Free Republic

Washington state has blown past its targets for signing up new Medicaid participants under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The program’s ranks have grown roughly 25 percent in the past six months, helping fulfill one of the act’s key goals to provide health care to nearly all Americans. By the end of March, more than 285,000 adults who are newly eligible to participate in Medicaid had signed up for coverage. That’s twice the number officials had hoped to reach by then, and a target they hadn’t expected to hit for three more years.

ESSEX, UK, April 16, 2014 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A UK hospital has apologized to a woman four years after doctors and staff let her 22-week premature son die in her arms within an hour of being born, despite the mother’s urgent pleas for help. Tracy Godwin, who in 2010 held her newborn son Tom for 46 minutes before he ceased breathing, said she was never told about the hospital’s policy stating that babies born before 23 weeks would be left to die. But the hospital has not indicated that it has changed its policy, only that it now has new guidelines...

• The executions of Clayton Lockett and Charles Warner were put off until April 22 and April 29. The state has had difficulty finding the ingredients of the cocktail used to execute prisoners. OKLAHOMA CITY — An Oklahoma court on Tuesday rescheduled a pair of executions set for this week and next so state prison officials will have more time to find a supply of drugs for the lethal injections. The decision came in a lawsuit in which two inmates had sought more information about the drugs that would be used to execute them later this month. The inmates had...

Big Guy’s most recent poll numbers were a little disappointing. Plus, the latest Obamacare enrollment numbers aren’t looking so hot either. So the Big White Big Brains got together and decided to kill two birds with one stone: they determined they could address both fronts by making Big Guy more hip.So presidential decorum was sacrificed to the god of hipness to troll for a few more Obamacare enrollees. The performance took place on the FunnyorDie.com website show titled “Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis.” Seriously, a website show? Out of 1000 24/7 cable channels, not one felt it worth broadcasting...

New York Times columnist and Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman is questioning Oklahoma Republican Sen. Tom Coburn’s claim that Obamacare caused him to lose his cancer specialist. “It’s a garbage story, it really is,” said Krugman in a back-and-forth with former House Speaker Newt Gingrich on CNN after the State of the Union on Tuesday. Coburn, who announced earlier this month that he’ll resign from office at the end of the year as he battles his fourth bout with cancer, told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that his oncologist was no longer covered under his health care plan.

Record-keeping snags could complicate the start of insurance coverage this month as people begin using policies they purchased under President Barack Obama's health care overhaul. Insurance companies are still trying to sort out cases of so-called health insurance orphans, customers for whom the government has a record that they enrolled, but the insurer does not. Government officials say the problem is real but under control, with orphan records being among the roughly 13,000 problem cases they are trying to resolve with insurers. But insurance companies are worried the process will grow more cumbersome as they deal with the flood of...

OAKLAND, Calif. — A Northern California family who lost their bid to keep their 13-year-old daughter on life support says "there is still time for a miracle." Alameda County Superior Court Judge Evelio Grillo has ruled that Jahi McMath, who was declared brain dead after suffering complications following a tonsillectomy, can be removed from the ventilator keeping her body functioning.

Health Reform: A cancer patient who spoke out against the cancellation of his insurance by ObamaCare now faces an IRS audit he may not live to see, and says he'll pay the fine rather than burden his family. Bill Elliott knows the meaning of the adage that the only two things that are certain are death and taxes, for he is now staring both in the face. Like the Tea Party before him, Elliott faces an IRS audit for speaking out against the ObamaCare that canceled his insurance coverage he liked and was promised he could keep. He appeared recently...

A prominent liberal columnist’s admission that the “death panels” Sarah Palin warned about really are and always have been a part of Obamacare caused a blowup Tuesday on Fox’s “The Five,” when host Eric Bolling said “liberal royalty” owes Palin an apology. Bolling was referring to a statement by Time magazine columnist and passionate Obama fan Mark Halperin, who told Newsmax TV on Monday that health-care rationing was an inseparable part of Obamacare’s takeover of the U.S. health system. Halperin himself didn’t use the term “death panels,” but the point was clear enough from the clip. It wasn’t clear enough...

Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, health adviser to President Barack Obama, is under scrutiny. As a bioethicist, he has written extensively about who should get medical care, who should decide, and whose life is worth saving. Dr. Emanuel is part of a school of thought that redefines a physician’s duty, insisting that it includes working for the greater good of society instead of focusing only on a patient’s needs. Many physicians find that view dangerous, and most Americans are likely to agree.

I have been involved in editing the article on Death Panels on Wikipedia. For those who are interested in Obamacare the original claim by Sarah Palin that Obamacare would include panels that would limit treatment to achieve cost savings and might be expected to result in people not getting treatment they need, particularly older or disabled people, seems like yet another obvious fact that the left cannot accept. No where is this more clear than in the Wikipedia article on Death Panels which, in violation of Wikipedia rules is essentially a long diatribe against Gov. Palin. I am requesting a...

After Bill Elliott's $150/mo plan was canceled as a result of the ACA, he found himself unable to burden his family with his new $1500.00/mo premium costs. He is choosing to pay the fine and "let nature take it's course".

Mama Grizzly warned us this would happen. Under Obamacare, the sick and weak and old would stand before death panels of bureaucrats to be granted life or death. Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin was laughed off the stage for making what we now know is a prescient prediction four years ago. Perhaps she is one of the few who actually read the healthcare bill before it passed. "And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course," she wrote on her Facebook page in 2009. "The America I know and love...

A classroom of 14 and 15-year-old Illinois high school students was assigned the task of deciding the fate of ten fictional characters in an exercise that critics called a lesson in death panels. The assignment was part of a sociology unit for freshmen and sophomore students at St. Joseph-Ogden High School in St. Joseph, just east of Champaign. The story was first reported by Champion News. The lesson involves 10 people who are in desperate need of kidney dialysis. “Unless they receive this procedure, they will die,” the lesson states. But there’s a problem. The local hospital only has enough...

Navigators trained to answer questions and sign people up for health insurance under the new Affordable Care Act will be allowed to do that work inside the local public health clinics, after Democrats on the Broward County Commission voted Tuesday to defy the state's ban on that activity. The so-called "county" health clinics are actually run by the state Department of Health, which had said the Obamacare navigators could not do their work on clinic grounds. Enrollment starts next Tuesday, and the politically charged rhetoric has heightened as the day approaches. Broward commissioners said the county owns the health clinic...

Dear Friends, I wanted to pass along an article that contains some interesting information about health insurance costs. I hope you have a minute to take a look. It's by Carol Gentry, a respected health-care journalist who used to write for the Wall Street Journal, The Tampa Tribune and the-then St. Petersburg Times. She’s the founder and editor of Health News Florida, where this article was published. Sincerely, Bill Nelson No Rate Increase, Rand Predicts by Carol Gentry 11:06 am on Fri August 30, 2013 Contradicting Florida's Office of Insurance Regulation, a study from the RAND Corporation reports that the...

When Congress debated Obamacare, pro-life advocates and Republicans like Sarah Palin were castigated for claiming the government-run health care program would include death panels that would ration health care treatment. Now, former presidential candidate Howard Dean has essentially admitted they were right and is calling for the repeal of the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB). In a Wall Street Journal op-ed Monday he called the IPAB “essentially a health-care rationing body” that he believes will fail. “There does have to be control of costs in our health-care system. However, rate setting — the essential mechanism of the IPAB — has...

June 18, 2013 (PJSaunders) - In this last week both Belgium and the Netherlands have taken major steps towards euthanasia for children. A consensus among members of the Belgian Federal Parliament has reportedly formed in support of legislation to allow children to choose to undergo euthanasia in certain dire cases, according to a report in the Belgian daily newspaper Der Morgen, as translated by the Paris-based news agency Presseurop. If child euthanasia is legalized in Belgium, the country would become the first in the developed world to have a law on the books formally allowing the practice. Belgium became the second country in the world...

Sarah Murnaghan, a victim of ObamaCare at the tender age of just ten years old has beaten back the Death Panel, at least for now. Thanks to the intervention by federal judge Michael Baylson, Sarah got her urgently needed and life saving lung transplant with no time to spare. This is open defiance of Death Panel Czarina Kathleen Sebelius' order that she be allowed to die because it's simply against the rules to allow a child to receive adult lungs. Ignore the fact that the child's doctors all insist that adult lungs would work in Sarah's case. The Czarina hath...

A dying girl who needs a lung transplant and only has weeks to live has will receive the long-awaited lung transplant she so desperately needs. Sarah Murnaghan, the 10-year-old Pennsylvania girl dying of cystic fibrosis, received national attention after HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius refused to help.