Free Republic

The Wall Street Journal reports that the part-time Florida Legislature has adjourned for the year without approving the Obamacare Medicaid expansion, which Gov. Rick Scott famously flip-flopped into supporting earlier this year. Here's how the Journal's editorial described the outcome: The nine Republican governors who decided earlier this year to pump some helium into the Obamacare balloon and expand Medicaid forgot about that saving grace of American politics: the separation of powers. On Friday, Florida became the latest state to reject the expansion, as Gov. Rick Scott failed to convince the GOP-controlled legislature to approve his Medicaid flip. Republicans in...

I've almost completed the 1st week of Insanity. I understand that it is designed to be a rough workout, but I have a hard time keeping up with Shaun T. I was wondering if other have completed this and if they were happy with the results. A guy I work with does P90X and repeats it - he's done it 6 times so far. I definitely feel better after a week.

Lawsuit: EPA Conducted Gas Chamber-like Experiments on Elderly, Infirm at University of North Carolina [T]he EPA has been conducting human experiments on people by piping diesel fumes from a running truck mixed with air into their lungs at a North Carolina university. The agency has ginned up yet another green crusade — the lethal dangers of diesel fumes. They even had a gas chamber set up to accommodate the environmental research project that shockingly recalls the death camps in Poland. Read more: http://joemiller.us/2012/10/lawsuit-epa-conducted-gas-chamber-like-experiments-on-elderly-infirm-at-university-of-north-carolina/#ixzz2ThSWxmIY

Suicide rates are tied to the economy. The Boston Globe reported in 2011: A new report issued today by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention finds that the overall suicide rate rises and falls with the state of the economy — dating all the way back to the Great Depression. The report, published in the American Journal of Public Health, found that suicide rates increased in times of economic crisis: the Great Depression (1929-1933), the end of the New Deal (1937-1938), the Oil Crisis (1973-1975), and the Double-Dip Recession (1980-1982). Those rates tended to fall during strong economic times...

Coach is Right published this article well before the current IRS scandals had broken. We thought readers might be interested in taking another look at this slight infraction committed by our “voluntary” taxing authorities. In September of 2011, 60 million health records involving 10 million Americans were illegally confiscated by members of the IRS. The theft took place at an unidentified place of business in California. Referring to itself as the John Doe Company in a lawsuit filed last week against the 15 IRS agents who took part, plaintiffs claim that...

Planned Parenthood’s new advertisement asserting that aborted babies will thank their would-be mothers evidences a shift to macabre honesty in the organization’s messaging. “There’s nothing worse for a child than being unwanted,” claimed PP spokeswoman Adora Slaughter. “Add to this the burdensome tedium of motherhood and you have a formula that maximizes unhappiness. Abortion rescues all the participants from this fate.” “Previously, we have invested almost all our energy on advising women to carefully consider the responsibilities they could avoid by aborting a potential child they don’t want,” Slaughter said. “I mean, having a baby you don’t want is like...

Michigan House Republicans unveiled legislation Thursday that would expand Medicaid, but the measure includes conditions the federal government might reject. Medicaid expansion is the No 1 issue states are facing regarding Obamacare this year. President Barack Obama's administration wants states to expand Medicaid, which would lock them into participating in Obamacare. Under the House Republican plan, Michigan would go along with Medicaid expansion only if the federal government pays for 100 percent of it and allows the state to implement major reforms to the program. Key elements of House Bill 4714 are "cancellation clauses" under which the program would be...

President Obama, as usual, is blameless for any misfeasance and malfeasance of the Government he allegedly leads. Let's make it easier for him by making it simpler and smaller. Due to the complexity and multiplicity of scandals increasingly enveloping the Obama Administration, I became too bogged down with constantly emerging new stuff to write about it. Sadly, President Obama also has to rely on media reports, so I can easily understand his problems. Indeed, even this little bit about the Justice Department almost escaped me: WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department failed to provide the names of some terrorists in the...

In an embarrassing effort to squelch the growing IRS scandal, the White House unleashed their master apologist, David Axlerod to defend the President Obama’s role in the intimidation of American citizens. Breaking from their tired playbook of duck and blame, Axlerod adopted the strategy of selective knowledge to explain to MSNBC’s host Joe Scarborough that Obama couldn’t possibly know everything happening in his administration. “Part of being president is there’s so much beneath you that you can’t know because the government is so vast,” Axlerod tried to explain. No doubt Axlerod extended the same leniency to President Bush over the...

Thursday, May 16, 2013 May 16, 2013 Another IRS scandal: agents illegally seized 60 million medical records Image009And as if there's not already an abundance of problems at the IRS, another one erupts, involving 60 million private medical records of 10 million patients - including all California state judges - from Healthcare IT News: The Internal Revenue Service is now facing a class action lawsuit over allegations that it improperly accessed and stole the health records of some 10 million Americans, including medical records of all California state judges. According to a report by Courthousenews.com, an unnamed HIPAA-covered entity in...

The terrible ten year rape/ kidnapping ordeal suffered by three innocent Cleveland women at the hands of Ariel Castro, a registered Democrat (look it up) may yet put the baby killing crowd at NARAL and NOW in a web of their own evil lies. Their captivity included daily rapes and the predictable pregnancies that followed. The startling evidence shows Castro’s depravity extended to stomach punching pregnant victims to cause miscarriages thereby murdering at least five innocent babies. That Castro’s crimes are revolting and demand the death penalty is a widely held sentiment; but what will women’s organizations do or say?...

“In the days of the Malleus, if the physician could find no evidence of natural illness, he was expected to find evidence of witchcraft: today, if he cannot diagnose organic illness, he is expected to diagnose mental illness.” (1) The Malleus Maleficarum was a 15th century text which instructed Inquisitors on the proper method of identifying, trying and burning witches. Though it was many years ago that renowned psychiatrist Thomas Szasz (1920-2012) used the example of the Malleus to comment on the diagnostic practices of his fellow physicians, it seems he might have been on to something as today psychiatrists...

In light of the recent Oregon Medicaid study, several people have discussed the idea of taking parts of the social insurance system and replacing them with cash benefits. This naturally brings up the debate about whether it should be a policy goal for the United States to adopt a universal basic income (UBI). These poverty-level targeted incomes are universal and unconditional, so everyone would get them regardless of their income, status or work participation. Wonkblog’s Dylan Matthews wrote an overview of universal basic incomes and some proposals for such a system last year. Though establishing a basic income was once...

“It is customary to define psychiatry as a medical specialty concerned with the study, diagnosis and treatment of mental illnesses.” But according to prominent psychiatrist and academic Thomas Szasz MD (1920-2012) “…this is a worthless and misleading definition.” “Mental illness is a myth. Psychiatrists are not concerned with mental illnesses and their treatments. In actual practice they deal with personal, social, and ethical problems in living.” (1) Szasz write that “…the notion of a person ‘having a mental illness’ is scientifically crippling. It provides professional assent to a popular rationalization—namely that problems in living experienced and expressed in terms of...

Bad-week-after-bad-week for the besieged Obama White House- and this one still ain't even over yet! At a point in time when Obamacare's most unpleasant periods of implementation -and massive tax hikes- are yet to have hit, seems reality has already penetrated much of the public awareness...  at least to the point so that somebody besides medical professionals and small-businesses are frightened by this legislative Frankenstein.  Obamacare has never enjoyed 50% support in any poll I've ever seen- now today, barely a third of regular Joes and Josephines approve, just one point better than the all time low of 34%...

In psychology and psychiatry, a condition is considered pathological when it results in behaviours or states of mind which are harmful to oneself and/or others. Sometimes it is a question of degree. All of us, for example, have little insignificant rituals, or irrational beliefs, or acts of superstition that serve no purpose but are harmless enough. When these come to dominate somebody's life and seriously interfere with normal everyday functioning, they are deemed a disorder, specifically Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). We all generally keep objects that only occupy space without any use or function, but it is only when...

The past 2 decades have witnessed an alarming increase in the number of Americans diagnosed with mental illness. Is modern psychiatry reaping an immense profit by impulsively—perhaps even deliberately–conflating mental illness with a growing, public aversion to the demands of personal responsibility? In the summer of 2011, The New York Review of Books published two lengthy articles by Marcia Angell, MD—Senior Lecturer in Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School and former Editor in Chief of The New England Journal of Medicine. In these articles, Angell reviewed three books which take a critical look at psychiatry and its relationship with the...

My dog, Elkie, recently suffered a stroke. While she was recovering, she developed an infection of her digestive track. My veterinarian prescribed an oral antibiotic. She called the local CVS drug store and ordered it. My wife and I are customers of this CVS store and get our prescriptions there through Medicare and Tricare, the latter the military retiree plan. I went to pick-up the medicine, to find it had to be prepared by another pharmacy and then sent to CVS. I was told to come back later in the day. Because I had already made one trip, I called...

While the Michigan Legislature debates expanding Medicaid, a new study says that doing so may not significantly improve health outcomes. The study, "The Oregon Experiment," was published in the New England Journal of Medicine and measured several health areas, like blood pressure, glycated hemoglobin, cholesterol and depression. The report compared two groups of similar people: one group in the state's Medicaid program and another that was not enrolled in the state's Medicaid program. Mean values and absolute changes in clinical outcomes and health outcomes with Medicaid coverage. "We found no significant effect of Medicaid coverage on the prevalence or diagnosis...

"The increase in the rate of TB in the UK, which contrasts with most other European countries, may, at least in part, be due to the fact that a high proportion of UK cases occur in the foreign-born, coupled with a comparatively large number of foreign nationals from countries with a very high incidence of TB." Who wrote that? One of the far-right "nazi grouplets", as the Marxist site Searchlight would call them? A racist, a xenophobe? No, it is the conclusion of a scientific study published in the world's most authoritative database of peer-reviewed medical research, the US National Library...

Our founding fathers were very careful to stipulate in our Constitution, and in crystal clear language, that our Constitution, and only those laws which shall be made in pursuance thereof, shall be the supreme law of the land. All those who assert Obamacare is the law of the land, need to explain why the following stated reasons are insufficient to establish that Obamacare has not been made in pursuance of our Constitution. And they need to explain why Obamacare is in harmony with the documented intentions and beliefs under which our Constitution was adopted. Keep in mind our very own...

Is your business involved in manufacturing, research and development, clean or renewable energy, generating electricity, or nuclear power? Did it open after January 1, 2002? Is it creating jobs that provide health care benefits conforming to the requirements laid out in Obamacare? Congratulations; under Texas House Bill 3390, your company may qualify for a break on its school district taxes. For everyone else, bad news; the albatross that is Obamacare still hangs around your neck. The new legislation, just placed on the House agenda Thursday, decries the difficulty our state’s high property taxes create for attracting capital-intensive industries like manufacturing....

Not long after ObamaCare passed Peter R. Orszag (the economist Obama relied on to get Obamacare passed) and Ezekiel Emanuel (the doctor that assisted Orszag in getting ObamaCare passed) wrote that the law: puts into place virtually every cost-control reform proposed by physicians, economists, and health policy experts. A year after it's passage Obama supporters claimed the law will contain costs: When the President and progressive leaders in Congress took on the task of health care reform one year ago, they made three broad promises to the American people: (1) to cover the uninsured, (2) to make coverage more stable...

I thought that stench smelled familiar... Heritage Foundation   h/t Doug Ross

The mother of all government screw-ups is coming your way. Medical coverage will be reduced and the costs you pay are going to rapidly escalate. The "Death Panels" are coming and who knows what treatment they're going to allow you to receive. What happens to restaurant chains who can't afford to cover their employees, will their prices double? The affect on part time employees is even worse. More and more people will be involuntarily converted into part-timers to reduce employer insurance costs. Doctors will no longer be able to afford to be in business for themselves and they will become...

Not Safe For Work (some foul language) - Full title - "Jason Collins Isn't A Hero, Hes A Liar & A Fraud! Here's Why! Pt 1 (1st Openly Gay NBA Player)" The woman who was once engaged to NBA star Jason Collins says she had NO CLUE he was gay at the time of their relationship ... in fact, she only found out last weekend ... and she was floored. Carolyn Moos (who played a few seasons in the WNBA) dated Collins for seven years and was engaged to him until they broke up in 2009 ... after Collins pulled...

After 46 years the Texas Tower sniper killings still raises important questions. On August 1, 1966 Charles Whitman a 25 year old former Marine and college student started his day by killing his mother and wife. He then packed up a variety of guns and a large quantity of ammunition and drove to the University of Texas Austin campus took the elevator to the top floor and began to shoot people as they walked by 28 floors below. When he was finished he had murdered 17 including an unborn child and injured another 32 innocent people. For 1 hour and...

States also struggle as increased Medicaid spending crowds out other budget priorities, and they blame federal rules, allowing individuals with substantial assets to enroll in this welfare program. In a letter to Congress, the State of Virginia writes “the federal government should give states greater flexibility to consider assets when determining eligibility for LTC coverage through the Medicaid program.” The State of Wisconsin agrees this will “help ensure the long-term sustainability of such programs for their residents in most need of government assistance.” Federal rules force states to disregard more than a half million dollars in home equity and the...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Obama, he didn't do the keynote last night to Planned Parenthood, but he did show up and make a speech, and his comments were the first to Planned Parenthood by a sitting president. And he lauded 'em. He praised their nearly 100 years of service to women. This makes me ill, by the way. That a president of the United States shows up at an abortion factory, essentially, and praises their work. You know what else he said? He said the opponents of abortion want to return to the 1950s. Yep, that's right. Opponents of abortion, just...

If the Michigan Legislature goes along with Gov. Rick Snyder’s plan to expand Medicaid as part of Obamacare, it will mean spending a lot more money for worse medical service, said one health policy expert. More people would be covered but that will stretch already stressed resources for the government safety net health insurance program, said Avik Roy, a senior fellow for the Manhattan Institute in New York City who spoke to a crowd of about 70 at a Mackinac Center for Public Policy Issues and Ideas Forum on Thursday. Roy writes a blog for Forbes called “The Apothecary,” and...

The uncomfortable effects of government actions are being felt everywhere. Obamacare concerns are, anecdotally, delaying hiring, causing firms to change benefits for the people, and increasing taxes on the great majority. On the other hand, in the context of the "sequester", which is merely a slowdown in the breakneck rate of government spending, anyone who has traveled by plane in the last month knows the full court press efforts under way to ensure the American public knows just how 'devastating' the sequester cuts are - with delays rising exponentially with every dollar removed from the FAA budget. But there is...

Congress is preparing to take action on a bipartisan proposal to raise taxes on flu vaccines. This is not a tax on the wealthy, but rather on a broad swath of Americans, or at least those who choose to be immunized against the flu. In February, identical bills were introduced in the House and Senate to add seasonal flu vaccines to the IRS code as taxable. The legislation would exact a 75¢ per dose tax on any "vaccine against seasonal influenza." Given that the Centers for Disease Control projects that 135 million doses of flu vaccine will be used this...

The hospital "doesn't really want Mexicans," he said in a telephone interview with the AP. "They wanted to disconnect me so I could die. They said I couldn't survive, that I wouldn't live."

Few aspects of the Affordable Care Act are more critical to its success than affordability, but in recent weeks experts have predicted costs for some health plans could soar next year. Now health law supporters are pushing back, noting close ties between the actuaries making the forecasts and an insurance industry that has been complaining about taxes and other factors it says will lead to rate shock for consumers. "Most actuaries in this country -- what percentage are employed by insurance companies?" Sen. Al Franken, a Minnesota Democrat, asked an actuary last week at a hearing of the Committee on...

There is an increasing trend toward higher health insurance rates for those who are overweight and live “unhealthy” lifestyles as defined by insurance companies and employers. As the thinking goes, the obese and others (usually smokers) are automatically viewed as chronically unhealthy and above average consumers of healthcare services. Whether this is true for a particular person or not has become irrelevant. More premium money has to be collected from somewhere and neither the cowardly insurance companies nor our feckless politically correct corporate leaders will demand higher premiums from homosexuals whose risky lifestyle is well established as a cause of...

Won't be needing that Lexus in the can, son In news that shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone outside the snake-fascinated Hopenchange cult, the suspect now in FBI custody for sending letters laced with poison to Republican  Sen Roger Wicker (+ Richard Shelby/Obama) has been named as one 'Paul-Kevin Curtis' (why do psychopaths always use three names?), a Democratic activist and budget rock/country star impersonator, among other things. Seems the 45-y.o. Mississippi resident (when he's not busy with terrorist acts) has been performing a schlock act out of Tupelo, MS called 'Tribute to the Stars' while also claiming to be a...

Somewhere toward the end of "A Few Good Men" comes the only scene from the movie that anyone actually remembers. It's the one where Jack Nicholson in a uniform begins chewing the scenery and turns a dreary Aaron Sorkin adaptation of an Aaron Sorkin play into a memorable movie while inflicting Sorkin on the entertainment industry for the next two decades. The familiar thesis of Nicholson's Colonel Jessup is that he does what needs to be done and what no one wants to talk about needing to be done. His existence may be "grotesque and incomprehensible to you", but he...

‘SHE’S NOW OR NEVER’ FOUNDER MENNE TALIVA’A HALL RUNS IN NORTH SHORE MARATHON (Honolulu, HAWAI'I)--She’s running to fight obesity, diabetes and heart disease. She’s running for her family. “I run for change!” exclaims Menne Taliva’a Hall, founder of a health and wellness sisterhood and Blog called ‘She’s Now or Never’ or SNN. "My quest to run marathons is a demonstration to prove that change is possible! I leave footprints in honor of family and friends that have passed on and for those that I love dearly." After shedding 150 pounds and finishing more than 20 half-marathons, Hall – blogger and...

Kermit Gosnell entered a Philadelphia courtroom on Monday where he is on trial for the murder of seven unborn children. He looked at the seating reserved for media and saw something he hadn't last week. Media. The big guns. The Bigs were shamed into appearing at the abortionist's trial after a stunning Twitter campaign that began Thursday night and swept through the weekend. A courtroom photo I snapped last week showing three rows of empty media seating, while grisly trial was in its fourth week, went viral. The new media rattled the old media, and the old responded by...

"Mr. Speaker, will the decades-long major national news media cover-up of the brutality—and violence—of abortion methods ever end? "Will Americans ever be told the horrifying details as to how—and how often—abortionists dismember, decapitate, and chemically poison innocent babies? "Will Americans ever be informed by a conscientious, unbiased news media that in the past 40 years, over 55 million child victims have been brutally killed by abortion—a staggering loss of children’s lives that equates to the entire population in England? And that many women have been hurt physically, emotionally, psychologically—and according to the Center for Disease Control over 400 women...

http://blogcritics.org/politics/article/the-15-percent-solution-adapting-to/ Why is healthcare tied to employment? One of the smartest decisions the federal government made was compelling employers to collect insurance, taxes, unemployment, and Medicare/Social Security contributions through the employee’s paychecks. We all have had the same reality check when we received our first paycheck. You remember…you worked at a fast food place in high school, and you received $5 per hour. You worked 20 hours, and realistically believed you would receive $100. That’s the first time you learned about taxes, and the thrill of the moment, receiving your first paycheck, is tempered by the reality of FICA, or...

Love and fear are often presented as exceptional motivators, but which one is the greatest? From a theological viewpoint, the answer is love: “There is no fear in love, but perfect love drives out fear because fear has to do with punishment, and so one who fears is not yet perfect in love.” (1 John 4:18) Fair enough, but on the way to perfection, it’s virtually impossible for us to ignore our fears, especially if the punishment involved will affect our health. Thus, we are assaulted—on a daily basis—by all sorts of health scares. No doubt, these scare motivators are...

>Earlier I shared what happened when I asked an AP reporter and a Washington Post reporter about their personal Gosnell blackouts.It was so illuminating that I decided to check out a few other media outlets. I headed over to Politico. Since Washington Post reporter Sarah Kliff tried to justify her lack of coverage of the Gosnell trial by calling it a local crime story, I thought I’d add other local stories into my search. Thanks for the idea! So here’s what I found out. Politico‘s search engine pops out 165 results on Trayvon Martin (local crime story in Florida), 94...

I’ve been writing about media coverage of abortion for many years. And so have many others. If you haven’t read David Shaw’s “Abortion Bias Seeps Into The News,� published in the Los Angeles Times back in 1990, you should. That report also explains why we cover the topic here at GetReligion.But the thing is that I’m getting kind of sick of pointing out egregious bias only to see things not just remain bad but get worse. Just think, in the last year, we saw the media drop any pretense of objectivity and bully the Susan G. Komen Foundation into funding...

Thanks to conservative new media, the Kermit Gosnell trial is finally part of the national dialog. But before the mainstream press got around to doing their job, ten congressmen took to the floor of the House to protest the lack of media attention being paid to the horrifying story. One such congressman, Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), contrasted the abortionist's trial to another ongoing narrative that the media covers obsessively: gun control. “If Dr. Gosnell had walked into a nursery and shot seven infants with an AR-15, it would be national news and the subject of presidential hand-wringing,” said Smith, a...

The Obama budget is finally out and there are, to no surprise, a potpourri of new tax hikes proposed, many of which are aimed at the "wealthy" among us. Deep within the bowels of the colossal budget, however, lies a proposed tax that targets the poor among us and it is perhaps a precursor of other health-related taxes to come. President Obama proposes raising the tax on cigarettes from $1.01 to $1.95 per pack--a whopping 93% increase in taxes. The White House estimates that the tax would raise $78.1 billion, of which around $66 billion would be used to fund...

The unforeseen difficulties of implementing the Affordable Health Care Act (aka Obamacare) have key proponents scrambling for answers. Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), one of the leading writers of the Obamacare legislation, now calls the program “complex beyond comprehension. We had hoped that somehow, someone would've come up with sensible procedures for how the thing is supposed to work, but no such luck. The system's as opaque as the day we passed it. Our high hopes are crashing down around us.” US Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius blames Republicans for the mess. “Instead of rolling up their sleeves...

No preparation for a potential influx of 10-12 million people (note: on the low end estimate) into the system.Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said her department has its “hands full” with the implementation of the healthcare law and cannot prepare for any immigration reform bill’s impact on health insurance costs. During a House Ways and Means Committee hearing on Friday, Texas Republican Rep. Kenny Marchant asked Sebelius, “Has HHS made any preparation for how to meet the added cost of providing care for the potential 10 or 12 million people that might gain permanent resident status under any...

There’s no money to run White House tours, but apparently there’s money to pull one of Al’s pet projects out of mothballs. Satellite shelved after 2000 election to now fly By SETH BORENSTEIN WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama is proposing dusting off and finally launching an old environmental satellite championed by Al Gore but shelved a dozen years by his 2000 rival George W. Bush. Obama proposed Wednesday spending nearly $35 million in his 2014 budget to refurbish a satellite, nicknamed GoreSat by critics, that’s been sitting in storage after it was shelved in 2001, months after Bush took...

The other day, the father of a classmate of my son’s called to ask if he could join a group of fourth-grade boys practicing a comedy sketch for their school’s talent show. Like any parent coordinating a child’s schedule, I asked the basics: What time? Where do you live? When should I pick him up? Then I stammered out a final question, apologizing in advance for its personal nature: Do you keep guns in your home? Long pause. “No,” he replied, “but it’s a valid question.” The events of the past few days only reinforce the need to ask these...