Free Republic

One of the most overlooked aspects of the year just ended is the vindication of Chief Justice John Roberts -- a vindication that showed up as the national catastrophe known as ObamaCare got rolling. Roberts may have also doomed Hillary Clinton's chance to live in the White House again. The chief justice, an appointee of President George W. Bush and reputedly a constitutionalist in his jurisprudence, set his diabolical trap (diabolical to Democrats) on June 28, 2012, when he joined with the four liberal justices on the Supreme Court to uphold the constitutionality of ObamaCare. Conservatives and Republicans across the...

As the father of a 2-month-old, I can only imagine the horror the parents of 11-month-old Charlie Gard are going through. No words, no thoughts or prayers, or even time, will be able to wipe away their pain. But that pain did not have to be so great, and it may not have had to have been at all were it not for the single-payer health care system in the United Kingdom and the bureaucrats politicians who rallied to keep Charlie a prisoner to it. Gard was born with a rare genetic disease that was working to destroy his body....

In August 2007, then-Sen. Barack Obama expressed his hope for the growth of socialized medicine in the United States. “[Health care] is a $2 trillion part of our economy, and it is my belief that it’s not just politically, but economically, it is better for us to start getting a system in place—a universal health care system signed into law by the end of my first term as president and build off that system to further to make it more rational … By the way, Canada did not start immediately with a single-payer system. They had a similar transition step.”...

With Obamacare shaping up as a public policy disaster that is the equivalent of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the Hindenburg, the Bay of Pigs, and Desert One combined, perhaps we should go back and take in Ronald Reagan’s warning about this back in 1961.  Reagan said that socializing health care would require socializing the patients, and voila, we have Obamacare canceling insurance plans previously agreed to between consenting adults.But Reagan also warned that doctors would come to be regulated, too: Today, the relationship between patient and doctor in this country is something to be envied any place. The privacy, the...

There is stirring on the left. Now that the odds that ObamaCare will crash and burn have ticked up a notch or two, the words "single payer" are being heard more frequently. [For those who have been living under a rock, "single payer" is what we used to call "national health insurance," and before that "socialized medicine" and before that "government-provided health care," by people who today call themselves "progressives" but used to call themselves "liberals" and before that "socialists" in some cases — all in the hope that continual re-labeling will make the ideas actually seem sensible.] Take Dennis...

Forty-three hospital patients starved to death last year and 111 died of thirst while being treated on wards, new figures disclose today. The death toll was disclosed by the Government amid mounting concern over the dignity of patients on NHS wards. * as well as 43 people who starved to death, 287 people were recorded by doctors as being malnourished when they died in hospitals; * there were 558 cases where doctors recorded that a patient had died in a state of severe dehydration in hospitals; * 78 hospital and 39 care home patients were killed by bedsores, while a...

Liberal socialistic politicians consistently promise utopia and deliver misery. One way they do this is by pointing to “successful” programs in socialist nations as models for American problems. Cuba’s wonderful universal health care program has been one of these models for decades. But now it seems this program — sometimes touted as better than our own medical system — is now in shambles and facing more financial cuts. Raul Castro is even attempting to educate the population of the need to economize the country’s failing health care system. He has run a series of ads that have a common theme...

Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) might be able to switch the phrase ‘job-killing’ in H.R. 2 in response to the left’s call for more civil dialog, but one thing’s for sure. ObamaCare (official title Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act) is a job killer. That assertion has been verified by a fact-finder media site normally thought of by conservatives as leaning left. Talk to the folks in Lynn Haven, Florida. One of the most ignored news events in the nation occurred in April, 2010. The News Herald (Panama City) reported the loss of approximately 700 Sallie Mae jobs in Lynn Haven,...

Leftists who opposed Obamacare because it was not the British-style National Health Service or the Canadian "single payer" system should take another look. Constitutional conservatives who feared that Obamacare was a blueprint for an incremental roll out of "single payer" have been proven right. California's governor is about to sign legislation to set up that state's Health Benefits Exchange. The HBE is authorized under Obamacare and is supposed to be a place where small business and individuals can access the best insurance plans at the cheapest price—a real exchange where customers can compare benefits and price in a competitive atmosphere....

SNIPPET: "Andy Griffith, the former TV Sheriff of Mayberry and guardian of small town America, is now the national spokesman for ObamaCare. More specifically, this venerable gentleman is the spokesman for the new Medicare. Apparently Griffith is under the naïve belief that ObamaCare is a genuinely good thing for seniors. As much as it pains me to say this, Griffith is dead wrong. ObamaCare is a fatal bargain for seniors, and all Americans."

Click here to find out more! Lately, even the most elite in media have started to report some of the intended and unintended consequences of the rushed and ill-conceived federal health care bill passed earlier this year by the Barack Obama administration and the Democrat-controlled Congress. And I've had my first eye-opener. Like everyone of their generation, my parents automatically qualify for Medicare. Soon after the new health care bill passed, their personal physician retired. When they set about looking for a new one, they kept hearing the same refrain: "We are no longer accepting new patients." Why? Because while...

Barack Obama has been mighty keen on rolling out the most positive aspects of ObamaCare first in order to protect vulnerable Democrats facing voters angry over the bill’s passage. One of the big wins for Obama in the bill was the mandate for insurers to allow parents to carry their kids on policies until their 26th birthday. However, that intervention has created a rather perverse set of incentives that will see fewer children insured: Some major health insurance companies have stopped issuing certain types of policies for children, an unintended consequence of President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul law, state...

SNIPPET: "(CNSNews.com) - Maryland will join Pennsylvania as the second state to use federal tax dollars to pay for abortions under the new health care law signed by President Barack Obama in March, according to information released by Maryland’s State Health Insurance Plan. Maryland will receive $85 million in federal funds for its federally mandated high-risk insurance pool, which will cover abortions. As CNSNews.com reported on July 14, Pennsylvania will receive $160 million in federal funds for its high-risk insurance pool, which will also cover abortions."

AS I SEE IT Congress must repeal Obama's health-care rationing plan By SEN. PAT ROBERTS Special to The Star SNIPPET: "U.S. Sen. Pat Roberts, a Republican from Dodge City, Kan., is a member of the Senate Health and Finance committees. He voted against the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act." SNIPPET: "It has scarcely been three months since the new health reforms, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), were signed into law. Unfortunately, as I and many of my colleagues predicted, the promises made to the American people by the president and the majority are already unraveling. The...

Internal White House documents reveal that 51% of employers may have to relinquish their current health care coverage by 2013 due to ObamaCare. That numbers soars to 66% for small-business employers. The documents — product of a joint project of the Labor Department, the Health and Human Services Department and the IRS — examine the effects new regulations would have on existing, or “grandfathered,” employer-based health care plans. Draft copies of the documents were reportedly leaked to House Republicans earlier in the week. Rep. Bill Posey, R-Fla., posted them on his Web site Friday afternoon. (View the full report here.)...

Note: The following text is a quote: www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/seniors-across-america-host-local-meetings-participate-health-care-tele-town-hall-m Home • Briefing Room • Statements & Releases The White House Office of the Press Secretary For Immediate Release June 07, 2010 Seniors Across America to Host Local Meetings, Participate in Health Care Tele-Town Hall Meeting with President Obama Senior Obama Administration Officials to Attend Local Meetings WASHINGTON—On Tuesday morning, senior citizens across the country will gather at a series of local meetings to participate via phone in a national tele-town hall meeting on the Affordable Care Act with President Barack Obama. Additionally, more than a dozen senior Obama Administration officials will...

(CNSNews.com) - Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said on Wednesday that Dr. Donald Berwick, an advocate of health-care rationing nominated by President Barack Obama to run Medicare and Medicaid, is “absolutely the right leader at this time” to run the government’s largest health-care entitlement programs. Under the health-care reform law signed by President Obama in March, hundreds of billions of dollars will be cut from the Medicare program over the next decade. Berwick is nominated to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), which oversees Medicare. Berwick, a professor at Harvard Medical School, has repeatedly indicated...

Now that Congress has imposed new requirements on health insurance plans, regulators are trying to resolve another big question: Which plans must comply with the requirements? In keeping with President Obama's promise that you can hold on to your insurance if you like it, the new law exempts existing health plans from many of its provisions. But the law leaves it to regulators to decide how much a health plan can change without giving up its grandfathered status. In other words, when does a health plan cease to be the same health plan? Say you get coverage through your job:...

...The grant-receiving states would be required to mandate that all health care providers in the state determine the Body Mass Index of all their patients in the 2-to-18 age bracket and then report that information to the state government. The state government, in turn, would be required to report the information to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for analysis....

Those of us who see Obamacare as a distinct step backwards are often branded as alarmist and out of touch. When we point to the regular horrors of government run systems, especially the UK, we’re shouted down with healthy dollops of “it-can’t-happen-here-because-the president-said-it-won't.”Read on.But before you do, look at this photo from London’s MailOnline: Not pretty.It’s a photo taken in a UK (government run) hospital of 84-year-old Clara Stokes. The photo was taken by her outraged daughter who discovered that her mom was living a nightmare – starved, dehydrated, and lying in her own feces.Apparently, the ward was very...