Free Republic

A key former adviser behind President Obama's healthcare law said the traditional role of health insurers would be "dead" by 2025, predicting massive changes in the industry. "By 2025, insurance companies as we know them — taking in premiums and paying out — dead," Ezekiel Emanuel ... Emanuel, the older brother of former White House chief of staff and current Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, has long argued that health insurers will shift away an employer-based system. By 2025.. ... Most Americans currently receive health insurance through their employers. ObamaCare includes an employer mandate, which requires companies with 50 or more...

The Veterans Affairs Department is apologizing to a Massachusetts woman for offering an appointment to her husband almost two years after he died. Suzanne Chase, of Acton, tells WBZ-TV her Vietnam veteran husband, Doug, was diagnosed with a brain tumor in 2011. …

The nation’s second-largest physicians’ organization said Monday that healthy women who are not pregnant do not need routine pelvic exams, a controversial recommendation based on its analysis that, on balance, the manual screening does more harm than good. The American College of Physicians, which represents 137,000 internal medicine physicians and related specialists, said the diagnostic procedure causes some women discomfort, anxiety, pain and additional medical costs, and may keep some from seeing their doctors. Yet it does little to detect ovarian cancer or other disorders.

Most Obamacare customers will face serious premium hikes next year unless they change their health insurance again, according to a Thursday study from Avalere Health. Most Obamacare customers are receiving some level of taxpayer subsidies to take the edge off high premium rates, but the plans that determine the amount of subsidies available will be changing significantly, according to Avalere.

Hospitals across the country are struggling to deal with a shortage of one of their essential medical supplies. Manufacturers are rationing saline — a product used all over the hospital to clean wounds, mix medications and treat dehydration. Now drug companies say they won’t be able to catch up with demand until next year. ...“The Most Expensive Drug Shortage in History” The burden ultimately falls on hospitals, clinics, and dialysis centers to come up with their own workarounds. And all that staff time adds up. Hospitals spend $216 million a year on the labor costs of managing drug shortages, according...

Imagine how much better off America’s veterans would be if the federal government spent more time delivering actual care and less time compiling tyrannical lists. The death-inducing secret waiting lists for patients are just the tip of the iceberg. Did you know, for example, that the VA keeps a database on “disgruntled” and “disruptive” vets that results in arbitrarily restricted care?

The word "unexpectedly" for negative economic reports has become a much-mocked cliché in the media over the past five-plus years of recovery, but this week's final look at first-quarter economic growth deserves an exception. First estimated at a meager 0.1 percent annualized rate, and then downwardly revised to -1.0 percent in May, most economists expected a smaller revision to the downside – in the -1.5 percent-1.8 percent range.

When a person has a disease that cannot be cured, do you think doctors should be allowed by law to end the patient’s life by some painless means if the patient and his or her family request it? At first blush, the idea that a euthanasia should be allowed seems to follow a logic. If a person is suffering and wishes to end that suffering then who has the right to tell them no? It is their life, right? Only some troglodyte Bible thumper could possibly deny a person the simple mercy of ending their suffering. In this way it...

Patients suffering from terminal illnesses are often forced to make the heart-wrenching decision to enter hospice for end of life care. The decision to enter hospice is tragic and sad enough for patients, but now they are being told they are no longer welcome at hospice facilities because of Obamacare. Michigan’s Hospice of Holland has announced that it is no longer accepting patients. “The biggest issue under the Affordable Care Act is…that we’re going to see cuts in reimbursement- it’s going to be at least 12 percent. We projected out what those cuts are going to do to the organization...

The National Health Service has been praised as the world’s best health-care system by an international panel of experts who said it was superior to those found in countries which spend far more on health. The study, entitled “Mirror, Mirror on the Wall,” also described US healthcare provision as the worst globally. Despite investing the most money in health, the US refuses care to many patients without health insurance and is also the worst at saving the lives of people who fall ill, it found. The Commonwealth Fund, a Washington-based foundation produced the report. The fund is respected around the...

They don't care." As Obama administration officials pivot like haywire jewelry-box ballerinas to divert attention away from the nationwide Veterans Affairs disgrace, a reader who has been fighting the system urged me to urge Capitol Hill and the American public to stay focused. This former Special Forces soldier and medic served his country for 25 years. He worked in the health care field managing military field medical clinics. "I know how health care is supposed to run, even in austere or low-budget environments," he says. And in his nightmarish, ongoing experience, the VA is an epic, deadly, monstrous failure. He...

Gillian Robespierre, the feminist director of the abortion comedy Obvious Child, is not a fan of Fox News, as she revealed in an interview with Matt Juul Wednesday in the Boston Globe. Asked about sexism and feminist hashtags on Twitter, she said "like, I’m watching a lot of CNBC and Fox News in these [expletive] hotel rooms and it’s just making my head spin. It just makes me really sad. It doesn’t feel like we’ve come too far, but then it feels like we have come far because we’re talking about it right now." It makes her have violent thoughts...

Republican U.S. Sen. David Vitter, running to be Louisiana's next governor, is leaving the door open to a possible expansion of the state's Medicaid program to cover more of the working poor, as allowed under the federal health care law. Vitter said Monday that he's not opposed to the expansion if Louisiana can improve the performance of its Medicaid program and if the expansion doesn't draw state resources away from other spending priorities like higher education.

A Los Angeles Superior Court Judge reversed his own ruling, permitting Casey Kasem’s daughter, Kerri Kasem, to remove her father’s food and hydration (via feeding tube), which will result in his death by starvation and dehydration. Kasem’s wife of 33 years, Jean Kasem, is fighting for the life of her husband, with her attorney, Steve Haney, calling the judge’s decision, “the functional equivalent of a death sentence.”Growing up in the 70’s, I was introduced to Casey Kasem’s easy to recognize voice as each week he counted down “American Top 40″ hits for almost four decades on a radio show heard...

Vietnam veteran Gene Stoesser has been waiting nearly two months for an appointment with a Veterans Affairs doctor to schedule his heart surgery. The 71-year-old former Marine from Glendale, Arizona, went to the emergency room at the VA’s Phoenix hospital on April 28 with chest pains. He said he was told he’d need surgery soon, but has yet to get an appointment. “They sent me home to die,” Stoesser said Tuesday, surrounded by dozens of other veterans at a crisis center set up by the American Legion in downtown Phoenix in a first-of-its-kind event for the nation’s largest veterans group....

National insurance giant UnitedHealthcare plans to cut up to 700 Massachusetts doctors from its physician network for seniors enrolled in its private Medicare plan as a way to control costs, according to company officials. For elderly patients enrolled in the plan, the cuts mean they will have to find a new doctor or eventually switch to a new health plan that covers their current doctor. The move, effective Sept. 1, follows similar cuts made by the insurer to its Medicare Advantage provider networks in 11 other states... There is also pending legislation in Congress to prevent health plans from cutting...

Officials at a Veterans Affairs medical center in Albuquerque say as many as 3,000 patients were assigned to a doctor who didn't actually see them, a New Mexico congresswoman said Wednesday. The officials told U.S. Rep. Michelle Lujan Grisham, D-N.M., that the practice of putting patients without primary care doctors into a separate pool was part of an effort to balance demand and a shortage of doctors at a facility that handled nearly 660,000 outpatient visits last year....

link only: http://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/letters/2014/05/26/bernie-sanders-blocked-va-accountability-act/9614547/

The federal government may reimburse doctors for talking to Medicare patients and their families about “advance care planning,” including living wills and end-of-life treatment options — potentially rekindling one of the fiercest storms in the Affordable Care Act debate. A similar provision was in an early draft of the federal health care law, but in 2009, former Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin took to Facebook to accuse President Barack Obama of proposing “death panels” to determine who deserved life-sustaining medical care. Amid an outcry on the right, the provision was stripped from the legislation. Now, quietly, the proposal is headed...

The deadly rationing scandal at several Veterans Administration hospitals has many politicians running for cover, suddenly suggesting we offer veterans more private-pay options to the single-payer plan of the Veterans Health Care system.But not Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Barack Obama. They’d prefer the entire nation be forced into a single-payer system where the government replaces private insurance, a system that has inevitably led to rationing where it’s been tried.On Monday, Pelosi was interviewed by Time magazine’s Ezra Klein about changes or improvements she’d like to see to Obamacare. Nancy Pelosi: “I have some of my own suggestions that I...