Free Republic

Health Care Reform: Failure to buy health insurance in the just-passed health care bill could get you five years in jail with a $250,000 fine. How can violating a law that's unconstitutional be a felony? The passage last Saturday night of the House health care measure by a fragile 220-215 margin may well prove to be a Pyrrhic victory. In polls, townhall meetings and tea parties, Americans have shown they don't want a "reform" that costs a staggering $1.2 trillion yet fails to meet the left's desire of insuring all the uninsured. And they certainly don't want a bill that...

Daughter saves mother, 80, left by doctors to starve Sarah-Kate Templeton, Health Editor AN 80-year-old grandmother who doctors identified as terminally ill and left to starve to death has recovered after her outraged daughter intervened. Hazel Fenton, from East Sussex, is alive nine months after medics ruled she had only days to live, withdrew her antibiotics and denied her artificial feeding. The former school matron had been placed on a controversial care plan intended to ease the last days of dying patients. Doctors say Fenton is an example of patients who have been condemned to death on the Liverpool care...

Politics: The administration stages a photo-op with handpicked doctors who support its health care reform. Fortunately, most doctors still believe that the first rule of medicine is to do no harm. It would seem some doctors still make house calls. Some 150 of them made one at the White House Monday in an attempt to give a booster shot to the administration's chaotic and stalled health care reform drive. Rather than a grass-roots uprising of physicians, this was a classic case of AstroTurfing. Attendance was by invitation only, and 40 of the 150 were said to be members of Doctors...

Health Care Systems: A return to private health care is rising from the grass roots north of the border. While we rush headlong toward socialized medicine, Canadians are saying, "No, thanks — been there, done that." We recently told the story of Ava Isabella Stinson, born 13 weeks premature at St. Joseph's hospital in Hamilton, Ontario. She weighed all of two pounds and had no time to be put on a waiting list. But there were no open neonatal intensive care beds for her at St. Joseph's or anywhere else in the entire province of Ontario it seems. Canada's perfectly...

Litigation: The Founding Fathers envisioned the states as laboratories for ideas and choices. If the administration needs a demonstration project for successful tort reform, it need look no further than Mississippi. When President Obama said during his health care speech to Congress that he would "look into" malpractice reform and support "demonstration projects" at the state level, Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi, a Republican, responded: "If they want a demonstration project, come down to Mississippi. I'll show you a demonstration project." Mississippi enacted tort reform in 2004, including caps on medical malpractice awards. As a result, the number of medical...

The chairman of the Senate Finance Committee wants levies on insurers to pay for Obamacare and fines for families who don't sign up. To keep Obamacare alive, Baucus has proposed a Rube Goldberg scheme of fees and fines on insurers and the uninsured designed to forcibly bring everyone into the loving and protective arms of the nanny state...

Reform: The chairman of the Senate Finance Committee wants levies on insurers to pay for ObamaCare and fines for families who don't sign up. We can cut costs and expand coverage without sacrificing freedom.To keep ObamaCare alive, Montana Democrat Max Baucus has proposed a Rube Goldberg scheme of fees and fines on insurers and the uninsured designed to forcibly bring everyone into the loving and protective arms of the nanny state. To help finance his Plan B, Baucus would impose annual fees of $6 billion on health insurers, $4 billion on medical-device makers, $2.3 billion on drug manufacturers and $750...

Majority Rule on Health Care Reform (NYT Barf) NYT ^ | August 29, 2009 Posted on Sunday, August 30, 2009 2:59:06 AM by Tzimisce The talk in Washington is that Senate Democrats are preparing to push through health care reforms using parliamentary procedures that will allow a simple majority to prevail in their chamber, as it does in the House, instead of the 60 votes needed to overcome the filibuster that Senate Republicans are sure to mount. With the death of Senator Edward Kennedy, the Democrats do not have the votes just among their 57 members (and the two independents)...

Health Care Reform: A study by the British Patients Association tells the true story about socialized medicine in Britain. It's one of willful and woeful neglect of millions, missed diagnoses, and elderly patients left in pain.BD Exclusive Series: Government-Run Healthcare: A Prescription For FailureWhile reading this disturbing analysis of the pitiful state of medical care in Britain in the Daily Telegraph, the Vincent Price horror classic "The Abominable Dr. Phibes" came to mind. Price portrayed a man who used bizarre methods to dispatch his victims. The abominable British National Health Service, based on this report, is only slightly better. The...

Health Systems: Health care in France is often held up as a model the U.S. might follow. Yet the French have their own problems that show there's no such thing as a free lunch — or a free doctor's visit.Call it the grass-is-greener syndrome. Advocates of national health care, acknowledging the flaws in ObamaCare yet despising the current U.S. system that has the best medicines, the best medical equipment and the shortest waiting lists, have turned their eyes lovingly to places like France. As City Journal contributing editor Guy Sorman notes, the French would also love to have the low-cost,...

Reform: If Massachusetts is any guide, the passage of ObamaCare is almost certain to increase demand and worsen the shortage of doctors. Access to health care doesn't mean much if there's no doctor to provide it.Suppose health care reform passes and all are insured, by force or otherwise. The U.S. will be short 124,400 front-line physicians by 2025, according to the Association of Medical Colleges. That does not include the 15,585 new primary-care providers the administration plan is estimated to require. The Massachusetts reforms enacted in 2006, designed to provide universal coverage, provide an insight into what we might expect...

You don't break a young bronco just by beating it. You break it by making it feel helpless -- confining it in a small corral, isolating it from the herd, running it around and around on a short rope, feeding it only when it follows commands, making friends with it, whipping it as needed, and making sure that it knows who's boss every second of the day. In the end the colt knows there's just no way out. That's the real motivation behind "Universal Healthcare"  Obama is trying to sell us Euro-socialism, which means bribing and intimidating people with their...

We already knew this, thanks to Rep. Zoe Lofgren and Barack Obama himself, but it’s nice to get confirmation from those fine folks at Factcheck.org — an Annenberg project, no less. After Obama tried to paint it as a lie, the National Right to Life Committee insisted that ObamaCare would use taxpayer money to fund abortions. It turns out that they were right: The truth is that bills now before Congress don’t require federal money to be used for supporting abortion coverage. So the president is right to that limited extent. But it’s equally true that House and Senate legislation...

Medical Care: A leaked report shows that Vancouver's health authority is considering cutting thousands of surgeries to balance the budget. However organized, government-run health care inevitably leads to rationing.Defenders of ObamaCare continually point out that their plan is not like Canada's, that holding that country's system up as an example of impending medical doom is invalid. Canada's system is different. Instead of having a single national plan, Canada's national health insurance, a kind of public option, is composed of 13 interlocking provincial and territorial plans, all framed under the Canada Health Act. But based on a report leaked to the...

Leadership: Scores of congressmen and women are trying to hide from their constituents this August recess as the revolt over ObamaCare continues. If you haven't seen him or her lately, you might try your refrigerator.IBD Exclusive Series: Government-Run Healthcare: A Prescription For FailureIt's amazing how frightened of the community the party of the great community organizer has become now that the community has organized itself against his attempt to impose socialized medicine on the country. They cheered when he told them to get in the faces of their opponents. Now they won't show their faces, period. Senate Majority Whip Dick...

Health Care: The CBO says a government-run health care system would cause 23 million Americans to lose private coverage, cost $1 trillion dollars and still leave 30 million uninsured.The Congressional Budget Office, not your typical right-wing think tank, has looked at the Affordable Health Choices Act, as unveiled by Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Edward Kennedy, and found the word "affordable" to be false advertising. We have looked at it and found the word "choices" to be as meaningless as being told you can buy any car you want — as long as it's a Ford. The CBO director says on his...

Health Insurance: Driven by focus groups, the administration and Congress rail against insurance companies to get ObamaCare passed. So why have they been protecting the insurance companies from real competition?In a recent stop in North Carolina, President Obama told the crowd that our existing health care system "works well for the insurance industry, but it doesn't always work well for you." This shift from discussing what's in his plan to fighting the insurance bogeyman is no accident. In June, Joel Benenson, the president's chief pollster, told the Economic Club of Canada, where health care is a public scandal, that the...

Member of European Parliament Daniel Hannan warned Americans of the dangers of government-run healthcare on the Friday edition of the “Glenn Beck Program.” Hannan, a Conservative who represents Southeast England in the European Parliament, said of the British National Health Service (NHS), “The most striking thing about it is that you are very often sent to the back of the queue.” Beck noted the lengthy waiting times for care under Britain’s socialist National Health Service (NHS). These figures were provided by the BBC on May 27, 2009: *cataract surgery – 8 months *hip replacement – 11 months *knee replacement –...

Sarah Palin has been criticised for referring to the proposed Federal Panel, which will have unlimited authority to ration healthcare, as a "death panel", and seniors in wheelchairs have been called 'NAZIs' and 'organized disruptors' for objecting to this takeover of everyone's healthcare and lives. Since the bill in Congress, HR 3200, is 1017 pages long and filled with legalese, all Americans owe an enormous debt to a philosophy professor from Duke University, John David Lewis, for carefully reading and translating into plain English some of its more important provisions. That analysis is shown below:

Reform: If the world's most famous physicist, Stephen Hawking, is a shining example of British health care, how is it that others in the U.K. are repeatedly denied critical care and medicine?In commenting on efforts to overhaul American's health care system, we have tried to pull back the curtain and pay attention to those trying to clone the systems of Canada and Britain. But supporters of government-run health care frequently ignore some of the less-pleasant facts. Much has been made of this statement in one of our Aug. 3 editorials: "People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance...

The number of people in their forties diagnosed with mouth, tongue and lip cancer has increased by a quarter in the past decade. According to figures today from Cancer Research UK, oral cancer is "largely preventable", with smoking and drinking alcohol among the main risk factors. However, experts believe the increase is down to alcohol consumption, as they say cancers caused by smoking often take 30 years to develop, and smoking rates have gone down while drinking has gone up. Researchers also point to diets low in fruit and vegetables and the sexually transmitted infection human papillomavirus (HPV) as reasons...

It appears that Obama was for the single payer health care plan before he was against it.

Health Care: There might not be a "death panel," as Sarah Palin described it, but federal bureaucrats will be making end-of-life decisions. That's why state-run medicine is a leading cause of death in Britain and Canada.A post on the former Alaska governor's Facebook page has caused a stir by discussing openly what many privately fear and something we have written about. End-of-life counseling and efforts to measure cost-effectiveness of treatment will combine in a perfect storm to ration care in a way that lets the government decide who lives and who dies. "The America I know and love is not...

Legislation: Still believe in post-racial politics? Read the health care bill. It's affirmative action on steroids, deciding everything from who becomes a doctor to who gets treatment on the basis of skin color. President Obama is on the record as being officially opposed to reparations for slavery. But as with other issues, you have to sift through his eloquent rhetoric and go beyond the teleprompter to get at what he really means.

When Laure Cuccarolo went into early labor on a recent Sunday night in a village in southern France, her only choice was to ask the local fire brigade to whisk her to a hospital 30 miles away. A closer one had been shuttered by cost cuts in France's universal health system. View Full Image France Fights Universal Care's High Cost Agence France-Presse/Getty Images Doctors, trade unions and others have called national protests against French health-care cutbacks this year. One petition signed by prominent physicians said they feared the intent of the reform was to turn health care into a 'lucrative...

The news from Barbara Wagner's doctor was bad, but the rejection letter from her insurance company was crushing. The 64-year-old Oregon woman, whose lung cancer had been in remission, learned the disease had returned and would likely kill her. Her last hope was a $4,000-a-month drug that her doctor prescribed for her, but the insurance company refused to pay. What the Oregon Health Plan did agree to cover, however, were drugs for a physician-assisted death. Those drugs would cost about $50. "It was horrible," Wagner told ABCNews.com. "I got a letter in the mail that basically said if you want...

IBD Exclusive Series: Government-Run Healthcare: A Prescription For Failure Discourse: At a town hall last week in Dallas, an elderly "mob" with "manufactured" outrage questioned AARP's support for nationalized health care, asking: "Do you work for us or do we work for you?"There were no swastika-wearing grannies at Tuesday's meeting, as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi might claim. Nor were they "taking their cues from talk show hosts, Internet rumor-mongers . . . and insurance rackets," as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has said. But they were mad as hell at the perception that AARP was selling them out in the...

How long will it take?

The Obama White House has employed a former ABC journalist to launch a disinformation campaign against The Drudge Report for publishing a link to a Youtube video. The video in question exposes the lie that Obama and other Democrats do not intend for government healthcare to muscle out all private plans and morph into a socialist, single-payer program. Here is that video. Make up your own mind.

Rationing: In the recesses of the House health care "reform" bill is a provision for end-of-life counseling for seniors. Don't worry, granny, they're from the government and they're here to help.At a town hall meeting at AARP headquarters in Washington, D.C., President Obama was asked by a woman from North Carolina if it was true "that everyone that's Medicare age will be visited and told they have to decide how they wish to die." At first, the president joked that not enough government workers existed to ask the elderly how they wanted to die. The idea, he said, was to...

Congress: In exchange for a vague promise of cuts in the cost of health care "reform," a few fiscally conservative Democrats agree to release the bill to a September floor vote. Have the pit bulls become Chihuahuas?Apparently even a Blue Dog Democrat will stop growling if you toss him a big enough bone. Four of the seven who helped keep the House bill bottled up in the Energy and Commerce Committee — Mike Ross of Arkansas, Baron Hill of Indiana, Zack Space of Ohio and Bart Gordon of Tennessee — agreed to vote the bill out of committee in exchange...

The House health-care reform bill proposes to decrease hospital visits by establishing a “medical home pilot program” for elderly and disabled Americans. Such a medical home would not require a physician to be on the staff, and therefore could be run solely by nurse practitioners and physician assistants. Medical homes also would practice “evidence-based” medicine, which advocates only the use of medical treatments that are supported by effectiveness research. But physicians’ groups say the legislation could lead to restrictions on which treatments may be used for certain conditions, despite the fact that some patients might require a unique or unconventional...

Health Costs: Lawyers are responsible for more unneeded procedures than "greedy" doctors. But instead of capping malpractice awards, bureaucrats will soon decide which treatments are OK and whether you're worth it.Health Costs: Lawyers are responsible for more unneeded procedures than "greedy" doctors. But instead of capping malpractice awards, bureaucrats will soon decide which treatments are OK and whether you're worth it.

Oddly enough, as the nation considers ObamaCare, the press is completely uninterested in the experience of Massachusetts and Hawaii, both of which have ambitious, and failed, experiments in trying to provide universal health care. Mitt Romney, the architect of the Bay State's health care plan, which is costing far more than expected, is largely absent from the airwaves, despite his legitimate claim to be an expert. The Boston Globe calls the plan a "failure" and notes "The state's plan flunks on all counts." Spending for the Commonwealth Care subsidized program has doubled, from $630 million in 2007 to an estimated...

Still believe in post-racial politics? Read the health care bill. It's affirmative action on steroids, deciding everything from who becomes a doctor to who gets treatment on the basis of skin color. President Obama is on the record as being officially opposed to reparations for slavery. But as with other issues, you have to sift through his eloquent rhetoric and go beyond the teleprompter to get at what he really means. His opposition to reparations is based on the fact they don't go far enough. [snip] Under the Democrats' plans, if a medical school wants to receive contracts and grants...

Legislation: Still believe in post-racial politics? Read the health care bill. It's affirmative action on steroids, deciding everything from who becomes a doctor to who gets treatment on the basis of skin color.President Obama is on the record as being officially opposed to reparations for slavery. But as with other issues, you have to sift through his eloquent rhetoric and go beyond the teleprompter to get at what he really means. His opposition to reparations is based on the fact they don't go far enough. In a 2004 questionnaire, he told the NAACP, "I fear that reparations would be an...

Ever since I was a child, I have enjoyed watching aliens assault our planet Earth on both the small and large screens.  It all started when I first witnessed Ming the Merciless project a deadly Nitron Ray from planet Mars onto the Earth, causing horrific changes in our atmosphere and threatening the lives of mankind. In The Blob, I saw a baby "blob" arrive on a meteor and grow with every human it consumed. In Invasion of the Body Snatchers, I beheld strange seedpods from outer space replicate the human forms of the doomed while they peacefully slept.  In War...

Health Reform: If Democrats in Washington think their health care reform with a public option is a good thing, why have they exempted themselves from it? Why isn't what's good for their constituents good for them?During ABC's June 24 infomercial for government-run health care broadcast from the White House, President Obama was asked if he and his family would abide by the restrictions and limitations that came with his proposed reforms. In what Ed Morrissey at HotAir.com called "Obama's Michael Dukakis moment," President Obama refused to make such a pledge and confessed that if "it's my family member, if it's...

Meg owes her life to the tenacity of her mother and the skill of her surgeon. Without them she would almost certainly be dead by now. Diagnosed with a malignant brain tumour when she'd just turned 19... Neurosurgeons in Britain believed it was too risky to operate because of where the tumour was located... So Meg was told that there was no cure and the cancer would eventually kill her. 'When I was diagnosed, my surgeon refused point blank to operate,' says Meg, 23. 'He said it was too dangerous and he would only consider operating when the tumour became...

THE World Health Organisation says swine flu has swept the globe at "unprecedented speed", and a study warns that the pandemic could tip the world into deflation and delay the economic recovery. The WHO said it will stop giving figures on the numbers infected by the A(H1N1) virus to allow countries to channel resources into close monitoring of unexpected developments and patterns in the spread of the disease. Argentina, meanwhile, issued a nationwide alert after pigs were confirmed to have the swine flu virus. "In past pandemics, influenza viruses have needed more than six months to spread as widely as...

A state commission recommended yesterday that Massachusetts dramatically change how doctors and hospitals are paid, essentially putting providers on a budget as a way to control exploding healthcare costs and improve the quality of care. The 10-member commission, which includes key legislators and members of Governor Deval Patrick’s administration, voted unanimously to largely scrap the current system, in which insurers typically pay doctors and hospitals a negotiated fee for each individual procedure or visit. That arrangement is widely seen as leading to unneeded tests and procedures. Massachusetts would be the first state to adopt such a broad “global payment’’ system,...

Obamageddon Almost a year ago I wrote an editorial letter warning the Barack Obama posed a grave threat to the Republic because, like Bill Clinton, he was a facile liar whose radical roots and affiliations were being actively concealed by the mainstream media. I predicted that he would be the most liberal and destructive President to hold the Executive Office since Jimmy Carter. I now admit that I was wrong; I was entirely too charitable. Obama makes Jimmy Carter look like Milton Friedman. In the span of just six months, President Obama and the Democrat party have done more damage...

[Snip]...Yesterday afternoon, IBD laid the following bombshell on its readers (HT to dscott, I also heard Rush mention this a short time ago; bolds after title are mine): It's Not An Option Congress: It didn't take long to run into an "uh-oh" moment when reading the House's "health care for all Americans" bill. Right there on Page 16 is a provision making individual private medical insurance illegal.

Congress: It didn't take long to run into an "uh-oh" moment when reading the House's "health care for all Americans" bill. Right there on Page 16 is a provision making individual private medical insurance illegal. IBD Exclusive Series: Government-Run Healthcare: A Prescription For Failure When we first saw the paragraph Tuesday, just after the 1,018-page document was released, we thought we surely must be misreading it. So we sought help from the House Ways and Means Committee. It turns out we were right: The provision would indeed outlaw individual private coverage. Under the Orwellian header of "Protecting The Choice To...

The healthcare reform bill that Obama and the Democrats are pushing to get approved by September is a prescription for murder. Better start moving to protect your aging loved ones by mounting an overwhelming effort to defeat this bill!

At the same time President Obama is asking members of Congress to take one of the most politically difficult votes of their careers, he is also pressing lawmakers to give up one of their most valued perks of office: boosting Medicare payments to benefit hometown providers. Behind the scenes, Obama is pushing for a mechanism that would take Medicare payment authority out of the hands of politicians and invest it in a separate entity, possibly under the executive branch. "Structures that fundamentally alter the long-term costs are a must for real health-care reform," said White House Chief of Staff Rahm...

Congress: It didn't take long to run into an "uh-oh" moment when reading the House's "health care for all Americans" bill. Right there on Page 16 is a provision making individual private medical insurance illegal.When we first saw the paragraph Tuesday, just after the 1,018-page document was released, we thought we surely must be misreading it. So we sought help from the House Ways and Means Committee. It turns out we were right: The provision would indeed outlaw individual private coverage. Under the Orwellian header of "Protecting The Choice To Keep Current Coverage," the "Limitation On New Enrollment" section of...

America has the best health care system in the world. Is it perfect? No. But it's still the best. Yet we're about to throw it all away in favor of... government-run health care. But here's the one thing: The Democrats' latest health care plan has nothing to do with "health" or "caring" and everything to do with power and control. "But Glenn, there are like 14 quadrillion people without health insurance. And besides, it's free!" Actually the plan House Democrats unveiled Tuesday will cost $1 trillion over 10 years, but only 17 percent of the spending comes in the first...

BOSTON — A hospital that serves thousands of indigent Massachusetts residents sued the state on Wednesday, charging that its costly universal health care law is forcing the hospital to cover too much of the expense of caring for the poor. The hospital, Boston Medical Center, faces a $38 million deficit for the fiscal year ending in September, its first loss in five years. The suit says the hospital will lose more than $100 million next year because the state has lowered Medicaid reimbursement rates and stopped paying Boston Medical “reasonable costs” for treating other poor patients. “We filed this suit...

You have advanced kidney cancer. It will kill you, probably in the next year or two. A drug called Sutent slows the spread of the cancer and may give you an extra six months, but at a cost of $54,000. Is a few more months worth that much? If you can afford it, you probably would pay that much, or more, to live longer, even if your quality of life wasn’t going to be good. But suppose it’s not you with the cancer but a stranger covered by your health-insurance fund. If the insurer provides this man — and everyone...