Free Republic

The choice for voters is clear: a tax cut from Donald Trump or a pay cut courtesy of Hillary Clinton. Trump is promising to slash income taxes to zero for millions of people currently paying them, and to reduce the tax bite on everyone else except the mega-rich. Clinton, by contrast, isn’t cutting income tax rates for anyone. Instead, she’s campaigning to raise business taxes, despite warnings it will cause wages to plummet and the economy to tank. No wonder Trump is moving up in the polls. Most Americans are still making less than they did in 2007. The mainstream...

Under the guise of “reform,” President Obama is dismantling Medicare — dooming seniors to needless pain and disability and shortening their lives. The stakes are high, because Medicare and the access it gives patients to medical innovations have transformed aging. Before Medicare, older folks languished in nursing homes or wheelchairs with crippling illnesses. Now, seniors dodge that fate, thanks to hip and knee replacements, cataract operations and heart procedures — all paid for by Medicare.

UnitedHealthcare and Aetna insurers are losing billions trying to sell ObamaCare plans. In 2014, the WH tried to avert disaster by promising insurers a taxpayer-funded bailout, but public outrage and quick action by Sen Marco Rubio put a stop to it. Desperate to keep insurers on board, they are now dipping into public money. On Feb. 12, the administration announced a whopping $7.7 billion to insurers, just this year alone....money taken from reinsurance fees....paid whether you buy your own plan or get covered at work, or if employer self-insures..... the fee is buried in your premium or taken out of...

The Obama administration will tell any lie and break any law to prevent the president’s signature health-care program from collapsing. Insurance companies such as UnitedHealthcare and Aetna are losing billions trying to sell ObamaCare plans, and the risk is they’ll drop out at the end of 2016. No insurance companies means no ObamaCare. In 2014, the White House tried to avert that disaster by promising insurers a taxpayer-funded bailout, but public outrage and quick action by Sen. Marco Rubio put a stop to it. Now the administration is at it again. Desperate to keep insurers on board, the administration scrambled...

President Obama hiked to Exit Glacier in Alaska last week, with photographers in tow, to send the world a message: The glacier is melting.Obama blames it on the increasing use of fossil fuels such as coal,oil and natural gas,which he wants to restrict not only in the United States but worldwide. The photo op was designed to build support for an international climate agreement he’s pushing hard to sell, so far with little success......Exit Glacier has been shrinking for 200 years—since 1815—long before widespread industrialization and automobiles. As the president ended his trip,he sounded the alarm again: “This state’s climate...

This week, President Obama is hailing his Clean Power Plan as "the single most important step America has ever taken in the fight against global climate change." Obama is posing as the environment's savior, just as he did in 2008, when he promised his presidency would mark "the moment when ... the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal." Seven years later, that messianic legacy is in doubt. Obama's Clean Power Plan has never had legislative support, even when his own party controlled both houses of Congress. Now he's trying to impose it without...

On Monday, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention head Thomas Frieden announced a new policy on health care workers returning from Ebola-plagued West Africa. Parroting President Obama’s Saturday radio address, Frieden cautioned that Americans must be “guided by the science,” not fear. Sorry. The Obama administration’s halfway approach is based on political correctness, not science. And it is a gamble. According to Frieden, about five health care workers fly back from West Africa to the U.S. every day, landing at Chicago, Newark, Atlanta, New York’s JFK or Dulles outside of Washington, D.C. For months, the CDC did almost nothing to...

On May 7, the Obama administration boasted that ObamaCare was improving health-care quality for seniors, and it pulled out a bag of statistical tricks to prove it. But a closer look shows that it’s not improving care. It’s skimping on it, socking seniors with unexpected bills for “observation care” and likely shortening their lives. President Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services announced that fewer seniors discharged from the hospital are returning for additional care within a month’s time. HHS claims that this drop in “readmissions,” from 18.5 percent in 2012 to 17.5 percent in 2013, signals quality improvement. Nationwide,...

While the debate continues over how many ObamaCare enrollees are actually paying their premiums, one aspect of the law temporarily rewards those who actually stop paying – and doctors may wind up bearing the cost. “This law provides a 90-day grace period for people who have subsidized ObamaCare exchange plans and stopped paying their premium," said Betsy McCaughey, health care author and former New York lieutenant governor. But the insurance companies are only obligated to cover the first 30 days of the 90-day grace period

If Betsey McCaughey is correct (and I bet she is, because she has not only read the entire ObamaCare bill, she has written a book about it), Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan publicly humiliated herself during the oral arguments on the Hobby Lobby case, revealing that she either did not read the law, or failed to comprehend it if she did so. Writing in the New York Sun, McCaughey lays out what is wrong with the Justice’s declaration about Obamacare: she asserted that the statute itself mandates provision of birth control. Not one word in the Affordable Care Act guarantees...

President Obama is using the Internal Revenue Service to silence employers unhappy about Obamacare. That’s the hidden purpose behind the employer mandate delay announced on February 10th. The administration released 227 pages of mind-numbing regulations ridiculously billed as making “ the compliance process simpler and easier” for employers. Hidden in the gobbledy-gook (on pages 125-6) is a requirement that employers sign a statement to the IRS, meaning under penalty of perjury, that they have not reduced the number of employees or cut hours to shield themselves from the costs of Obamacare. Democrats running for re-election this fall are desperate to...

The Obama administration and New York's senior senator , Democrat Chuck Schumer, are conspiring to muzzle critics of the Democratic Party before this fall's midterm elections. Literally to outlaw free speech. They are rushing through a change in IRS regulations that would prevent Tea Party organizations and other not-for-profits called 501c4s from engaging in customary pre-election activities such as get-out-the vote drives, debates and forums, and brochures rating the candidates. The regulation would even prohibit these groups from criticizing incumbent office-holders within 60 days of a general election .. This regulation would destroy fair elections. It would silence 501c4s, many...

RUSH: Betsy McCaughey -- who's one of the ranking analysts of socialist medicine, socialized medicine, be it Hillarycare or Obamacare -- has a piece at Investors.com, the old Investor's Business Daily, and headline of the piece says, "Think Obamacare Is Bad Now? It Gets Worse Next Year." Okay, now, what gets worse next year? Well, here's how she starts the piece: "'Substandard' and 'cut-rate' is what President Obama calls the health plans that millions of Americans have lost, even though they wanted to keep them. Backpedaling on his promise that 'if you like your plan, you can keep your plan,'...

Believing in this president is proving to be a health hazard. ~snip~ The liar is none other than the President of the United States. On June 15, 2009, President Obama told a town hall meeting that “No matter how we reform healthcare, we will keep this promise…. if you like your healthcare plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan. Period. No one will take it away. No matter what.” The fine print in his health law proves that he never intended to keep that promise. Sec. 1251(a)(1) of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) says that no...

I was reminded of this interview when I saw this tweet by Daniel Horowitz: Now that the results of enrollment are coming in, it is quite clear that obamacare is medicaid 10:52 PM - 26 Oct 2013 Betsy McCaughey would agree, as she was on with Megyn Kelly last night to discuss the fact that Obamacare was designed to push people into Medicaid. Why? Because is a single payer system and that’s what they believe in, McCaughey said.

Last week, the national Republican Party issued a report on why it lost the 2012 presidential election. The report belongs in the paper shredder. Look at a map of the U.S., and you’ll see why. The Republican Party is already on the way to dominating presidential politics. Red states are on the rise, and blue states are sinking. In politics, demography is destiny. The biggest mistake the GOP could make is to change course and abandon its current policies. It will soon control an Electoral College majority. Americans are voting with their feet to live in Republican-run states with low...

Last week, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform disclosed how state officials in New York scammed federal taxpayers out of billions of dollar by exploiting the Medicaid system. The federal government matches dollar for dollar what a state spends on Medicaid. New York spends $5,118 per day per patient in state facilities for the mentally disabled, equivalent to $1.9 million a year per patient. “Personal care” for the home bound is a New York Medicaid benefit that includes grocery shopping and housekeeping, and it costs as much as $150,000 a year per recipient. Overall, New York spends more...

Betsy McCaughey, Ph.D and David Asman discuss Romneycare and Obamacare. Power and Money with David Asman

President Obama said, "The package we've put together" will "start bending the cost curve on health care" and "cut the deficit by a trillion dollars." Even a sympathetic Congressional Budget Office has finally put the nail in the coffin of that howler. At the time Obama made the claim, we all knew it was specious, and study after study came out showing just how fraudulent it was. There was the double counting on Medicare, the "Doc Fix" scam and a host of others. When Rep. Paul Ryan asked the CBO to rescore Obamacare with more accurate assumptions, it didn't...

For most Americans, the health reform bill that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is pushing to pass will be worse than coal in their stockings. Herewith, the Top 10 List of Things You Don't Want From Health Care Reform This Christmas — But Will Get Anyway From Congress. 1. Higher premiums: If you pay for your own insurance, your premiums will cost 10% to 13% more than if the bill didn't pass, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Insurance won't be more affordable. Sixty percent of the newly insured are being enrolled in Medicaid, the public program for the poor....