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Affordable Care Act is in full swing, there’s a lot of apprehension and perhaps, sometimes, enthusiasm about what is truly in store for the medical profession. The last time you visited your doctor you may have noticed that he or she was more apprehensive, cautious, and yes, maybe more overwhelmed. The fact of the matter is that the health care profession is undergoing the most significant renovation to ever happened in the history of the United States. Here are many things that keep many doctors awake at night:

This election season brought out some of the more bizarre behavior we’ve seen from corporations across the country. Having unlimited access to candidates through unlimited campaign contributions wasn’t enough. Some CEO types got on bully pulpits to blast the president and his health care plan before the election. Some of that rhetoric was over the top. Some of it could have been illegal. Papa John’s CEO John Schnatter warned that he would raise his pizza prices from 15 cents to 20 cents per order to pay for Obamacare, which could bring the third largest pizza delivery operation in the U.S....

Ann Clwyd broke down as she spoke about the final moments of Owen Roberts, who contracted pneumonia after being admitted.[Snip] She said her husband was squashed against the side of his bed, his lips dry, and cold from a fan that had been turned on for a patient in an adjacent bay. A light had been flicked on in the four-bed ward and someone shouted out “anybody for breakfast?” just moments before he died., Ms Clwyd said. She painted a picture of nurses who treated her husband with “coldness, resentment, indifference and even contempt"

Item One: Obama-friendly retailer issues special dividend to avoid Obama tax increase... Late last week, Sinegal and the rest of the Costco Board of Directors voted to pay shareholders a special $7 per share dividend to avoid higher dividend taxes that are scheduled to go into effect on January 1, 2013. As the Wall Street Journal notes... That’s a $3 billion Christmas gift for shareholders that will let them be taxed at the current dividend rate of 15%, rather than next year’s rate of up to 43.4% — an increase to 39.6% as the Bush-era rates expire plus another 3.8%...

Americans' economic confidence was better in November than in any month since Gallup began tracking confidence daily in January 2008. The -13 Economic Confidence Index score surpasses the previous bests of -17 from October and May of this year. The index, which began at -32 in January 2008 as the recession was taking hold, had been -20 or lower until May.

Those who thought ObamaCare was set in concrete by Chief Justice John Roberts' decision last June are in for a shock. December 14 is the new deadline (extended from November 16) for states to let the feds know, yea or nay, whether or not they will be setting up a health insurance exchange, which is the key to participating in the misnamed Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Obama's belief that the public would warm up to his signature legislation once it became the law of the land has proven false. The current Kaiser Family Foundation poll reports that only...

Darden Restaurants Inc. won’t be looking as good as expected next week when the restaurant company is set to release its second-quarter earnings, it said Tuesday. The Olive Garden, Red Lobster and LongHorn Steakhouse parent lowered its profit and revenue projections for the quarter ended Nov. 25, blaming sour promotions in its eateries, Superstorm Sandy, its purchase of the Yard House USA chain and even its efforts to mitigate the coming costs of healthcare reform, also known as "Obamacare."

A vote to report a state Obamacare exchange bill out of the Michigan House Health Policy Committee came up short yesterday, with only two Republicans supporting it (Committee Chair Rep. Gail Haines of Waterford and Rep. Mike Callton of Nashville). Following the vote, House Speaker Jase Bolger, R-Marshall, declared the state-run exchange dead, saying: “…After due diligence, however, it is clear that there were too many unanswered questions for the committee to feel comfortable with a state-run exchange and we will not have one in Michigan… The committee apparently was not able to get the answers to key questions or...

Now that Obama has been re-elected and Democrats still control the Senate, Republicans no longer have the chance to repeal Obamacare. But all is not lost. There's still an opportunity for America to stop this disaster by choking the life out of the federal monstrosity. Obama's signature legislative achievement is likely headed back to the Supreme Court. Just last week, the high court ordered a lower federal court to take up a lawsuit by the patriots at Liberty University, who claim Congress violated the college's religious freedoms by forcing it to provide federally mandated insurance and requiring payment for abortion-related...

Obamacare supporters rejoiced in June when the Supreme Court ruled the U.S. could use its taxing authority to mandate that most people buy health insurance. But their celebrations may have been a bit premature. The Affordable Care Act faces other legal hurdles—including a challenge that only could have been made after the Supreme Court’s ruling. The right-leaning Pacific Legal Foundation amended its challenge to the ACA after the Supreme Court upheld the insurance mandate under Congress’ taxing powers. The group's challenge turns on the Origination Clause in the U.S. Constitution, which requires that bills for raising revenue start in the...

(Reuters) - The Internal Revenue Service has released new rules for investment income taxes on capital gains and dividends earned by high-income individuals that passed Congress as part of the 2010 healthcare reform law. The 3.8 percent surtax on investment income, meant to help pay for healthcare, goes into effect in 2013. It is the first surtax to be applied to capital gains and dividend income. The tax affects only individuals with more than $200,000 in modified adjusted gross income (MAGI), and married couples filing jointly with more than $250,000 of MAGI. The tax applies to a broad range of...

Thanks to the 62,615,406 individuals who took off their thinking caps and re-elected President Barack Obama, thousands upon thousands of folks are receiving their pink slips now or soon will over the next several weeks or months. These lost jobs are often high-paying and are disappearing by the hour. The culprit? It's none other than Obama's landmark legislation, The Affordable Care Act, aka ObamaCare. Re-electing Barack Obama guaranteed that the 2.3% medical device tax, a key funding source for ObamaCare, will go into effect on January 1, 2013. This transfer of money from these companies to the federal government, which...

Dems: Federal health programs should cover DREAMersBy Sam Baker - 12/03/12 02:53 PM ET Federal healthcare programs should cover the children of illegal immigrants, a group of House Democrats says. Democrats are asking the Obama administration to make healthcare available to children who are able to stay in the U.S. under the deferred-action immigration policy that President Obama announced earlier this year. The policy — similar to the DREAM Act — allows many children of illegal immigrants to remain in the U.S. without fear of deportation, as long as they meet certain criteria. A group of House Democrats, led by...

Much like the Greek debt crisis offered a glimpse of that fiscal day-of-reckoning 'Obama bucks' America is soon to face, the UK's  ever-ailing National Health Service -a 60-year-old system of socialized medicine known as the NHS- provides Americans a useful preview of all the expensive, unnecessary disasters our own Obamacare will soon be bringing on this side of the pond. And the prognosis?  Hope you're sitting down... The Guardian (UK): Senior doctors warned that the findings reflected their increasingly frantic efforts to find beds for the growing number of emergency admissions and that repeated breaches of the 85% (capacity) limit meant...

Republicans believed a Mitt Romney win would seal Obamacare's fate. Democrats - or rather, the lonely two-fifths of Americans who support the president's beleaguered healthcare law - believed an Obama win would secure its future. Both sides were kidding themselves.Romney may have pledged to repeal the law, but his positions on Obamacare had the life span of a rainbow. He supported an identical law when he got the credit for signing it as governor of Massachusetts. He then opposed Obamacare when that's what GOP primary voters wanted to hear, and later endorsed parts of it when he thought that's what...

Opposition to Obamacare fueled the Tea Party wave of 2009-2010. The next wave will include continued opposition to Obamacare, along with other fiscal issues, The Tea Party tsunami at the gates. The fight over Obamacare as a law ended when Chief Justice John Roberts enganged in mental gymnastics to uphold the law under Congress’ taxing authority, and then again when Obama’s reelection removed any possibility of complete repeal. The fight over Obamacare now is over implementation. There are inherent problems in the law itself which will raise popular ire, but the battle now is over exchanges and other aspects of...

I’m not easily grossed out or nauseated. Heck, I’m on email lists for a half-dozen softball teams and you can only imagine the strange/filthy/nasty things that guys send to each other. But I read a story about the death panels in the United Kingdom that left me discombobulated. I can’t even begin to describe how I feel.Here’s the intro of a disturbing report in the Daily Mail.Sick children are being discharged from NHS hospitals to die at home or in hospices on controversial ‘death pathways’. Until now, end of life regime the Liverpool Care Pathway was thought to have involved...

December 1 , 2012 City of Detroit - Layoffs Coming Feb 2013? Resolution Copper Mining - up to 400 Update: Clinton Community College NY - 10 Celgard - 40 EnerSys Energy Products - 100 AM General - Confirms Layoffs, About 100? Update: AT&T - 106 Landline Techs. in CT City of Steubenville Ohio - 12 Layoff Notices Cumberland Pharmaceuticals - 1/3 of its Salesforce U.S. Steel Corp.McKeesport Tubular Plant - 142 Worldwide Flight Services in 51 in Honolulu Orange Township Ohio - 22 Layoff Notices Scentsy - 19 O'Hare Airport - 300 Janitor Jobs Cuts Possible Glendale Adventist Medical Center...

There is an antique saying -- no less true for its antiquity -- that you need to be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it. This came to mind when I read a recent report about what is happening at a Pennsylvania college. One of President Obama's most loyal -- not to say fawning -- constituencies clearly is academia. His rate of support among collegiate faculty and administrators surely approaches near-unanimity on the typical campus. This is why the news about the Community College of Allegheny County (CCAC) is so richly ironic. CCAC has just announced...

Residents of states that refuse to set up health insurance exchanges under Obamacare are set to be hit with higher premiums under new rules announced by the Health and Human Services Department. Insurance companies will be charged 3.5 percent of any premiums they sell through the federal exchanges, the department announced Friday. And insurers are likely to pass that surcharge on to clients, leaading to higher premiums. The only states to be affected are those that refuse to set up their own exchanges because of opposition to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. They are almost certain to be...