Free Republic

<p>Jennifer Genuardi is a seemingly endangered species: a primary care doctor in an impoverished New York neighborhood.</p> <p>When she takes the subway from the upper East Side and steps out into Hunts Point, she emerges as one of just two physicians working fulltime at the Bella Vista Health Center and thus just one of two in the entire, high-poverty 10474 zip code (pop.: 12,281).</p>

The Republican National Committee is out with a 100-page analysis of how the party can revive its sagging fortunes. Doubtless many of the recommendations are good ones — more outreach to minority and women voters, better candidate recruitment, fewer debates during the primaries, openness to immigration reform, competing with Democrats in absentee and early voting, and much more.Some of these things may help, or at least, as my grandmother would have said about chicken soup for a cold, they can’t hurt. Others sound a little desperate, such as “Republican leaders should participate in and actively prepare for interviews with...

@Peter_WehnerIn the aftermath of President Obama’s now-obvious-to-all sequester overreach–in which he first predicted the end of the world as we know it, then backed away from those claims once the cuts went into effect, then attempted to inflict maximum pain on the American people, and is now blaming the Secret Service for the stupid and unnecessary decision to shut down White House tours–something is changing.President Obama’s RealClearPolitics.com approval rating is in the 40s. His disapproval rating exceeds his approval rating in three different polls (Fox, McClatchy/Marist, and Quinnipiac). Congressional Democrats are beginning to grouse. And according to a Washington Post...

Reuters reports a hitch in Governor Rick Scott’s plans to expand Medicaid coverage, as directed by the ObamaCare plan he once vowed to oppose: On the eve of convening of the 2013 session, the House Select Committee on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act rejected the expansion. A Senate counterpart committee postponed consideration of the issue, which is sure to be one of the biggest controversies of the session.Scott, a Republican who bitterly fought President Barack Obama’s national healthcare plan as a candidate and in his first two years as governor, stunned conservative supporters on February 20 when he...

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...

<p>The words were tucked deep into the sprawling text of President Obama’s signature health-care overhaul. Under the headline “Protection of Second Amendment Gun Rights” was a brief provision restricting the ability of doctors to gather data about their patients’ gun use — a largely overlooked but significant challenge to a movement in American medicine to treat firearms as a matter of public health.</p>

The "Affordable Care Act" might die a death of a thousand legal cuts. Last June, upon learning that the Supreme Court had ruled Obamacare's individual mandate constitutional, many observers were forced to concur with the Dickens character who opined, "If the law supposes that… the law is an ass." Yet, the increasing number of anti-PPACA lawsuits that have been receiving serious attention from the courts suggests that the legal system may not be as irrational as it seemed when Chief Justice John Roberts began braying from the bench on June 28. If this seems Pollyannaish, consider the fate of McCain-Feingold....

Two weeks ago, I pointed out Section 1555, one of the major chinks in PPACA's armor according to an attorney at the Goldwater Institute. Section 1555 is in the law under "Subtitle G - Miscellaneous Provisions." Since bringing this up, I've heard from some who believe that this section is limited solely to those who sell ("issue") health insurance. Here again is Section 1555: "No individual, company, business, nonprofit entity, or health insurance issuer offering group or individual health insurance coverage shall be required to participate in any Federal health insurance program created under this Act (or any amendments made...

The National Catholic Bioethics Center has published an analysis saying that it will be immoral for a Catholic who owns a private business to purchase health insurance for his or her workers under Obamacare and its implementing regulations--which mandate that insurance plans bought by businesses and individuals must cover sterilizations and all Food and Drug Administration-approved contraceptives, including those that can cause abortions. “Dropping all coverage appears to be the most morally sound approach,” the Catholic ethicists concluded.They further said that Catholics have an affirmative duty to oppose the Obamacare mandate.“Most importantly,” they wrote, “we are impelled to recall the...

A year and a half after the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, bureaucrats at the IRS and Health and Human Services issued an 18-page report outlining new regulations that will dramatically increase health care costs for small and large businesses alike. The regulations, written by an IRS attorney, arbitrarily redefine "full time employee" as someone who works 30 hours a week for a business. Traditionally, most private businesses have defined "full time employee" as someone who works 40 hours a week. With this new regulation, the federal government is now removing the right of businesses to...

Could one of the main provisions of Obamacare be used to “reopen” a discussion of the law in the legislature? Cato Scholar Michael Cannon argues that state-run exchanges, or the absence thereof, can be used for this purpose. Obamacare is unstable, he argues, because it instructs insurance companies to charge citizens of the same age the same premium regardless of their health risk. “That creates a huge incentive for those people not to purchase health insurance, to wait until they get sick to purchase health insurance,” said Cannon at a recent Capitol Hill briefing. “And when the healthy people aren’t...

"While we strongly advocate the provision of care for the millions of uninsured Americans who will benefit from the legislation, we are concerned that there are key aspects to this law that will, ultimately, hurt this nation’s ability to provide widespread care for its citizens," the statement said. "Since the PPACA was passed in 2010, organizations representing urologists nationwide have been working with lawmakers and regulators to demonstrate how certain provisions of the PPACA—including the establishment of the Independent Payment Advisory Board [IPAB] and the value-based modifier—will negatively impact physicians’ ability to provide quality care to patients. Though we applaud...

As we come closer to finding out the Supreme Court’s disposition of the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (the PPACA), and, in particular, its individual mandate (which requires virtually all adult Americans to purchase health insurance or pay a penalty), there is an increasingly anguished lament coming from the left of the punditocracy and the political class. There is palpable fear that the Court will (as it should, in my opinion), declare the individual mandate unconstitutional, and thereby undo the signature achievement of President Obama’s administration. Perhaps, most notable is the New Republic’s distinguished court commentator,...

Starting on March 26th, the Supreme Court listened to three days of arguments concerning the constitutionality of the healthcare act that has come to be known as “Obamacare.” Their ruling, which won’t come until the end of June, will shape the future of American healthcare. While the healthcare issue has been off the front pages since it was signed in March of 2010, the constituently of one of its more controversial requirements has been in and out of the federal court system. The ruling addresses an issue at the heart of how our nation is governed. The Constitution gives a...

March 21, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Concerns over the new health care law’s system for rationing health care - famously dubbed the “death panels” by Sarah Palin - have been reinforced by a former head of the American Medical Association, who said the advisory panels “will essentially mean rationed care” for the elderly. Former AMA President Donald Palmisano wrote in a Daily Caller column Monday that the Independent Payment Advisory Boards (IPAB), tasked with keeping Medicare expenses under control, would have little oversight as they deal with the disproportionate cost burden from seniors with greater medical needs. “The 15 officials who...

This week marks two years since of the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and if the Obama administration has chosen to all but ignore the second anniversary of Obamacare, the rest of us should pause and reflect on just what a monumental failure of policy the health-care-reform law has been. What’s more, it has been a failure on its own terms. After all, when health-care reform was passed, we were promised that it would do three things: 1) provide health-insurance coverage for all Americans; 2) reduce insurance costs for individuals, businesses, and government; and 3) increase...

When you bake a bad ingredient into a cake, no matter how nicely you decorate it, the cake will still be bad. That's the lesson to take from the controversy over Obamacare, Catholicism, and contraception. To recap, under Obamacare all employers will be required to arrange for "health insurance" for their employees. Coverage must include various disease-preventive health services and women's contraception at no charge. No premium-sharing, no copays, no deductibles — nothing.The Department of Health and Human Services, which has ominous rule-making power under Obamacare, exempted Catholic churches (as employers) from this rule because Catholicism teaches that contraception is sinful....

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA, ACA, or "Obamacare"), signed into law March 2011, in the near term creates more than 100 new health care bureaucracies, a large increase in taxes, and new government expenses of $500 billion. Most importantly, however, it will create an incentive and penalty regime for health care institutions and professionals that will compromise traditional professional medical ethics. Embedded in PPACA is a system of mandates and incentives derivative of guidelines for efficient patient care that means some rationing. An example most often raising objections in the public discussion of PPACA is the Patient...

Even if ObamaCare survives Supreme Court scrutiny next spring, its trials will be far from over. That's because the law has a major glitch that threatens its basic functioning. It's so problematic, in fact, that the Obama administration is now brazenly trying to rewrite the law without involving Congress. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act offers "premium assistance"—tax credits and subsidies—to households purchasing coverage through new health-insurance exchanges. This assistance was designed to hide a portion of the law's cost to individuals by reducing the premium hikes that individuals will face after ObamaCare goes into effect in 2014. (If...

Obamacare’s Effect on Small Business -By: Larry Walker, Jr. -“An unlimited power to tax involves, necessarily, a power to destroy; because there is a limit beyond which no institution and no property can bear taxation.” ~ Daniel Webster in M'CULLOCH v. STATE, 17 U.S. 316 (1819) -Although Barack Obama boasts of having implemented 17 tax cuts for small business during his one-term proposition, as I pointed out in Why Congress Shouldn’t Just Pass Obama’s Jobs Bill, Again, not one item on the list actually meets the definition of a tax cut. #1 on the list was the Small Employer...