Free Republic

Socialists, Democrats, Communists and liberals rely on people being kept in the dark about their policies. Things are so much easier for them that way. When the media never asks inconvenient questions, any chance of the truth getting out is generally non-existent. But when the bottom publically falls out of one of their fake “benefits” it becomes impossible for these people to keep us in the dark. When the Berlin Wall was coming down the Communists were still telling people to go back to work at their useless factories where they were making useless commodities no one wanted; but the...

Indiana Republican Gov. Mike Pence is moving ahead to extend Medicaid coverage to hundreds of thousands of Hoosiers under the federal health law after securing a key concession from the Obama administration. The deal, to be announced Tuesday, could pave the way for half a dozen more states to seek similar deals, boosting Medicaid expansion proposals in Republican-led states including Florida, North Carolina and Wyoming. Indiana and Washington officials had been locked for months in negotiations over an issue that could shape the future of Medicaid, the 50-year-old federal-state health program that covers more than 60 million low-income Americans. Mr....

Britain’s most senior doctor has said the under-pressure NHS may be forced to abandon the concept of free healthcare for all. Prof. Sir Bruce Keogh, medical director of the NHS in England, said there were doubts over whether the taxpayer-funded model was “sustainable in the longer term”. He added that huge changes were needed—including less reliance on hospitals—if free treatment was to be preserved. He told the Guardian: “If the NHS continues to function as it does now, it’s going to really struggle to cope because the model of delivery and service that we have at the moment is not...

In baseball, when you get three strikes, you’re out. There have been at least five strikes called against single payer (SP). Shouldn’t we hear from an umpire? Whether you call it single payer, socialized medicine, universal health care, Veterans Administration (VA) Hospital System, ObamaCare, Public Option, or National Health Service, these are all different names for the same thing: government-controlled healthcare. Details vary but all single payer-type systems have one thing in common: a central authority that controls both supply of dollars and providers, as well as demand for goods and services. Strike #1: Italy's price controls In the...

I received many interesting comments from readers on Single-Payer "Medicare for All" Proposal; Live and Let Die; Why Does Single-Payer "Work" in Europe? This email is from a US M.D. named Ken. Ken writes ... I agree with everything you wrote, but you omitted a discussion of the variation of demand in relation to the cost. It is approximately correct to state that when the perceived cost to the user approaches zero, the demand for services approaches infinity. This is the crucial flaw in all "government-funded" single-provider programs. The demand for "free" services is impossibly huge. I have read extensively...

An Obamacare-created and taxpayer-funded insurance company in Iowa has been taken over by the state due to a financial crisis. CoOportunity Health is Iowa’s insurance cooperative — a nonprofit insurance company created by the Affordable Care Act to supposedly undercut the large, for-profit insurers that Democrats castigated as “greedy” and “evil” during the debate over health care reform. After just beginning to offer plans in 2013, the company’s already insolvent and has now been taken over by the state of Iowa, insurance commissioner Nick Gerhart announced Wednesday. CoOpportunity doesn’t have enough cash on hand to be sure it can pay claims for its...

**SNIP** “It is not the right time for Vermont” to pass a single-payer system, Shumlin acknowledged in a public statement ending his signature initiative. He concluded the 11.5 percent payroll assessments on businesses and sliding premiums up to 9.5 percent of individuals’ income “might hurt our economy.” Vermont’s outcome is a “small speed bump,” said New York Assembly member Richard Gottfried, who’s been pushing single-payer bills for more than 20 years. But opponents says it’s the end of the road. “If cobalt blue Vermont couldn’t find a way to make single-payer happen, then it’s very unlikely that any other state...

The one state that not only embraced Obamacare but insisted on going beyond it to a full single-payer system was Vermont, the haven of hippies and expatriate New Yorkers, which has become one of the most liberal states in the nation. In 2011, it adopted a form of neighboring Canada’s government-financed health care and promised to implement it by 2017. (And Jonathan Gruber was a key architect of this plan as well as of Obamacare.) This week, however, Governor Peter Shumlin, a Democrat, admitted the state couldn’t afford the plan’s $2 billion price tag and consequent sky-high taxes, and pulled...

If you’re looking for a state with a reliable Leftward tilt, you’d be hard pressed to do better than Vermont. After all, this is the place which has repeatedly elected Bernie Sanders – a man who considers the Democrat Party too conservative for his tastes – to statewide office since 1991. So in terms of socialist experimental laboratories, this is the spot where you’d want to launch progressive initiatives and take them for a test spin. That was the plan for Governor Peter Shumlin, who had promised his constituents that they would soon be enjoying the first in the...

Calling it the biggest disappointment of his career, Gov. Peter Shumlin said Wednesday he was abandoning plans to make Vermont the first state in the country with a universal, publicly funded health care system. Going forward with a project four years in the making would require tax increases too big for the state to absorb, Shumlin said. The measure had been the centerpiece of the Democratic governor's agenda and was watched and rooted for by single-payer health care supporters around the country. "I am not going (to) undermine the hope of achieving critically important health care reforms for this state...

Vermont’s incumbent governor, Peter Shumlin, wants his state to become the first to launch a government takeover of its health-care system. But the results of last month’s election could give him pause. He was unable to secure a majority of votes this November — after winning 58 percent of the vote two years ago. Now the state legislature will determine whether to send Shumlin back for another term. What happened in between? Vermont botched the launch of its state-run insurance exchange. By 2017, the exchange is supposed to serve as the “infrastructure” for a single-payer system, with the state picking...

The White House is tired of hearing about Jonathan Gruber’s comments. Everyone is getting “pretty tired of relitigating” Gruber's comments — everyone except Republicans, White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Tuesday. Gruber’s comments that the Affordable Care Act was passed because of the “stupidity” of the American voter is not shared by “anybody at the White House,” Earnest said, adding very few Americans are paying attention to the narrative. “Some Republicans are fanning the flames of those old political arguments because it's politically advantageous. It's easier for them to talk about six-to-eight-year-old videos than to talk about how the...

The Origin of Obamacare: The Organization and Their Plan Part 1   Quentin Young, Sen. Barack Obama, 2003 Quentin Young is a founding member of the Chicago-based Physicians for a National Health Program. [1][2] Young is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America [14] Peter Orris co-founded the Physicians for a National Health Program [3]. Orris was a member of Students for a Democratic Society at Harvard [4] Physicians for a National Health Program advocates single-payer national health insurance. [10] They both serve on the National Physicians Alliance Advisory Board. [5] Obama learned about single-payer health care from his...

The administration on Monday said fewer than 10 million Americans will enroll in Obamacare’s health exchanges this go-around, well short of the 13 million target congressional scorekeepers deemed critical to its economics, suggesting another rocky rollout in the law’s second year of full operation. Policy advisers at the Health & Human Services Department estimated that 9 million to 9.9 million people would enroll through the exchanges — or only a slight increase over the 8 million that the administration says were active at the end of the first enrollment period this April. The Congressional Budget Office, which is the government’s...

There is a famous thought experiment called the trolley problem, and it goes like this: A runaway trolley is headed toward five people bound on the tracks. You are standing before the switch that could divert it onto another track, where it would kill only one person. Do you pull the switch? The trolley problem is the most flattering possible way to think about the conservative movement’s fanatical commitment to repealing Obamacare. If they pull the switch and repeal Obamacare, or if they persuade five Republican Supreme Court justices to cripple it, they will spare America from the evils of...

We just finished enrolling our family in the healthcare plan provided by my wife's employer. The deductible is $3000 per individual and $6000 for family. Our oldest son, who works for a private company, has also been put on our plan because he could not afford to pay the health exchange prices nor his employer's healthcare plan. My wife was paying about $450 per month on the healthcare premiums to cover the family. Now, we are suddenly going to be paying $650 per month and there are NO choices - just one plan from which everyone can choose. It only...

I’m a huge fan of Switzerland, largely because its voters approved a spending cap that should be a role model for other nations.It’s called the “debt brake” and it has helped reduce the burden of government spending in Switzerland at a time when most nations in Europe have been moving in the wrong direction.But that’s not the only reason I like Switzerland.I also appreciate the fact that Swiss voters seem to be much more sensible than voters in other nations.Every so often I see polls, for instance, suggesting that French voters overwhelmingly want less government spending. But then they go...

Fox News is reporting that employer-provided health care plans may be a thing of the past. Former Obama health adviser Zeke Emanuel predicted that Obamacare will replace 80 percent of employer-provided health plans will disappear in 10 years. “It’s going to actually be better for people. They’ll have more choice,” Emanuel said. “Most people who work for an employer and get their coverage through an employer do not have choice.” …

As I was watching the video clip of Jonathan Gruber talking about state-based exchanges and subsidies last night I came across another admission which deserves some attention. A few minutes later in the Q&A following his January 18, 2012 speech, Gruber admits that the public option was an attempt to slip single-payer into the Affordable Care Act.(VIDEO-AT-LINK)So I like the public option. The public option is actually the brainchild of another academic, a guy named Jacob Hacker who's at Yale. And the public option, basically it was a clever idea. He said look, the left wants single-payer, the right wants...

Reforming health care is a signature issue with the current administration, but even the most ardent proponents of Obamacare would be reluctant to call it a success. Notwithstanding the well-publicized problems, of the countless billions spent on this program, precious little has gone into actual patient care. But really, what should we expect from a system designed by soulless bureaucrats such as “bioethicist” Ezekiel Emanuel and Donald Berwick, former Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services? Emanuel infamously suggested that doctors take the Hippocratic Oath too seriously, while Berwick intoned that the federal government must step in between...