Free Republic

Obamacare is meant to provide health coverage to the millions of Americans who don't have it, but the cruel irony is that millions of other Americans may lose their current health insurance as a result. These "losers" are primarily people who buy their own health insurance rather than have it provided by an employer. Many now find their plans will be canceled because they fail to meet the minimum coverage requirements under Obamacare. These plans offer "bare bones insurance...usually catastrophic care...and beginning Jan. 1 insurance companies will not be allowed to offer these very plans," says Rick Newman, Yahoo Finance...

Two key congressional committees have unveiled a proposal to end the annual "doc fixes." Wednesday's draft from the Senate Finance and House Ways and Means Committees outlines a gradual shift that would freeze doctor reimbursement rates for 10 years. It would also provide bonuses to providers who embrace alternative payment models that reward quality of care. Lawmakers are hoping to enact a permanent repeal by Dec. 31 of the "sustainable growth rate" formula that reimburses doctors for Medicare, and move Medicare toward performance-based payments. Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle praised the proposal as an "important step" toward improving...

According to OECD, teen unemployment rates (under 25) in Europe continue to escalate, particularly in Greece and Spain. eurounemploy That is scary looking! It reminds me of The Who’s song “Teenage Wasteland.” But, the US is no slouch when it comes to teen unemployment. The 16-19 cohort is seeing an unemployment rate of 22.60% while to 20-24 cohort is experiencing 12.80% unemployment. For the sake of comparison, I also included Germany teenage (under 25) unemployment which is 7.70%. unemployteenusgerm For the entire population, here is a chart of labor force participation in Germany, Spain, USA and Mexico. lfp103113 Even beleaguered...

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It’s official. Yay! We’re #2!!As planned, America has ceded our number one power position to the rest of the world. Which is only fair - we’ve been #1 for a very long time now - it’s someone else’s turn. We don’t want to be accused of hogging world leadership. After all it’s not as if we’re better than anyone else, right? “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism, and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” - Barack Obama, 2009 I'll take that as an affirmative response.So Big Guy must be delighted...

<p>Should children have the right to ask for their own deaths?</p> <p>In Belgium, where euthanasia is now legal for people over the age of 18, the government is considering extending it to children — something that no other country has done. The same bill would offer the right to die to adults with early dementia.</p>

GWEN IFILL: As we speak this morning, Kathleen Sebelius is testifying in the House about healthcare.gov. And you have called Obamacare a rolling disaster, but you haven't called for her to resign. Why not? SEN. MITCH MCCONNELL, R-Ky.: Well, look, I don't think anybody could make this work. We said back in 2009, when it was passed, without a single vote to spare, not a single member of my party in the House or Senate voting for it, it couldn't possibly work. We predicted that insurance -- health insurance premiums would go up, jobs would be lost, and the president's...

How did CMS know? Simple: The employees there tested the site themselves and ended up in the same circle of 404 hell that the rest of the country landed in on October 1. And so, yet again, we return to the great unanswered question of the past month. How much of this was epic incompetence by HHS and how much of it was bad faith? When Marilyn Tavenner claimed she didn’t expect a meltdown on day one, was that a shameless lie or proof that HHS is so dysfunctional that her deputies withheld the results of the testing from her?...

...Sebelius’ testimony was a disaster. She said HealthCare.gov has never crashed. While technically true, this is only because the site has been consistent in its ability to transmit various error messages. This technicality is not the sort of thin reed one should cling to when one’s website has become the butt of every late-night joke routine, the best punchline on Twitter, and the greatest source of irate, frustrated commentary from people visiting one’s Facebook page to complain. I assume Sebelius plans on quitting her job soon, but it can’t be before the site is fixed — for her own sake...

It's like they're afraid to. It's like there's still a fear of going after Obama, or going after Sebelius, just from the consultant level of the party or whoever's running the Republican Party. There seems to be some instruction that's gone out from on high to back off. "Don't even get close to making it look like it's personal! Don't be mean!" I'm at a loss. Well, no. I'm not at a loss to understand it. I know exactly what's going on. There is no Republican ideology is what is going on.

Please help me understand. Why don't we subpoena the President? The daily lies about Obamacare have reached the point where Americans need some answers from the President - officially and under oath. There's too much at stake here not to do this. I think that he could claim Executive Privilege, but doesn't he need some justification (such as national security) to do so? And also I believe that ignoring a subpoena is grounds for impeachment. Any constitutional scholars out there? Why are we not issuing a subpoena to Barack Obama? If there was ever a time where we needed someone...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Her father was tortured in detention in North Korea and died. Her elder sister went searching for food during the great famine of the 1990s, only to be trafficked to China. Her two younger brothers died of starvation, one of them a baby without milk whose life ebbed away in her arms. North Korean defector Jin Hye Jo tearfully told her family's story Wednesday to U.N. investigators during a public hearing in Washington, their latest stop in a globe-trotting effort to probe possible crimes against humanity in North Korea. The U.N. commission, led by Australian judge Michael...

President Obama has declined an invitation to speak at next month’s ceremony marking the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address. The event, slated for Nov. 19 at the Soldiers' National Cemetery in Gettysburg, instead will feature Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell and renowned historian James McPherson as the keynote speakers, the Gettysburg National Military Park said in a press release. “President Obama will not attend and the Secretary of Interior will represent the administration,” the park pointed out in the first paragraph of its press release. It’s unclear why Mr. Obama, a noted admirer of President Lincoln, declined the...

A conservative government watchdog says it has obtained emails revealing that the Internal Revenue Service sent conservative groups’ private tax exemption application and tax return information to the Federal Elections Commission, in violation of federal law.According to Judicial Watch, the emails from Jan. 2009 to the present, provided by the FEC in response to an August 2013 Freedom of Information Act request, yielded a “revealing email chain” between former Internal Revenue Services (IRS) Director of Exempt Organizations Lois Lerner and enforcement attorneys at the Federal Election Commission (FEC).Judicial Watch explains that in one email exchange beginning on Feb 2, 2009,...

A young deer near Grand Rapids Michigan will be celebrating October 31 differently next year I would venture to guess. First, a little history for those of you who did not grow up in a Dutch Reformed community: The Dutch Reformed tradition frowned on the day of Halloween. Our parents taught us that witches, ghosts and goblins were not a healthy thing to be celebrating. Halloween origins are traced back to the Celts many years ago. The Celts believed that in the season between fall and winter, the veil between this life and the next was at its smallest. They...

DECEPTION: In the face of millions of cancellation notices, Democrats want to downplay the president's "keep your health plan" pledge as standard political hyperbole. It was, in fact, a calculated lie that got ObamaCare enacted.

In a move certain to delight most of official Washington, D.C., it has been decided to change the name of the Washington Redskins football franchise to the Washington Reds. President Obama, himself, voiced his approval of the decision, as did Harry Reid, who was practically giddy upon hearing the news. The stadium will be painted red, in keeping with the new name, and its own name will be changed to Red Stadium. All players who play for the Reds, as well as all Red staff, Red cheerleaders, and Red coaches, will be asked to pay a 60% surtax on their...

You have to give them credit – health insurers are showing just how creative they can be at shirking their obligation to provide new consumer protections under the Affordable Care Act. Just last month Christine Monahan and I documented how health insurers are taking advantage of a legal loophole that allows them to escape compliance if they early renew policies late in 2013. According to the Wall Street Journal, early renewals are being pushed by major insurers such as UnitedHealth Group, Aetna, and Humana. They’re also being marketed by Blue Cross Blue Shield plans in a number of states. Unfortunately,...

The most wrenching stories always begin the same way: it was just a normal day. Oct. 18 was just a normal day when Darnell Barton, a school bus driver in Buffalo, N.Y., was carrying a full load of high school students and approaching the Scajaquada Expressway overpass. There, he saw a woman on the opposite side of the rail, standing where no person ought to be, leaning out over the traffic below. Barton stopped the bus and, according to the Buffalo News, tried to assess the truth of what his eyes were telling him.

In April, Rafael Cruz, the father of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), spoke to the tea party of Hood County, which is southwest of Fort Worth, and made a bold declaration: The United States is a "Christian nation." The septuagenarian businessman turned evangelical pastor did not choose to use the more inclusive formulation "Judeo-Christian nation." Insisting that the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution "were signed on the knees of the framers" and were a "divine revelation from God," he went on to say, "yet our president has the gall to tell us that this is not a Christian nation…The...