Free Republic

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?