Free Republic

A government-funded job training program that promised to turn hundreds of residents of Kentucky’s coal country into computer coders so far has spent $2 million to place 17 people in tech jobs and may have left others worse off, The Daily Signal has learned. The program, a private-public partnership between state and federal agencies and Interapt, a Louisville-based software development company, is a product of President Barack Obama’s TechHire Initiative of 2015. The job training program, budgeted for a total of $4.5 million, was supposed to last through 2019 and train up to 200 people from an economically depressed region...

I predicted the Trump POTUS victory from the day Trump announced his candidacy. I predicted that the industrial "blue collar" union folks would go massively for Trump, they did, I said Trump would get over three hundred electoral votes, he did. I now predict the Democrat Party will lose between 8-10 Senate seats and, 12-20 House seats in the upcoming 2018 Mid-Term elections. The Senate losses could even be larger. If the attempts to repeal Obamacare fail and Senate Democrats do not support the Republican efforts to repeal Obamacare, the Democrat Party will lose Senate seats in Florida, Virginia, West...

Lingering uncertainty about the fate of the Affordable Care Act has spurred the California legislature to consider adoption of a statewide single-payer health care system. Sometimes described as Medicare for all, single-payer is a system in which a public agency handles health care financing while the delivery of care remains largely in private hands. Discussions of the California measure have stalled, however, in the wake of preliminary estimates pegging the cost of the program as greater than the entire state government budget. Similar cost concerns derailed single-payer proposals in Colorado and Vermont. Voters need to understand that this cost objection...

White house economists overestimated annual economic growth by about 80 percent on average for a six year stretch during Barack Obama’s presidency, according to Freedom Works economic consultant Stephen Moore. Economists predicted growth between 3.2 to 4.6 percent for the years 2010 through 2015. Actual economic growth never hit above 2.6 percent. {..snip..}

Negotiations over increasing Illinois' payments to Medicaid providers have failed, opening the door for a U.S. judge to force the cash-strapped state to pay as much as $1 billion a month to ensure medical care continues for the program's three million recipients, according to a court filing on Monday. The move would cause a huge problem for the state, which has accumulated a $15 billion bill backlog due to a budget stalemate between its Republican governor and Democrats who control the legislature. It could force Illinois to stop making full payments on other state-mandated or court-ordered spending such as pensions...

Sen. Bernie Sanders took the stage and got right to it, warning 2,200-odd Ohioans that their lives are at risk if Senate Republicans push through their health-care bill. “Put yourself into someone else’s shoes,” Sanders said Sunday at Columbus’s ExpressLive concert hall. "What does it mean today if you are struggling for your life, dealing with cancer, dealing with heart disease, dealing with diabetes, dealing with some chronic illness threatening your existence? What does it mean when you read in the paper that Republicans might take away your insurance?” A voice in the audience shouted out the answer: “You die!”...

The network’s vaunted new hire has whiffed her first opportunities to shine. Did NBC make a $17.5m mistake? It’s still months before Megyn Kelly’s new NBC daytime show is set to premiere, but it already feels like the former Fox News anchor has overstayed her welcome. Only three weeks into her Sunday-night newsmagazine show — a “Dateline” style piece, structured around her interviews with high-profile “gets” — Kelly’s star is dimmer than ever. It’s a far cry from where she was just a year ago. 2016 was a banner year for Kelly: After a wave of flattering media coverage, she...

California’s low-income residents continue to head straight for the emergency room — instead of their doctor’s office — for expensive treatment, a practice that the Affordable Care Act was supposed to curb. Three years into Obamacare, new figures show, ER visits by the state’s Medi-Cal patients rose 44 percent from early 2014 to late 2016. That’s pretty much the opposite of what architects of the nation’s health care law had predicted: The Obamacare provision expanding Medicaid was designed to get low-income people to start going to doctors in cost-efficient “managed care” plans. The Affordable Care Act’s architects had predicted that...

Are We Approaching the End Game? by Emmet Scott It is becoming more apparent by the day that the end game, in Europe at least, is now imminent. Things cannot go on like this much longer. Something has to give, and soon. To all appearances, what we have come to know as “European Civilization” is doomed. The proximate cause of this, however, is not the mass colonization of Western Europe which has stepped up several gears in the past two years. Not is it primarily the chaos, lawlessness and terrorism which these colonists have brought with them. These things are...

Most cite high costs and insurers dropping coverage! Roughly 1.9 million Americans canceled their Obamacare coverage in 2017. Most cited high premiums and disruptions in coverage as the reason, according to two reports from the Department of Health and Human Services. The agency announced that 12.2 million consumers had selected an Obamacare plan or were reenrolled by the end of open enrollment on January 31, 2017. Only 10.3 million of those consumers, however, committed to the purchase by paying their premiums, leaving roughly 1.9 million Americans who essentially canceled their coverage. "In order to get a complete picture about enrollment...

Some ACA critics—virtually all of them Republican—seem to delight at the prospect of Obamacare crumbling one county at a time, perhaps obviating the need to pass legislation that would formally repeal it. But this seems remarkably short-sighted. Trump’s attacks on the ACA, and the real prospect of repeal under Republican-controlled government, have pushed public approval of the law to the highest levels ever. Americans disapprove of Republican plans to roll back the ACA and particularly dislike proposed cuts to Medicaid. So Republicans are now threatening programs Americans more or less like.

<p>President Donald Trump Saturday slammed Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer as "not a good leader" who has "gone very far left."</p>

Insurance companies offering individual health care plans in D.C. want to increase premiums from 13 percent to nearly 40 percent on average. Four major insurance companies have submitted health insurance rates for 2018 to the D.C. Department of Insurance, Securities and Banking for review. This will be the fifth year of open enrollment on DC Health Link, the District’s health insurance marketplace under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare. In the individual market, CareFirst has proposed an average rate increase of 39.6 percent for HMO plans and 19.7 percent for PPO plans. Kaiser proposed an...

Aetna Inc will exit the Obamacare individual insurance market in Virginia and will not offer these plans on or off the online exchange created by the Affordable Care Act, the company said on Wednesday. The company said last month that it would leave Iowa. It is selling these plans in four states in 2017.

Marie Harf, a Fox News contributor and former spokeswoman for Secretary of State John Kerry, scrambled on Wednesday to defend the Obama-era Syria deal from 2013, admitting it was not "perfect." Fox News host Bill Hemmer asked Harf whether she agreed with President Trump's decision to order a military strike against Syria last week. "I did. I thought it was a good response to President Assad's use of chemical weapons," Harf said. "What I'm more focused on now quite frankly is the strategy going forward and what happens next in Syria." Harf said that Congress did not give the Obama...

Major medical groups kept up the pressure on U.S. President Donald Trump on Wednesday to maintain funding Obamacare subsidies that are paid directly to insurers, warning that not doing so would destabilize the individual insurance markets that millions of people use to buy health insurance. House of Representatives Republicans sued the Obama administration for funding the subsidies, which they argue have to be appropriated by Congress. A federal judge in May 2016 ruled in favor of the Republicans, prompting an appeal by the Obama administration. The case is pending in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia...

Temperature 82 degrees with occasional clouds, and lagoon waters, clear as paradise… former President Barack Obama is wrapping up his month-long vacation in French Polynesia – with Michelle by his side. On Sunday, Tahiti television station TNTV revealed photos of Michelle Obama paddleboarding while the Barack swam in a Polynesian lagoon. The pictures were taken on the island of Moorea by fellow vacationers, who spotted the laid-back couple using a small boat for a late morning excursion. They were escorted by two other boats with their security detail, the station says. The former president has been staying out of the...

Syria’s regime has used sarin nerve gas for the first time since 2013, dropping bombs laden with the chemical agent on Isil fighters outside Damascus, according to a senior Israeli official. This use of sarin would show that Bashar al-Assad has retained the ability to gas his enemies despite an agreement that supposedly disarmed Syria of its chemical arsenal. That deal was reached after the regime used sarin and VX gas to kill as many as 1,400 people in rebel-held areas of Damascus on August 21, 2013. President Barack Obama had declared the use of chemical weapons to be a...

United States secretary of state John Kerry has mocked the notion that Syrian rebels were responsible for last month's chemical weapons attack near Damascus. He has called on all United Nations member nations to "stand up and speak out" on Syria's chemical weapons at the upcoming General Assembly. "The world can decide whether it was used by the regime which has used chemical weapons before, or whether the opposition secretly went unnoticed into territory they don't control, to fire rockets that they don't have, containing Sarin that they don't possess, to kill their own people," he said. "I would say...

Health insurer Aetna Inc said on Thursday it will exit Iowa's Obamacare-compliant individual insurance market in 2018, citing financial risk and the uncertain outlook. Aetna said it is still evaluating its other remaining individual insurance markets, which include Delaware, Nebraska and Virginia. The company exited most markets this year but in January said it had more than 240,000 people in individual plans and expected to post losses on them this year. Insurers have said uncertainty over which rules will be in place in 2018 and the billions of dollars in government subsidies that make the plans more affordable to millions...