude a number of doctors and hospitals...

The rise of nonphysician providers will enable more team care. Skilled health aides will monitor patients at home and alert a doctor if certain medical parameters decline. Nurses will provide wound care to diabetic patients, adjust medications like blood thinners and provide the initial management of chemotherapy side effects for cancer patients. Pharmacists will provide more counseling and urgent care. Physicians will remain essential to the proper diagnosis and treatment of disease, but will be backed up by teams who will help manage the more routine features of chronic illness.

Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel talks challenges facing the law. Fox News: The Kelly File

Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, health adviser to President Barack Obama, is under scrutiny. As a bioethicist, he has written extensively about who should get medical care, who should decide, and whose life is worth saving. Dr. Emanuel is part of a school of thought that redefines a physician’s duty, insisting that it includes working for the greater good of society instead of focusing only on a patient’s needs. Many physicians find that view dangerous, and most Americans are likely to agree.

Mika Brzezinski channeled the frustration of many liberals this morning when she gave what has to be the best reaction yet to New York Magazine’s supercut of President Obama telling Americans that if they like their current health care plan they can keep it. Joe Scarborough set up the clip, in which the president says repeatedly over the course of four years that under the Affordable Care Act people who already have health insurance and want to keep their plans will be able to. As we have learned over the last few weeks, insurance companies have been terminating plans that...

Obamacare architect Ezekiel Emanuel, a former adviser to the Obama White House, admitted today that, if Democrats have their way, the individual insurance market is going away. “Insurance companies don’t want, insurance companies don’t want the individual market as it’s constructed. They see the future. That individual market is going away. They don’t want to invest in it.” That was their plan all along. Via FOX News Sunday:

Fox News Channel’s Megyn Kelly grilled Ezekiel Emanuel last night on the foundational lies of Obamacare, with a focus on Obama’s relentlessly repeated falsehood that if you like your health plan, you can keep it. The older brother of Rahm Emanuel and Ari Emanuel, Ezekiel Emanuel is a physician, a former Obama adviser, a vocal proponent of Obamacare and a big advocate of the government takeover of health care. When Kelly homes in on the issues at hand, Emanuel takes a predictable approach. He changes the subject and decries Kelly’s interruptions seeking to direct him to the point. The video...

I love it when liberal progressives actually speak their true beliefs for us all to hear. However, you have to probe deeply and get them riled up enough to blow their cool in order to hear their unvarnished agenda. Liberals know that sane people do not agree with their policies or their goals, so they must always cloak them in a shadowy cloud of lies. It's always, "it's about the children!" or "where's your compassion?" with them in order to mask their true goals. Once you get under their skin, you can expose their lies and twisted words as they'll...

Ezekiel Emanuel, a noted oncologist, has helped advise the Obama administration in its effort to create an economic system larger than France’s economy to distribute health care services to over 300 million people. Together, those facts encapsulate the essence of our federal government: hopelessly overextended, devoid of caution and chock full of hubris. If that isn’t succinct enough to signal the coming disaster that will be Obamacare, then Emanuel’s recent column in the Wall Street Journal should tip the balance. Coincidentally, the column was about me, or, more appropriately, about a class of the peasantry to which Doctor Emanuel has...

“Presidential appointees,” Betsy McCaughey wrote in her 2010 pamphlet, Obama Health Law: What it says and how to overturn it (Encounter Books). “will decide what insurance plans cover, how much leeway your doctor will have, and what seniors get under Medicare.” “Chief among these advisors is Dr. Ezekial Emanuel, brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.” Since McCaughey, a former lieutenant governor of New York, typed those words, Rahm Emanuel has become mayor of Chicago while his brother has landed at the University of Pennsylvania where he serves as vice-provost and professor. “Dr. Emanuel has already been appointed...