Free Republic

I recently returned home after two weeks of engagements in New Zealand and Australia focusing on empowerment through reading. The Kiwis and Aussies are not very different from Americans, even though they inhabit the opposite side of the globe. I was struck by the way many people perceived the political atmosphere in the United States. Although the well-educated individuals who have access to all of the American cable channels tend to be well informed on the issues, most people had only heard that America has finally repaired its broken medical system with the advent of Obamacare and now everyone, including...

Health Reform: Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman says critics of ObamaCare should cease and desist, because the law is "working." Given his track record on health care analysis, we'll politely ignore this advice. In 2011, the same Krugman declared the Veterans Health Administration was "a huge policy success story, which offers important lessons for future health reform" because, among other things, "it's free from the perverse incentives created when doctors and hospitals profit from expensive tests and procedures." It turns out the VHA is more akin to a cesspool of bloated bureaucracy, mismanagement, deadly delays and cover-ups. A couple years...

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Friday it had uncovered a new safety breach at its bioterror research laboratories involving dangerous avian flu, just as it was investigating the failures behind the potential exposure of researchers to live anthrax bacteria. In its first findings from an internal probe into the anthrax incident last month, the CDC said multiple failures by individual scientists and a lack of agency-wide safety policies had led to the potential exposure of more than 80 lab workers to the dangerous bacteria at its campus in Atlanta.

Vasectomy can increase risk of developing lethal prostate cancer Scientists have identified a link between having a vasectomy and developing lethal forms of prostate cancer Laura Donnelly, and Claire Carter 10:00PM BST 10 Jul 2014 Men who have a vasectomy face an increased chance of developing prostate cancer and a higher risk of contracting the most aggressive form of the disease, a study has found. The Harvard research on 50,000 men, the largest study to examine the link between sterilisation and cancer, found that those who had the procedure had a 10 per cent greater chance of developing the disease....

WMBF in Myrtle Beach, SC, reported Wednesday on the growing trend of businesses hiring only part-time workers, due to an inability to afford Obamacare. This situation leaves workers without healthcare and without a full-time income or other benefits. Local staffing agencies say more small business are starting to hire more part time employees. Not because there is more full time work, but as WMBF reporter Mandy Noell found out, it's because they can't afford to have more full time employees. Obamacare places requirements for health care benefits that many small businesses just cannot afford to pay. As a result, they...

The Supreme Court’s decision last week in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby has pushed all the buttons that could be expected when sex and religion intersect. Many on the right are celebrating because they value religious expression and feel rather less excited about sex, especially of the non-procreative variety. And much of the Left is outraged because religion is generally considered of far less import while sexual freedom has a high priority. But both sides are missing the point. It is true that your boss shouldn’t be deciding whether or not your insurance plan includes contraceptives. It is also true that...

Buried in a largely overlooked government audit of the Obama-Care exchanges is a finding that casts still more doubt on the reliability of the 8 million enrollment number commonly cited by the administration and the press. In a section titled "Other Issues," an inspector general report released last week found that the HealthCare.gov marketplace couldn't show it had been reconciling its monthly enrollment numbers with insurance companies. That's despite the fact that the law specifically calls for this reconciliation, and the fact that, as the IG report notes, "the federal marketplace obtained the services of a contractor to reconcile enrollment...

Nine out of ten hospital wards may be at risk of overheating, increasing the dangers for vulnerable patients who are left sweltering in temperatures of more than 26C (78.8F), government advisers have warned. Poor ventilation, thin walls, low ceilings and big windows that can barely be opened are contributing to temperatures far exceeding acceptable levels during hot weather, according to the Committee on Climate Change. One fifth of domestic properties could also already be overheating, with flats especially vulnerable, it finds. The number of people dying prematurely from overheating could triple to 7,000 per year by the 2050s as global...

Nearly twice as many people are expected to drop out of Colorado’s state-run health care exchange in the coming years than originally projected, leading to nearly $2 million lost in associated fees for the financially embattled program over the next two years. Connect for Health Colorado originally projected that 13 percent of enrollees will either leave the exchange in fiscal 2015 or fail to pay their bills, but now they project the figure to be as high as 24 percent, according to the Denver Post. If that’s the case, the exchange will lose out on about $1 million in fees...

As Americans scrambled ahead of the July Fourth holiday weekend on Thursday afternoon, the Department of Health and Human Services released 1,296 pages of new regulations dealing with payment rates to doctors and hospitals. The timing of the news release is part of a long pattern for President Obama's administration, which has often used holidays as an opportunity to dump dense regulatory changes when most reporters and Americans are focused on their holiday plans. The release came at 4:15 p.m. Last year, the Obama administration used the days surrounding the July 4th holiday as an opening to announce a delay...

Thom Throp is a Kingsport insurance agent who's sold over sixty Affordable Care Act plans. Like thousands of others, he logged on with great interest to read a story from The Tennessean newspaper about a Maryville couple forced to separate after 33 years of marriage so the wife could keep health insurance. "We are in a situation in trying to get as many people covered as possible. People are falling in the proverbial crack," Throp said. (snip) So if expanding Medicaid isn't the answer, then what is? Throp tells us, even in a tight economy, that couples like the Drains...

Federal investigators are probing a whistleblower's allegations that applications for veterans seeking health care benefits may have been improperly purged from the VA's Health Eligibility Center in suburban Atlanta. Eligibility Center program specialist Scott Davis .. that health benefit applications for more than 10,000 veterans may have been improperly purged from ... Davis said the VA placed him on paid administrative leave after he filed the complaints

The threats to Obamacare just keep on coming…… A case before the U.S. District Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia may determine the Affordable Care Act was written in such a way that it prevents the federal government’s HealthCare.gov web site from offering subsidies. Now such a ruling would have a long way to go before it actually would become enacted — and a lot of legal hoops would have to be jumped through — but such a finding could be a show-stopper for Obamacare. More than 5 million of the 8 million who signed up for Obamacare...

Bias: You'd think that a government audit showing how ObamaCare couldn't tell whether millions of enrollees were eligible for the subsidies they're getting would be front-page news. Instead, the press hid it from view. If you wanted to read in the New York Times about these findings — which detailed rampant problems verifying eligibility and income information from millions of ObamaCare applicants — you had to dig 17 pages into the news section. In the Washington Post, the story was on page 11, after stop-the-press-stories like a change in House travel reporting rules and a puff piece on the new...

<p>While it is just a tragic anecdote, the latest story surrounding the chronic and too often fatal inefficiency of Veterans Affairs hospitals is illustrative of a much larger problem.</p> <p>“A veteran who collapsed in an Albuquerque Veteran Affairs hospital cafeteria, 500 yards from the emergency room, died after waiting 30 minutes for an ambulance,” the Associated Press reported on Thursday. “Officials at the hospital Thursday confirmed it took a half an hour for the ambulance to be dispatched and take the man from one building to the other, which is about a five minute walk.”</p>

Despite the controversy it has generated, the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the Hobby Lobby case was rather straightforward. The Religious Freedom Restoration Act, passed nearly unanimously in 1993 by a Democratic-controlled U.S. Congress and signed into law by President Clinton, set up certain tests to ensure that federal policies do not overly burden the free exercise of religion. And the court's majority ruled that a mandate forcing business owners to purchase insurance coverage for their workers that includes contraception coverage that violates their religious beliefs failed those tests. Critics of the ruling have framed this protection of religious liberty...

Insurance companies operating in New York State's marketplace are expected to ask for double-digit premium hikes next year, according to new filings from the companies. Capital New York reports the average requested increase was 13%. The New York Post reports that number at about 12%. But the bigger insurers are seeking a bigger premium hike — according to Capital, the six most popular plans in New York are requesting an average increase of almost 15%. The Post reports that Excellus Health Plan, which has about 24,000 customers, is requesting a 19.7% hike. MVP Health Plan, which has nearly 33,000 customers,...

A devastating new Health and Human Services (HHS) Inspector General report released on Tuesday reveals that the Obama administration has yet to determine whether 1,295,571 of the over 8 million Obamacare enrollees are U.S. citizens lawfully in the country. The finding, located on page 11 of the report, states that 44% of the remaining 2,611,780 application "inconsistencies" are related to verifying "Citizenship/national status/lawful presence." Another 960,492 application inconsistencies were related to verifying whether subsidy applicants provided accurate income information.

WASHINGTON — Federal officials can’t resolve 85 percent of 2.9 million “inconsistencies” on applications for ObamaCare even after nine months of trying, according to new data provided by the administration. Most of the problems involve certifying citizenship and income, key components of the national health plan. But some of the problems are downright nutty. One unidentified state-run marketplace cited situations in which infants and young children were “erroneously identified as incarcerated, according to federal data,” the inspector general for the Health and Human Services Department revealed Tuesday. Just 425,000 problematic applications have been resolved out of 2.9 million that states...

Accountability: Two new audits reveal failures in ObamaCare on a scale even we didn't think possible, with unresolved discrepancies, rules violations and technology problems that expose taxpayers to massive overpayments. In the first of a series of ObamaCare audits, the Health and Human Services inspector general found 2.9 million "inconsistencies" in applications submitted to the federal HealthCare.gov exchange in the first five months of open enrollment. In other words, the Social Security numbers, income, family size, citizenship or other information applicants provided didn't match existing government data. Some 1.3 million of the problems involved citizenship, and an additional million involved...