Free Republic

Last week, Karl Rove opined that a GOP attempt to defund Obamacare would be analogous to Pickett’s Charge at the Battle of Gettysburg. His analogy was trite as well as inaccurate, yet Gettysburg does contain a lesson for establishment Republicans who oppose defunding. Its moral lies not in Pickett’s disastrous charge, however, but in the failure of Union General George Meade to follow up his defensive Pennsylvania victory by attacking the Confederate forces as they withdrew to the safety of Virginia. Meade’s timidity extended the Civil War by two years and rendered his Commander-in-Chief nearly apoplectic with frustration. Lincoln, who...

Talk about being between a rock and a hard place. The Obama administration and its allies in Congress are... --snip-- Earlier this month the House passed legislation that would make it legal to delay the employer mandate. The House passed another bill to delay the individual mandate by a year, with the logic that individuals and families deserve the same break busineses are getting. Both bills will languish in the Senate, but they have led to the rather odd situation of the president actually vowing to veto legislation that would put his extralegal action on solid footing. The administration's problems...

Experience tells me the Independent Payment Advisory Board will fail... --snip-- There does have to be control of costs in our health-care system. However, rate setting—the essential mechanism of the IPAB—has a 40-year track record of failure. What ends up happening in these schemes (which many states including my home state of Vermont have implemented with virtually no long-term effect on costs) is that patients and physicians get aggravated because bureaucrats in either the private or public sector are making medical decisions without knowing the patients. Most important, once again, these kinds of schemes do not control costs. The medical...

The Affordable Care Act originally passed the House in 2009 with 220 votes, all but one of them Democrats. Recently 251 members of the House, including 22 Democrats, voted to postpone for one year implementation of the heart of the act -- the individual mandate to purchase health insurance. If this were any other issue, liberal commentators might see a governing majority emerging in favor of delaying Obamacare. In the last couple of years, House Republicans have voted over and over to repeal the president's health care plan. It got to be routine. Not long ago, however, the Obamacare battle...

Last Thursday, in remarkably blunt language, the heads of three major labor unions – James Hoffa of the Teamsters, Joseph Hansen of UFCW, and Donald “D.” Taylor of UNITE-HERE — wrote a letter to Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid denouncing Obamacare’s impact on employer-sponsored health insurance. Some of the highlights: “The ACA will shatter not only our hard-earned health benefits, but destroy the foundation of the 40 hour work week that is the backbone of the American middle class.” “This vision [of universal health care] has come back to haunt us.” “Our persuasive arguments have been disregarded and met with...

While Barack Obama has often been compared to leaders of the past, it's unlikely anyone has yet associated him with Antiochus IV Epiphanes. Ruler of the Seleucid Empire between 175 and 164 B.C., King Antiochus is best known for the persecution of Jews, and one story from the second book of Maccabees is particularly relevant here. As the passage tells us, the king was bent on forcing a Jewish woman and her seven sons to, of all things, eat pork. The boys resisted and were tortured and killed one by one as their mother, who ultimately was also murdered, looked...

I hope you will forgive me for assuming the Obama administration was merely bumping their normal Friday news dump forward to before the July 4th holiday, with their announcement that they would effectively delay the employer mandate’s implementation for a year. This was not the case – instead, the much bigger news, and far more devastating to any remaining claims that Obamacare is being properly implemented, was buried on Friday: the news that the most significant entitlement increase since the Great Society will be operating on the honor system. Sarah Kliff and Sandhya Somashekhar report: “The Obama administration announced Friday...

I don't know how he does it, but Internet Wit Sans Peer, Iowahawk, wrapped up the week more succinctly than anyone: BREAKING: State Department says Egyptian military overthrow spontaneous reaction to 'White House Down' movie" --snip-- For those who scream that the Republicans should sue to stop the rest of the law from being enforced, this analysis from a correspondent, Chicago lawyer Joseph A Morris, explains why this is impossible, riffing off Professor Adler's blog at Volokh Conspiracy It seems to me that, as a general proposition, the Executive has great discretion in deciding whether or not to refrain from...

Presumably due the increasing unpopularity of Obama’s controversial “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” (PPACA), U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, will be responsible for $54 in funding to support a large contingent of health care officials known as, “navigators,” who will be tasked with assisting citizens with the complexity of the 906 page healthcare regulation act. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Minority Leader of the United States House of Representatives at the time, famously justified rushing the bill through Congress at the time as a necessary procedure, because it was necessary to”pass the bill so that you can find...

President Obama’s Affordable Care Act won’t be implemented fully until 2015. But by most every measure, and according to most every voice, things are not going well. Health-insurance premiums are becoming more expensive, which is particularly striking when you consider that the act’s advocates promised it would decrease costs by $2,500 per person. A majority of states have chosen not to create state-based exchanges—the highly regulated ObamaCare insurance-policy marketplaces—after the Supreme Court said it would be unconstitutional for Washington to withhold certain federal funds from states to punish them if they refused to go along. The federal government must now...

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D. California) has equipped fellow Democratic lawmakers with an “Affordable Care Act Tool Kit.” It reveals the Democratic Party’s plan to turn the worthy goal of enrolling the uninsured into a cynical scheme for enrollling Democratic voters. The kit’s biggest tool is community organizing. Obamacare outsources the important job of enrolling the uninsured in health plans, taking it from government and entrusting it to community organizations. Why outsource? Because it eliminates public scrutiny, accountability, and the necessity to be nonpartisan. Community activists can say and do things that government employees can’t, such as urging people...

We have the president of the United States’ word as a gentleman that he knew nothing about the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of his enemies until he “learned about it from the same news reports that I think most people learned about this.” Furthermore, although the commissioner of the IRS, Douglas Shulman, visited Obama’s White House no fewer than 157 times, which is 156 times more than his predecessor Mark Everson ever visited the White House, we know that this was for legitimate Easter-egg rolls, as he testified to Congress, and meetings to discuss Obamacare. The Easter Bunny, one should...

The IRS scandal provides Republicans and conservatives with the opportunity to repeal and replace Obamacare now. The House Republican majority should refuse to fund the expansion of the IRS necessary to manage Obamacare. Without that funding, and hiring thousands of additional agents, the IRS cannot even begin to manage Obamacare. President Obama may throw a fit. He may refuse to sign funding bills to keep the federal government open. No matter. Let him close his government down if he wants. Nobody wants the IRS playing political games with their health care and health records, like it did with the constitutional...

The White House may invoke it in its peculiar way, but its occupants only show contempt for the rule of law. Last Thursday, Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA) started a Twitter prairie fire with his call for people to describe #ObamacareInThreeWords. (My contribution was “Sorry, Doctor retired.”) Other gems included “Max Baucus regrets,” “A massive failure,” “Rammed down throats” and the extremely uncomfortable proof of Godwin’s Law, “Arbeit. Macht. Frei.” Liberal participation brought “Win for kids,” “Republicans suck balls,” “Republicans hate me”... --snip-- House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-MI) hit the nail on the head in his opening...

Medicaid is already a $450-billion-per-year program, and a major chunk of the coverage expansion Obamacare promises comes by way of expanding it. So it would be nice to know if it worked, right? On Wednesday, a group of researchers released a new study on expanded Medicaid eligibity that suggests that it, sort of, well, doesn’t. Here’s what you need to know about it. What the Study Doesn’t ShowThe Oregon study compared health outcomes along several measurable indicators — including blood pressure, blood sugar, and cholesterol level — between people enrolled in Medicaid and the uninsured. What’s nice about this study...

The glow of the personal relationship with patients is being extinguished A fundamental principle in medicine is that if you get the diagnosis wrong, you'll probably apply the wrong therapy. A corollary is that if the therapy isn't working, increasing the dose may make things worse. That's where we are with ObamaCare. There are shortcomings aplenty in the health-care field, and changes and improvements are required. But never have I seen so many good intentions leading irreversibly to hell. Personal experience is by its nature parochial. Yet when it invalidates much of what passes for wisdom, there may be value...

President Obama is eager to build public support for his health care overhaul in the few months remaining before its implementation, but waning enthusiasm from Democrats threatens his effort right out of the gate. Two-thirds of Democrats now believe Obama's health care reforms will either hurt them personally or have no effect on their daily lives, a Quinnipiac University poll released Thursday shows. In comparison, just 27 percent of Democratic respondents said the reforms would help them.The president has long struggled to convince independent and Republican-leaning voters that his health care blueprint would lower premiums and expand insurance coverage.However, an...

Let me try to understand this: The key incentive for small businesses to support Obamacare was that they would be able to shop for the best deals in health care super-stores—called exchanges. The Administration has had 3 years to set up these exchanges. It has failed to do so. This is a really bad sign. There will be those who argue that it’s not the Administration’s fault. It’s the fault of the 33 states that have refused to set up their own exchanges. Nonsense. Where was the contingency planning? There certainly are models, after all—the federal government’s own health benefits...

As Obamacare begins to roll out, its champions are beginning to have to confront reality. But because they’re getting a lot of leeway and protection from the political press, the results of this confrontation with the consequences of the law’s poor design and misguided economic assumptions often take the form of little nuggets of truth buried in mountains of frantic, wishful obfuscation. Such was the little nugget buried in the middle of a story that was itself buried in the back of the A section of last Friday’s New York Times. The story was about the enormous challenges of implementing the law, and...

Over at The Atlantic, Chris Frates covers Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s “secret plan to repeal ObamaCare,” which turns out to be an old plan to repeal the law’s mandate through the reconciliation process after regaining the Senate majority in the 2012 election. The plan ran into a small problem with Republicans took it in the eye at the polls. They didn’t win the presidency, and they didn’t retake the Senate either. But the push to repeal ObamaCare’s individual mandate is not dead yet. Republicans in Congress already see it as vulnerable simply because it’s the least popular part of...