Free Republic

https://khn.org/news/once-its-greatest-foes-doctors-are-embracing-single-payer/ By Shefali Luthra 08/07/2018 When the American Medical Association — one of the nation’s most powerful health care groups — met in Chicago this June, its medical student caucus seized an opportunity for change. Though they had tried for years to advance a resolution calling on the organization to drop its decades-long opposition to single-payer health care, this was the first time it got a full hearing. The debate grew heated — older physicians warned their pay would decrease, calling younger advocates naïve to single-payer’s consequences. But this time, by the meeting’s end, the AMA’s older members had agreed...

If you’ve followed the saga of Baby Oliver – the British baby with the life-threatening heart tumor – you’ll be glad to know that the good ‘ol U.S. of A. came to this young Brit’s rescue. But how it happened is an amazing saga – and also very instructive to some left-wing American politicians … or at least to their constituents. Oliver Cameron, in case you weren’t following the limited coverage here in America, is a baby boy born with cardiac fibroma – a large, non-cancerous tumor on the heart. Without surgery, his life would be measured in mere months....

A landmark lawsuit has been filed by an Ontario man suffering from an incurable neurological disease. He alleges that health officials will not provide him with an assisted home care team of his choosing, instead offering, among other things, medically assisted death. "My condition is grievous and irremediable,” 42-year-old Roger Foley said from his bed at the London Health Science Centre’s Victoria Hospital in a video that was recently posted online. “But the solution is assisted life with self-directed funding.”

Ronald Reagan speaks out on Socialized Medicine, circa 1961. Audio file.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYrlDlrLDSQ&feature=youtu.be  

Seattle City Council president Tim Burgess is proposing a new tax on guns. The proposal would tax gun sales $25 per gun and add a five cent-tax on each round of ammunition. Five cents per round adds up to a roughly $2.50 increase for a box off handgun ammunition. The legislation would also impose a $500 fine on gun owners who do not report guns lost or stolen.

California's health exchange is violating the law by canceling private coverage for up to 95,000 people because they might qualify for Medi-Cal, the state's insurance commissioner says. At issue is health insurance for some of the poorest Californians whose incomes aren't high enough to even qualify for subsidized policies in the Covered California exchange. The state marketplace is notifying thousands of policyholders that their federal premium subsidies for Obamacare coverage will end Dec. 31 and their private health plan won't be renewed starting in January. Instead, these people will be put into Medi-Cal, the state's Medicaid program for low-income residents....

The new leftist website, Vox, has an article by Sarah Kliff on Vermont’s experiment with a single-payer healthcare system. But I don’t really have much to say about what’s happening in the Green Mountain State, other than to declare that I much prefer healthcare experiments to occur at the state level. Indeed, we should reform Medicaid and Medicare and also fix the tax code so that Washington has no role in healthcare. Then the states can experiment and compete to see what works best. But that’s a topic for another day. The real reason I cite Kliff’s article is that...

With just 20 days until Christmas, the White House has sent you seven gifts -- and it's not seven swans a-swimming. You may decide these shouldn't be called gifts. I agree. He's given us a stack of proposed Obamacare rules prepared well before the election and released to the public just two days before, and eight days after, Thanksgiving. In a nutshell, here is what's inside these 871 pages of federal regulatory "gift-wrapping": · Health Insurance Market Rules (131 pp) - rules on ending health insurance (as we know it no pre-existing condition exclusions) and nationalizing coverage, leading to higher...

The International Olympic Committee decided not to include in the opening ceremony a moment of silence to honor the eleven Israeli athletes killed by Palestinian gunmen during the 1972 games in Munich. That move drew the ire of NBC’s Bob Costas. During Friday’s ceremony, he commented that, although a private moment of silence was held before a mere 100 people this week at the Athlete’s Village, “for many, tonight, with the world watching, is the true time and place to remember those who were lost and how and why they died.” Instead, the Olympic ceremony featured a weird, politically correct...

A critically ill eight-year-old child is alive today because a Windsor emergency room doctor refused to wait for provincial approval to send the child to a Detroit hospital, according to the patient’s mother and hospital doctor. “She needed emergency surgery and if you don’t operate she was going to die,” said Dr. David Adekoya, Windsor Regional Hospital’s chief of emergency surgery who was at the hospital when the girl was treated. “She needed to be at a facility within an hour. We needed to make a decision and not wait around.” .... After the transfer to Detroit was arranged, CritiCall...

(The Hill) — Opponents of President Obama’s healthcare law are going to take their “best shot” at destroying it this year, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius warned Thursday. Sebelius, along with Reps. Donna Edwards (D-Md.) and Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), rallied a crowd of healthcare advocates to fight for President Obama and his signature domestic program. “Over the next few months we’ll see the biggest barrage of attacks and misinformation about the law we’ve ever seen, and that’s hard to do — increase the misinformation,” Sebelius said at a conference sponsored by the healthcare advocacy group Families USA. “The...

…is not that it will cost too much, or even that it will worsen our medical care, although both of those things are true. The real problem with socialized medicine–the eventual establishment of which is the purpose of Obamacare, according to Barack Obama–is that it will destroy our freedom. Mark Steyn has written that government medicine alters forever the relationship between state and citizen: once you are dependent on the government for your health care, you are no longer a freeborn citizen. You are the subject of an all-powerful state.

New Zealand, like most Western countries has had socialized health care for decades. It is a constant source of public dissatisfaction and bitching. The system is in perpetual crisis, with overworked and underpaid doctors and nurses, more bureaucrats than health professionals in the system, long waiting lists, rationed care and restricted access to drugs and treatment. Families regularly have take their cancer stricken children to other centers or even Australia for treatment. People mortgage their houses to pay private hospitals to administer treatments not available in the public sector. if waiting lists get too long, you get a letter telling...

Photobucket has banned my account with them. Reason? Because of hateful rhetoric. I posted several demotivational posters on there entitled universal healthcare head shot. It was an idea for a meme that a friend of mine in Santa Barbara came up with. It had pictures of the holocaust and so on and illustrated that a government powerful enough to give you free healthcare will not only deny you healthcare but even promote deathcare. Hence Hitler's holocaust and Stalin's purge. I also threw in pictures from South Africa, World war 1, China and so on. I was banned. According to the...

It’s a bit like a supermarket manager dying of starvation or a bottled-water distributor dying of thirst: In the U.K., a former National Health Service (NHS) director died while waiting for medical care — at her own hospital. The Daily Mail reports:

The following is a guest commentary about one person's experience with the Canadian Health Care system, so often used as a model of efficiency and low costs, and what the US should seek to emulate - Shanghai Dan Health care systems beware; Canada’s system is not all it’s made out to be. We don’t have Canadian government health insurance so we have to pay for everything, but that’s OK and we came on our mission expecting to do so. In fact, we haven’t been to a doctor for years except for a medical every year or two and we didn’t...

Two companies based in the Twin Cities are among the more than 100 health-plan sponsors that have received waivers so far from certain requirements of the federal health care overhaul that Congress passed earlier this year. The restaurant division of Minnetonka-based Carlson and Regis Corp., the Edina-based operator of hair salons around the country, were granted the waivers last month. The federal legislation phases out the use of annual dollar limits on the amount of health plan coverage for essential benefits. But the government says the changes could be exceedingly expensive for a group of health plans that provide coverage...

The UK has the fifth highest cancer death rate for women among the 27 European Union countries but spending on health is lower in Britain than other leading economies. Only Poland, Ireland, the Czech Republic and Hungary had worse records for deaths from cancer among women.[Snip] The ONS report said: “Breast cancer is the most common form of female cancer in England and Wales. It is also the second most common cause of cancer deaths in women, after lung cancer.” Death rates from breast cancer fell in the UK and the rest of Europe between 2000 and 2007.

With comprehensive health reform signed into law by President Obama a little less than six months ago, a high-ranking delegation of health care experts from Minnesota and Washington, D.C. will meet in Berlin, Sept. 14-20, for a seminar on health care policy that compares the U.S. and German systems. This is the second consecutive year that the University of Minnesota's Center for German and European Studies has organized this trip. This year's focus is on health insurance. The new legislation calls for the creation of state-based health insurance exchanges and Minnesota is positioning itself to maintain its national leadership role...

A schoolgirl suffered multiple organ failure and four heart attacks just days after doctors sent her home with paracetamol and told her to take 'plenty of rest', an inquest heard. Amy Carter, 15, begged doctors not to discharge her, telling them 'I'm dying' but medics assured her she would be fine. She developed septicaemia after being released by doctors who had diagnosed her with glandular fever. Two days later on Christmas Eve, Amy - who had not been able to eat for 19 days and weighed just six stone - was taken to hospital and died hours later. Amy was...