Free Republic

Climate Change: Major U.S. corporations have set up a Web site calling for a global climate treaty to be signed in Copenhagen. Considering recent evidence of massive climate fraud, perhaps they should reconsider. Many will remember the classic soft drink ad campaign where young people from many nations gather on a mountaintop and sing that they'd like to buy the world a Coke, the theory being that sharing a soda was the key to world peace. That sort of naivete has led peoples and governments around the world to accept at face value the outright fraud perpetrated by the Milli...

Control: The House and Senate climate bills contain a provision giving the president extraordinary powers in the event of a "climate emergency." As chief of staff Rahm Emanuel says, a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. If you thought the House health care bill that nobody read has hidden passages that threaten our freedoms and liberty, take a peak at the "trigger" placed in the byzantine innards of both the House-passed Waxman-Markey bill and the Kerry-Boxer bill just passed by Democrats out of Sen. Barbara Boxer's Environment and Public Works Committee. As Nick Loris of the Heritage Foundation points...

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...

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...

The race in Congress to pass bipartisan healthcare legislation this summer hit a rough spot yesterday as key senators raised doubts about whether they could sort out complex policy disagreements in time. Republicans called on Democrats to slow the pace of deliberations, and Democratic leaders sounded decidedly less confident about speedy approval amid festering divisions. Members of the Senate Finance Committee, which is searching for a bipartisan compromise, acknowledged they were not close to a deal. Last spring Democratic leaders set an aggressive timetable for passage of universal healthcare coverage, agreeing to vote before the Aug. 8 recess, return in...

Maybe Congress believes that the "other white meat" is good for you, because the health care bill is loaded with it, even though people are already choking on the price tag. In one more example that the Democratic Party-run congress is just not listening to the will of the people, both the house and Senate versions of the developing Obamacare legislation has special "pet projects" designed to make the representatives more popular in their districts. Included are projects that have nothing to do with providing universal health insurance such as adding lighting to a playground or clearing a walking path...

Health Reform: A critically ill premature baby is moved to a U.S hospital to get the treatment she couldn't get in the system we're told we should emulate. Cost-effective care? In Canada, as elsewhere, you get what you pay for.Ava Isabella Stinson was born last Thursday at St. Joseph's hospital in Hamilton, Ontario. Weighing only two pounds, she was born 13 weeks premature and needed some very special care. Unfortunately, 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.

This is an article filled with good links, that demonstrates Obama's effort to pretend to offer us a choice, but really the supporters of socialized medicine are out of the closet on the destruction of private health care as a whole. It is not about the efficacy of socialized health care, it is about showing how we are not really being offered a choice, and it demonstrates the slipping support for the plan. http://www.examiner.com/x-14881-Political-Buzz-Examiner~y2009m6d25-Obamas-Health-Care-Reform-debacle

If not, then why does the current bill exempt Members of Congress?"If you don't have health insurance, you'll be able to get the same kind of health insurance Members of Congress get for themselves." --Barack Obama, "Closing Argument" speech, Canton, Ohio, October 26, 2008 In a rare moment during last night's Democrat Party health care infomercial on ABC, President Obama was challenged by Dr. Orrin Devinsky, a neurologist and researcher at the New York University Langone Medical Center. Dr. Devinsky asked if Obama's wife or one of his daughters was sick and the plan the President proposed limited tests and...

852 - Pages in the bill 120 million - Number of individuals who could lose their current coverage as a result of the government-run plan reimbursing at Medicare rates created in the bill, according to non-partisan actuaries at the Lewin Group 4.7 million - Number of jobs that could be lost as a result of taxes on businesses that cannot afford to provide health insurance coverage, according to a model developed by Council of Economic Advisors Chair Christina Romer

According to IRS data, the bottom 50% of wage earners paid a total of 2.99% of all taxes – almost none...

ABC's White House special struggled for viewers President Obama's town hall meeting on health care delivered a sickly rating Wednesday evening. The one-hour ABC News special "Primetime: Questions for the President: Prescription for America" (4.7 million viewers, 1.1 preliminary adults 18-49 rating) had the fewest viewers in the 10 p.m. hour. The special tied some 8 p.m. comedy repeats as the lowest-rated program on a major broadcast network. The special was shot at the White House and featured the president answering questions about his health care plan. The president's primary message was that those who like their current insurance will...

If passed, President Obama's proposal for a government run option will doom us all to US Government Run Health Care “I strongly believe that Americans should have the choice of a public health insurance option operating alongside private plans,” Obama wrote. “This will give them a better range of choices, make the health care market more competitive, and keep insurance companies honest.” Logic dictates that a government operated health plan would be able to charge less than one operated by the private sector. Even if all other things were equal since the government plan would not have to make a...

There may be no limit to how far establishment media reporters will go in their attempt to prop up the public perception of failing state-run health care programs. The latest example comes from Massachusetts. The Bay State's CommonwealthCare (aka RomneyCare, so nicknamed because Governor Mitt Romney, rumored to be a Republican and pictured at right, championed the legislation's passage and signed the bill in 2006) continues to implode -- as anyone with a brain could have predicted, and as many, including yours truly (fourth item at link), did predict. Despite deep cuts, which essentially amount to large-scale rationing of care...

President Barack Obama on Wednesday night opened the door further than he has in the past to taxing health benefits to pay for health care reform.

President Barack Obama left the door open to a new tax on health care benefits Wednesday, and officials said top lawmakers and the White House were seeking $150 billion in concessions from the nation's hospitals as they sought support for legislation struggling to emerge in Congress. "I don't want to prejudge what they're doing," the president said, referring to proposals in the Senate to tax workers who get expensive insurance policies. Obama, who campaigned against the tax when he ran for president, drew a quick rebuff from one union president.

Ezekiel Emanuel got a memorable introduction to our haphazard health-care system on his first visit to a cancer ward as a medical student. The white coats were ordering a transfusion for a teenage girl, and since shyness does not run in his family — brother Rahm is President Obama's famously foulmouthed chief of staff, brother Ari a similarly silence-deficient Hollywood agent — he interrupted to ask why. Because she had Hodgkin's disease and her platelets were below 20,000, the team explained. Emanuel still had questions: Was there evidence for that protocol? Don't some hospitals wait until 10,000? Why 20,000? Because...

Only by expanding government control of health care can we bring down its cost. That's the faulty premise of the various proposals for health reform now being batted around Washington. The claimed cost control depends on politically safe ideas such as preventive care or the adoption of electronic health records. And neither -- even according to the Congressional Budget Office -- will do much to reduce spending. If these proposals are implemented and fail to produce savings, government will turn to a less appealing but more familiar tool to cut costs: the regulation of access to drugs and medical services....

The Senate is about to pay off the unions for helping get Obama elected. Senator Max Baucus (D, Mont.) looks to be about ready to propose a plan to pay for Obama’s massive, more than $1 trillion in new government spending on healthcare by instituting a new tax on many employees that currently have healthcare through their workplace (nearly 1 in 8 workers according to Peter Barnes). Never having been “income” before, Senator Baucus is prepared to claim it is and will be taxed accordingly. … unless, of course, you happen to be a union member. If you are a...

While still good, President Barack Obama's political health is deteriorating, threatened by what he thought would be balm -- his ambitious plan for a government takeover of health care. Mr. Obama remains slightly more popular than most presidents have been in their opening months. But his job approval rating has drifted down to 60% in the RealClearPolitics.com average. His disapproval numbers have nearly doubled to 33%. More troubling to Team Obama is the growing gap between the president's approval rating and declining support for major items on his policy agenda. Independents are increasingly joining Republicans in opposition to administration initiatives...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: CNBC, an interview just moments ago, Warren Buffett, big early supporter of the Bamster's, huge Obama supporter says there's been little progress over the past few months in the economic war being fought by the country. "We haven't got the economy moving yet," Buffett said. And of course he's right, except Goldman Sachs is out there saying they had a record first half of 2009, or they're going to pay record bonuses or some such thing and Citibank's giving people raises of 50% while the unemployment rate skyrockets at 10%. "While the economy is a shambles and...

There is a growing sense among Democrats that they will not be able to accomplish the entire agenda leaders set for 2009, pushing major policy debates into the midterm election year. Concerns over the cost of overhauling the nation’s healthcare system have served as a wake-up call to lawmakers. They had planned for a busy summer of healthcare and climate change debate, a dozen spending bills, a defense authorization and hearings on President Obama’s first Supreme Court nominee. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) even promised to add a sweeping overhaul of immigration to that list. But the revelation that...

We notice that the Obama administration is making a big push this week to try to recreate lost momentum on so-called "healthcare reform" in the United States Congress. It appears the once-monolithic Democrat rush to enact a comprehensive health care package that would provide health services to every man, woman and child in the country is splintering into various factions. Reasons for this are varied, but a very large one seems to be that more than a few legislators have been stunned at the costs to provide even a third of persons currently having no health insurance with some form...

Health Care: President Obama defends his federal plan as a tool to "discipline" private insurers. If that's really what he wants, why not set up a national market with real competition for a change?We ask the question with a strong suspicion of what the answer will be. It's that Obama, along with the liberal leadership of his party, wants something a bit stronger than mere "discipline" for private insurers. They're itching for punishment — to flog them for the sin of greed. Obama said as much in his press conference Tuesday when he accused the insurers of putting profits before...

MSNBC eats its own.

President Barack Obama said it is “not logical” to think that a government-run health care program competing with private health insurers would eventually drive the private firms out of business. The concern expressed by many Republicans and some private insurers has been one of the leading arguments against the president’s plan to establish a “public option” health care program. At a White House press conference on Tuesday, Obama said: “Why would it drive private insurance out of business? If private insurers say that the marketplace provides the best quality health care; if they tell us that they're offering a good...

Live thread for commentary on the ABC News Primetime ObamaCare Infomercial tonight at 9:00 PM CT/10:00 PM ET. John Boehner recommends this handy guide to the healthcare informercial from The Freedom Project.A Guide to the President's Health Care Infomercial Obama's Thinking 'Evolves' on Health Care Requirements Acknowledging that his thinking on the issue has "evolved," President Barack Obama says he could support a law mandating that individuals purchase health care coverage, with fines for those who do not, but he stressed that there must be some kind of waiver for those who are simply unable to afford it. (snip) During...

As the Obama administration pushes for a national health care plan, studies show that most Americans are overwhelmingly happy with their own health care -- but they are dissatisfied with the country's overall system, because most Americans who have insurance believe that those who don't have it are not receiving care. Those same studies, however, show that a surprisingly large 70 percent of the estimated 46 million Americans who don't have insurance say they do, in fact, receive health care, and that a vast majority of them are satisfied with it. A survey conducted jointly by the Kaiser Family Foundation,...

There is that old saying, "There are three kinds of lies; Lies, Dammed Lies and Statistics. Having spent over 30 years in marketing, I assure you that numbers can be made to prove anything. The unscrupulous will show twist numbers to prove a point without clearly noting how they were derived. Neither the NY Times nor CBS has not been accused of having scruples, at least not since Uncle Walter retired. Late last week, a highly promoted NY Times/CBS poll reported that almost 3/4 of Americans were solidly behind the Obama heath plan. When you examine the way the poll...

Cap and trade is the tax that dare not speak its name, and Democrats are hoping in particular that no one notices who would pay for their climate ambitions. With President Obama depending on vast new carbon revenues in his budget and Congress promising a bill by May, perhaps Americans would like to know the deeply unequal ways that climate costs would be distributed across regions and income groups. Politicians love cap and trade because they can claim to be taxing "polluters," not workers. Hardly. Once the government creates a scarce new commodity -- in this case the right to...

I realize how maddening it must be for you to watch our fellow citizens hypnotized by an over packaged, glorified street agitator with a used car salesman’s smarmy, phony self-deprecating “charm,” a braying jackass grin and a smooth TelePrompTer dependent spiel that bears no relationship to the truth, seemingly happy to hand over what they and their families have worked so hard for in the service of his vision of a socialist utopia. Why don’t these people get it? Are they blind? Isn’t it blatantly obvious what Obama has in mind? Particularly infuriating is the fact that they haven’t exactly...

Obama hits back at insurance companies for opposing public option. It took a few months, but tensions between the Obama administration and private health insurers seem to be coming to a head. In a White House press conference Tuesday, President Barack Obama described a government-run health care option as "an important tool to discipline insurance companies" and brushed aside criticism that such a plan would ruin the industry. "If private insurers say that the marketplace provides the best-quality health care," pondered the president, "then why is it that the government--which they say can't run anything--suddenly is going to drive them...

GO HERE for video. Automatically Generated Transcript (may not be 100% accurate) " Earlier we told you the President Obama again today -- health care reform must provide relief to people who do not have health insurance. But who are those people and why don't they have coverage... Of all the people who are uninsured at any point in time. Half of them will find insurance within a year and 90% of them will find insurance within two years. Because many of them -- a job they lost -- left and have a brief period without insurance ... Is to...

In the health reform debate, "exchanges" haven't gotten much play. President Obama mentioned them almost in passing at Tuesday's press conference."Let's have a system, the same way that federal employees . . . (and) members of Congress do," he said, "where we call it an exchange, but you can call it a marketplace, where, essentially, you've got a whole bunch of different plans." But despite their low profile, exchanges are key to all the major Democratic proposals in Congress. Exchanges act as clearinghouses for health insurance policies, making it more convenient to shop — along with generous subsidies for lower-income...

President Obama has a green light and open eight-lane highway for health-care reform. But somehow the guy can't put his foot on the gas. He hedges in neutral while some fellow Democrats muck up policy and Republicans demagogue them into mush. A commanding 85 percent of Americans want "fundamental changes" in American health care, according to a recent New York Times-CBS News poll. On the allegedly controversial "public option" -- a government-run plan that would compete with private insurers -- 72 percent are in favor. And that includes half of self-identified Republicans. What is Obama afraid of? He apparently dreads...

Why do we need President Obama's big-bang health care reform at all? What's the real agenda here? If it's really to cover the truly uninsured, a much cheaper, targeted, small-ball approach would do the trick. But on the other hand, maybe the real goal is a larger, ultra-liberal plan aimed at a government takeover of the U.S. health system. In a recent column, Larry Elder points to an ABC News-USA Today-Kaiser Family Foundation survey showing that 89% of Americans are satisfied with their health care. That means up to 250 million people could be happy with their plans. So why...

White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel joined in on a high-level, closed-door meeting on health care with top Senate Democrats on Tuesday evening, a session that comes just as President Barack Obama is turning up the heat to complete a deal this year on the controversial issue.

Today a national TV network turns its airwaves over to President Obamas pitch for government-run health care. Shouldnt this be a bipartisan discussion?

WASHINGTON (AP) — Even for a Democratic president, Barack Obama's challenge to health insurance companies and free market principles Tuesday was unusually pointed. A government-run health insurance option is needed "to discipline insurance companies," he said, part of his rallying cry for comprehensive health care overhaul. If they can't compete, it's probably their fault. Many private insurers, he said, spend too much time thinking about profits instead of helping people. "The public plan, I think, is an important tool to discipline insurance companies," he said. "Too often, insurance companies have been spending more time thinking about how to take premiums...

A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey shows that 72 percent of those questioned recently say they favor increasing the federal government’s influence over the country’s health care system in an attempt to lower costs and provide health care coverage to more Americans. Other recent polls show six in ten think the government should provide health insurance or take responsibility for providing health care to all Americans. It defies understanding that so many Americans want even more government in their lives than they already have, and make no mistake — there is a lot of government in our lives. This is particularly...

"No matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise to the American people," President Obama told the American Medical Association on June 15. "If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period. If you like your health care plan, you'll be able to keep your health care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what." But today the president clarified that promise. It seems he wasn’t saying “no one” will take away any American’s health insurance – he was saying the government wouldn’t. Which is not to say that...

President Barack Obama said on Tuesday he firmly believed that a government-run health insurance plan "made sense" in a broader overhaul of the U.S. healthcare system, and that private insurers should find ways to compete for clients.

“I need a crash cart, stat!” The political prospects for major U.S. healthcare reform have taken a decided turn for the worse in recent days (at least from the point of view of many Democrats). And you don’t need to be some totally plugged-in Washington insider to understand that. Just take a look-see at the stock market performance of industry players such as Aetna, Cigna, UnitedHealth Group, and WellPoint. Shares have been trending higher of late. What’s been slowly dawning on Wall Street is that the legislative process in Washington is unlikely to produce a national public health insurance option...

Democrats are becoming bolder about their idea that middle-class familes get the option of joining a government insurance plan in any overhaul of the health care system. Their fervor carries a risk. Liberals, citing polls that show support for a public plan, say they are increasingly frustrated with negotiations to make the idea more palatable to Republicans. Moderates, however, warn that abandoning the talks could jeopardize efforts to draft a bill that can pass a closely divided Senate. "It is important not to draw lines in the sand and rule out options before they are fully explored," Sen. Kent Conrad,...

President Obama dusted off a campaign slogan on Monday, sharply dismissing those who have expressed skepticism that the nation’s health care system will be overhauled by Congress this year. “Yes we can,” Mr. Obama said. “We are going to get this done.” In an appearance in the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House, Mr. Obama praised an agreement reached last week by drug companies to help close a cap in Medicare’s prescription drug coverage. He said the pharmaceutical industry’s pledge to spend $80 billion over the next decade to reduce the cost of drugs would pay for a portion...

Good Morning America's Diane Sawyer popped up on Sunday's Reliable Sources and swore that ABC's much-scrutinized health care special with President Obama "won't be an infomercial." She also seriously touted the objectivity of the network, cheering, "I know that our network has worked very, very hard to be completely-completely responsible and fair and serious about big issues."

A headline in today’s edition of Roll Call summarizes the health care debate this week: “More Hurdles for Health Care.” Democrats struggled with their various health care proposals last week in the wake of inconvenient reports that the two health care bills in the Senate would likely cost in excess of $1 trillion and would fail to cover all uninsured Americans. This week, more problems are surfacing as Americans get a better look at what President Obama and Democrats are proposing to do. First, Democrats may have problems with each other when they attempt to merge bills being written in...

President Obama has indicated he wants a health-care bill on his desk sometime around October...the evidence is overwhelming that we must end the private insurance company domination of health care in our country and move toward a publicly funded, single-payer, Medicare-for-all approach.

After Losing $20 Million in Equipment, Federal Health-Care Agency Won $500 Million Earmark in Stimulus; Agency’s HQ Had 10 Pieces of IT Equipment Per Worker Friday, June 19, 2009 By Monica Gabriel (CNSNews.com) - The $787 billion stimulus bill that President Obama signed in February awarded the Indian Health Service with an earmark for $500 million in new funding, including $85 million specifically set aside for “health information technology activities,” even though a Government Accountability Office audit released the previous June concluded that mismanagement of the IHS had allowed $15.8 million worth of equipment to be lost or stolen between...