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Vice President Mike Pence's physician, Dr. Jennifer Peña, resigned after derailing the nomination of White House physician Admiral Ronny Jackson to become secretary of Veterans Affairs with unsubstantiated allegations of professional misconduct on his part.“The vice president’s office was informed today by the White House Medical Unit of the resignation,” Pence spokeswoman Alyssa Farah commented Friday. “Physicians assigned to the vice president report to the White House Medical Unit and thus any resignation would go entirely through the Medical Unit, not the vice president’s office.”Dr. Peña was among those who claimed professional misconduct by Jackson. In memos obtained by CNN,...

Vice President Mike Pence's physician privately raised alarms within the White House last fall that President Donald Trump's doctor may have violated federal privacy protections for a key patient -- Pence's wife, Karen -- and intimidated the vice president's doctor during angry confrontations over the episode. The previously unreported incident is the first sign that serious concerns about Ronny Jackson's conduct had reached the highest levels of the White House as far back as September -- months before White House aides furiously defended Jackson's professionalism, insisted he had been thoroughly vetted and argued allegations of misconduct amounted to unsubstantiated rumors....

Editor's note: Scott Jennings, a CNN contributor, is a former special assistant to President George W. Bush and former campaign adviser to Sen. Mitch McConnell. (CNN) The shameful smearing of Dr. Ronny Jackson, the White House physician who was nominated by President Donald Trump to be Secretary of the Veterans Affairs Administration and has now withdrawn, is example #967 of why people hate Washington D.C. and were in a revolutionary mood at the 2016 ballot box. Montana Senator Jon Tester in particular ought to be ashamed of publicly airing unproven allegations against a Navy Admiral and doctor who has served...

As usual the MSM have a lead-eared, tone-deaf thud of a response to the Trump Dr. medical records issue. They'd need longer than a news cycle will allow to come up with some otherwise glaringly obvious pretext, to try to portray the 'poor doctor' and his loss of his rights--to Trump's records. This reminds me of Justice Harry Blackmun going to the Mayo Clinic Library to write about how a woman's personal choice is between her doctor and...her doctor. People need to stop reading news fantasies spun out by people who think it's their job to tell people what to...

Updated 14 hours ago President Trump's former top health official said Tuesday that health insurance costs would likely go up as a result of Trump-backed Republican legislation removing the federal requirement that everyone have health insurance. Congressional Republicans eliminated the individual insurance mandate, which was part of the 2010 Affordable Care Act, as part of a tax overhaul they passed in December. Removing the mandate without passing other reforms could spur young, healthy people to pull out of the ACA's insurance market and stop paying premiums, driving up costs for those remaining in the “pool” of people with insurance, former...

*SNIP* Additionally, people who identified as Republican also had significantly higher uninsured rates. The uninsured rate among Republicans rose from 7.9 percent in 2016 to 13.9 percent in the current survey period, which was conducted between February and March of 2018. The uninsured rate among those who identify as Democrats stood at 9.1 percent, statistically unchanged from 2016. They survey was conducted among a sample of 2,403 adults, ages 19 to 64. The results indicate that the coverage losses are likely to continue. Etc...

Unsubstantiated rumors and accusations targeting White House physician Rear Admiral Ronny Jackson, who was nominated by President Donald Trump to be Secretary of the Veterans Affairs Administration, have been propelled by media outlets and Democratic members of the Senate without any proof that those allegations were true. But where did these rumors and accusations start? Who was fighting to keep Dr. Jackson from being nominated and who wanted to smear his name publicly? According to four administration officials, the main allegations were brought forth by Vice President Mike Pence’s Army physician Dr. Jennifer Pena, who the officials contend has held...

During her outburst, Patterson was also reported behaving aggressively towards her employees, grabbing one of them by the arm and refusing to let staffers leave the office. According to the documents, she also threw various items at employees including a reflex hammer and also pulled her “diploma off the wall, threw it on the floor and stomped on it.” Employees told Lowndes County officers Patterson may have been “under the influence” during the time of the incident. She is also suspected of arriving at her practice intoxicated on more than one occasion, documents said. Patterson’s medical license was suspended on...

Bill Maher on Friday cut New Rules short to share an open letter to “dear friend” Roseanne Barr. The seven-minute segment found the Real Time host addressing the success of the Roseanne revival, while also questioning both Barr and her character’s controversial support of President Trump. “It’s 2018 and we have to talk about Trump,” Maher said. “Like it or not, you’re now the face of the Trump supporter, because you really do speak for a certain kind of American who knows they’re being screwed by someone, they just don’t know who. But here’s what you’re missing about Trump: When...

Planned Parenthood’s latest lawsuit betrays the lie that it cares first and foremost about providing healthcare for women... The nation’s largest abortion provider is 'suing to keep information from the government and to block safety inspections at its clinics'... The ACLU, on behalf of Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky, has filed a lawsuit against the state of Indiana to block a new law that requires two basic things:... Each clinic would need to undergo an annual safety inspection by the Department of Health, and each clinic would need to report any “abortion complications” experienced by its patients to the...

Back in '92, the late Paul Weyrich and I held a press conference during the Republican National Convention to make two announcements. First, we were endorsing George Bush 41's re-election. Second, we'd just made the most meaningless endorsement in history. He had so thoroughly bungled his first term that there was nothing to be done to save him. And we were right. The Republicans are now facing the same future in November. At this point, they will certainly lose the House and quite possibly the Senate. Worse, they've so botched their opportunity that only they can save themselves now. Their...

After beating back the repeated Republican efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, Democrats, for the first time in years, are taking the offense on health care. While the flashiest proposal—for an entirely government-run system—remains a distant aspiration, Democrats are again looking for new ways to expand Washington’s role in shaping the health-care system. Their ideas include new plans to expand coverage, restrain drug prices, and create a public competitor to private health-insurance companies. Encouraging all of these efforts are polls showing that support for the ACA clearly increased during the long legislative struggle over its future. “People are increasingly...

Twenty Republican-led states are seeking to temporarily invalidate former President Barack Obama’s health care law while their larger lawsuit against it proceeds. In a February suit, Texas and Wisconsin led a coalition arguing that the Affordable Care Act is no longer constitutional after the Republican-backed tax overhaul eliminated fines for not having health care coverage. Sixteen states with Democratic governors later sought to intervene. …

In recent weeks many people across the globe have been moved and outraged by the story of little Alfie Evans, whose life hung in the balance in a British hospital and whose fate was taken from the hands of his parents by the National Health Service (NHS) and the courts ... Alfie was forcibly removed from his breathing devices but continues to breathe on his own. The NHS and the courts would not even allow Alfie to go home with his parents, and when the nation of Italy offered to fly him to a Rome hospital for experimental treatment (at...

A lawyer who led the fight against Obamacare’s contraceptive mandate, eventually winning the Hobby Lobby case before the Supreme Court, won confirmation by the Senate Tuesday to a federal appeals court. Senators voted 50-47 to confirm Stuart Kyle Duncan to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi. Only one Democrat, Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, broke with his party to support Mr. Duncan. Other Democrats voiced opposition to Mr. Duncan as an “unfit ideologue” who fought women’s access to reproductive healthcare. They also said his defense of state laws requiring photo-ID to vote,...

Today’s Campaign Update (Because The Campaign Never Ends) Hey, let’s do that with Obamacare, too! – Chuckie Schumer announced on Friday that he’s introducing a bill that would essentially rescind federal marijuana laws because, he claims, he is such a huge believer in the concept of federalism that he thinks we should just let the states decide on whether pot should be legal or not. This marks the first issue in his long political career on which the old collectivist expressed a fealty to federalism. Talking Points Parrot for Senate! – Just minutes after Schumer had held his press conference,...

From criticizing President Donald Trump for congratulating Vladimir Putin on his re-election in March, to saying earlier this month that Trump’s comments about withdrawing from Syria “emboldened” Bashar al-Assad, Arizona Senator John McCain in recent weeks has continued to uphold his reputation as one of the Republican Party’s most vocal critics of the president. But what was perhaps McCain’s most dramatic gesture of dissent against President Trump to date came at 1:30 a.m. on July 28, 2017. In the opening scene from the new FRONTLINE documentary McCain, which traces the Republican Party’s evolution across McCain’s political career, and how President...

Any health care facility providing abortions in Tennessee will no longer receive any government funding, thanks to a new state law. The amount of state-funded health care will not be cut, just transferred to health care organizations that do not kill the unborn, Live Action reports: “Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam signed a bill this week that will soon strip Planned Parenthood and other abortion facilities of state funding. The state will now request a federal waiver which allows them to bar TennCare, Tennessee’s Medicaid program, from giving money to any abortion facility.” “Instead of directing funding towards abortionists, TennCare money...

Andrew Cuomo forces Fidelis Care "into 'voluntarily' writing billion-dollar checks"ALBANY, N.Y. (ChurchMilitant.com) - The governor of New York is going after a Catholic charitable organization, forcing it to foot the bill for the state. In an op-ed published Monday in the Wall Street Journal, Bill Hammond, director of health policy at the Empire Center, criticizes the deal orchestrated by Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Good Friday between Fidelis Care, a Catholic nonprofit healthcare plan, and Centene Corporation, a leading government-sponsored healthcare company. "Gov. Andrew Cuomo has a disturbing new way to raise revenue: using government muscle to squeeze private organizations into...

On the last day of 2016, I sent the editing team at The Federalist a draft article that predicted events in the coming Congress. If those events came to pass, then it could publish, along with a notation indicating that I had written it months (or years) previously.The piece described a scenario in which cross-pressures over repealing-and-replacing Obamacare led Paul Ryan to resign his speakership. Even then, before the 115th Congress officially convened, I envisioned conflicts between the “repeal” wing of the Republican Party and the “replace” wing, making success on health care unlikely and Ryan the likeliest “fall...