Keyword: govthealthcare
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The British National Health Service (NHS) has provoked a firestorm by temporarily banning surgeries on people who smoke, and those who are obese. Patients who smoke must quit for at least 8 weeks before non-urgent surgery and obese people must lose weight before the NHS gives the go ahead. The Telegraph: In recent years, a number of areas have introduced delays for such patients - with some told operations will be put back for months, during which time they are expected to try to lose weight or stop smoking. But the new rules, drawn up by clinical commissioning groups (CCGs)...
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The American health care system sucks. We pay more for health care than any country in the world and we only get average results. And tens of millions of Americans have no health insurance. Our latest attempt to address this situation, Obamacare, is a mind-numbing kluge of laws and policies that is off to a very rough start. And even if Obamacare ends up working, it will only fix part of the problem.The problem, as a ground-breaking article by Steve Brill made clear, is that America's health care providers and insurers treat people differently. If you're lucky enough to be...
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The serious shortage of primary care doctors in America will get much worse unless the country reforms its graduate medical education system, researchers from the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services (SPHHS) reported in Academic Medicine. Less than 25% of newly qualified doctors go into primary care, and just 4.8% move into rural areas, the authors added. This serious problem will only get worse unless some fundamental changes are introduced. … The American GME (graduate medical education system) depends on public funding. It receives almost $10 billion from the Medicare program, plus $3 billion from Medicaid....
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A record 72,600,000 were enrolled in Medicaid for at least one month in fiscal 2012, up from 71,700,000 in fiscal 2011, according to the Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission (MACPAC), which provides an annual statistical report to Congress on Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program. The 72,600,000 enrolled in Medicaid in the United States in 2012 was more than the 65,630,692 people who lived in France last year, according to data published by the Census Bureau, or the 63,047,162 people who lived in the United Kingdom. …
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ST. LOUIS • Mike Bates went to the John A. Cochran Medical Center on Monday to find out whether improper safety practices in the midtown hospital's dental clinic had infected him with a serious disease. Thirty minutes later, he walked out, with more questions than answers. "They took six vials of blood, handed him two packages of condoms and sent him on his way," said his girlfriend, Teri Waggoner.
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Medicine: The administration's nominee to run Medicare and Medicaid is a fan of Britain's National Health Service and rationing services. He believes in less discretion for your doctor, more power for your government. 'The decision is not whether or not we will ration care — the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open" is what Dr. Donald Berwick, President Obama's nominee to head the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services, said in an interview published in Biotechnology Healthcare in June 2009. The question is whether the Senate will confirm Berwick with open eyes. Berwick says: "NICE is...
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During the course of this decade we will witness a global battle over the fate of the nascent Bully State. The Bully State will be this decade's ‘bad cop' to the Nanny State's ‘good cop' of past decades. The past generation of welfare statism saw the unduly protective Nanny State bleed into every sinew of our daily lives. Sociologist David Marsland explains that, ‘Once you have a big welfare state in place, the excuse for state nannying is infinite in scale', he says. ‘This ... continues the process of reducing self-reliance and handing responsibility for ourselves to external bodies.' Yet,...
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States' Rights: Idaho requires its attorney general to sue the feds if ObamaCare passes while Virginia, the cradle of liberty, heads the line of states in front of the federal courtroom. Somewhere Patrick Henry is smiling. As the second coming of King George III seeks to impose the leftist mandate of national health insurance on the unwilling American people, the states are once again in revolt. This time they're unwilling to be the colonies of an imperial federal government determined to spend and tax us into bankruptcy while treating the Constitution as if it were bird cage liner. Is this...
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Health Reform: The white coats showed up again at the White House, helping the administration ram health care reform down our throats. Can you have a bipartisan bill without a bipartisan vote?It didn't work the first time, when the White House last year assembled enough sympathetic medical professionals to stage a photo-op in the Rose Garden trying to persuade us that, as the commercial goes, three of four doctors really, really support the administration's attempt to nationalize health care. Rather than a grass-roots uprising of physicians, last year's event was a classic case of astroturfing. Attendance was by invitation only,...
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Health Care: Will the administration seize the moment of Scott Brown's victory to work out real solutions, or will it follow Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid over the cliff? Or is it just about government control? Before Sen.-elect Brown became the Scott heard 'round the world, House Speaker Pelosi was asked what his victory in the bluest of blue states would mean. "Certainly the dynamic will change depending on what happens in Massachusetts," she replied in a bit of an understatement. The dynamic has changed, yet the Democrats, as the country song goes, apparently don't know when to hold them...
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Self-Evident Truths: Sen. Dianne Feinstein says it comes under the Commerce Clause. Rep. Steny Hoyer says it's mandated by the "general welfare" clause. Despite liberal wishes, health care is not a right. The "living Constitution" that Democrats and their court appointees have given us may be the death of our freedoms. Their constitution adapts to the times and serves the whims of the elitists. The Constitution is supposed to limit government powers. It does not allow government to do anything it feels like doing. Cass Sunstein, the head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, is the author of...
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Politics: If the Democrats' stitched-together Frankenstein monster of health care reform gets the 60 votes to get through the Senate, it will have been done through an assortment of bribes and brass knuckles. (snip) Sen. Ben Nelson, a Nebraska Democrat, has also been critical of the buy-in and public option, but he has an additional issue about whatever comes out of the Senate not involving public funding of abortion in any way. Michael Goldfarb on the Weekly Standard blog quotes a Senate aide as saying the White House is now threatening to put Nebraska's Offutt Air Force Base on the...
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Reform: Only a Bernie Madoff could believe the Senate's health care bill will extend coverage to 31 million Americans while cutting deficits by $127 billion over 10 years. It would be the first profitable entitlement. But that's what Majority Leader Harry Reid, citing Congressional Budget Office estimates, tells us the 2,074-page bill — said to cost only $849 billion over a decade — would do. Like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, he seems to be following Vice President Joe Biden's admonition at an AARP town hall meeting that "we've got to spend money to keep from going bankrupt." We suspect Reid's...
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Health Care: A government task force has decided that women need fewer mammograms and later in life. Shouldn't that be between patient and physician? We have seen the future of health care, and it doesn't work. We have warned repeatedly that the net results of health care bills before Congress will be higher demand, fewer doctors, more cost control, all leading to rationing. New recommendations issued by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) regarding breast cancer and the necessity for early and frequent mammograms do not convince us otherwise. Just six months ago, the panel, which works under the...
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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...
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The public option is back. Its Lazarus act is hailed as a sign of how rosy the health- care debate looks for Democrats. August is but a sepia-tinged memory. Passage of a sweeping bill is now considered a lock by the wisest Beltway pundits. And legislation may even include the most shining prize of all, the public option that liberals -- no matter what the talking points for public consumption -- consider a way station to the Valhalla of a government-controlled system. The flush on ObamaCare's cheeks, though, is not necessarily a sign of health. The return of the public...
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Health Reform: House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer says it's constitutional to mandate insurance coverage. Congress, he insists, has "broad authority" to make us buy things to provide for the "general welfare." Democrats' Alice In Wonderland interpretation of what they consider to be a "living Constitution," where words mean what they say they mean based on political considerations, gets more bizarre by the minute. (snip) We've been down this road before. In 1994, Hillary Clinton's secretive health care task force was trying to nationalize health care. "A mandate requiring all individuals to purchase health insurance would be an unprecedented form of...
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Federal Powers: Where in the U.S. Constitution does it say the government can force people to buy health insurance? And by what authority does it prohibit the purchasing of insurance across state lines?A key part of the administration's plan to reform health care is what is called the "individual mandate" — a requirement that everyone must have health insurance either through his or her employer or purchased individually. A good chunk of the uninsured are that way of their own volition. They are young and healthy and feel they have better things to do with their money at this point...
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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...
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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...
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