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Playing God to save a buck. More than 50 patients have died after an NHS trust introduced a secret policy to downgrade 999 calls and not to send ambulances to terminally ill patients. Managers at East of England ambulance trust were accused of “the most cruel form of rationing imaginable” after admitting that 8,000 patients had been affected by the changes.An internal NHS report discloses that 57 patients died after their calls were downgraded following a decision not to send ambulances to the terminally ill and to those who had given instructions not to resuscitate.It meant that, instead of...

Increased insurance coverage does not mean increased access to medical care. No matter how badly you want something to be true, simply wishing will not make it so. This is a lesson that Obamacare supporters need to learn, as they tell us yet again that the Affordable Care Act “is working.” The latest claims stem in part from evidence that the number of uninsured Americans has been steadily declining. It is true that the most recent poll from Gallup found that the uninsured rate fell to 12.9 percent in the fourth quarter of 2014, down from 16.3 percent before the...

**SNIP** Requiring employees to shoulder more of the cost burden may undermine public support for Obamacare just as Congress, now firmly under Republican control, considers new ways to gut the law. The tax takes effect in 2018, and employers are already laying the groundwork to make sure they don’t have to pay the 40 percent surcharge on health-insurance spending that exceeds $27,500 for a family or $10,200 for an individual. Once envisioned as a tool to slow the nation’s growing health-care tab, the tax has in practice meant higher out-of-pocket health- care costs for workers. “I don’t think there’s any...

More than half of the 2014-2015 enrollment period for the Affordable Care Act, best known as Obamacare, is in the books, and the enrollment figures on the surface look very encouraging. To be clear, Obamacare is about more than just enrollment figures. For one thing, in order for the health reform law to be successful, it'll need people that enroll to actually continue paying their premium. This is the only way that medical care costs get spread out over a greater swath of the public, which is needed to control medical care cost inflation. However, between April and mid-October,...

One of the first agenda items on the to-do list for the new Congress is redefining the definition of full-time work under Obamacare's employer mandate, which goes into effect this year. Under the healthcare law, companies have cut hours in order to avoid reaching the Obamacare threshold requiring businesses to provide health insurance if they employ more than 50 full-time workers at 30-hours per week. As a result, the economy is seeing an substantial shift from full-time to part-time workers with fewer benefits as a result of the law. Republicans have long expressed the need to re-establish the definition of...

Sacramento — California´s budget, which bounced back after years of deficits, is now being squeezed by rising healthcare costs for the poor and for retired state workers. The mountain of medical bills threatens to undermine Gov. Jerry Brown´s efforts to strengthen state finances — his central promise of the past four years. Enrollment in the state´s healthcare program for the poor, known as Medi-Cal, has exploded by 50% since President Obama´s signature law took effect. Although the federal government picks up most of the tab, state costs have also been growing, and faster than expected. Meanwhile, the annual bill for

Effing the Middle Class:: By: Larry Walker II ::In Part 1, we voiced concern that in constitutional law sense, an excise tax is usually an event tax as opposed to a “state of being” tax, the recent exception to this principle being the "minimum essential coverage" tax under Internal Revenue Code section 5000A as enacted by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Public Law 111–148), whereby an indirect tax is imposed on the condition of not having purchased health insurance coverage.This is not the first time in history the United States has forced its middle class to pay a...

VA Offers ‘Free Gun Locks’ in Exchange for Owners’ Info, Addresses & # of Guns Owned Posted on January 6, 2015 by Ammoland By AWR Hawkins Washington DC - -(Ammoland.com)- A number of veterans say they’ve received a letter from the Veterans Administration (VA) offering them “free gun locks” if they fill out a form which asks for their address and the number of guns for which they need locks. The VA is offering up to four locks per veteran. The Washington Times acquired a copy of the letter and quoted it as saying the VA “[hopes] to reach all...

While reporting on the rollout of the Affordable Care Act, journalist Steven Brill was diagnosed with a life-threatening condition that required heart surgery. "There I was: a reporter who had made hospital presidents and hospital executives and health care executives and insurance executives sweat because I asked them all kinds of questions about their salaries and about their profit margins," Brill tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "And now I was lying on a gurney in a hospital in real fear of my life." Brill had a bubble on his heart that the doctors said had a 15 to 17 percent...

This is almost as delicious as unions — who did everything in their power to get it enacted — calling for ObamaCare's repeal once they realized the harm it would do to their members. It seems that ivory tower professors at Harvard, where health experts helped craft the law, are now grumbling about the impact ObamaCare is having on their pocketbooks. Harvard administrators say ObamaCare pushed them to make cost-saving — for Harvard — changes to their health benefit plan. As its enrollment guide explains, Harvard "must respond to the national trend of rising health care costs, including some driven...

The brain incubator at Harvard, the place which according to legend, and certainly the US News and World Report's annual paid college infomercial, is the repository for some of the smartest people in the world, is furious. The reason - Harvard's illustrious faculty has learned that they too will be subject to their own policy recommendations as relates to Obamacare, which they themselves helped conceive. As the left-leaning NYT reported earlier today, "for years, Harvard’s experts on health economics and policy have advised presidents and Congress on how to provide health benefits to the nation at a reasonable cost. But...

In baseball, when you get three strikes, you’re out. There have been at least five strikes called against single payer (SP). Shouldn’t we hear from an umpire? Whether you call it single payer, socialized medicine, universal health care, Veterans Administration (VA) Hospital System, ObamaCare, Public Option, or National Health Service, these are all different names for the same thing: government-controlled healthcare. Details vary but all single payer-type systems have one thing in common: a central authority that controls both supply of dollars and providers, as well as demand for goods and services. Strike #1: Italy's price controls In the...

One of the most controversial features of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) was the desire on the part of many of its backers to subject medical decisions to a “cost effectiveness” standard. In a nut shell, that means asking of various medical procedures if the addition to good health or life expectancy they promise is worth what they cost. But if it’s good to ask that question about a medical procedure, isn’t it equally good to ask the same question about the entire Obamacare program? When we do it turns out that Obamacare fails the test. To a lot of...

Companies with more than 100 full-time employees need to comply or face fines. ... Companies with more than 100 full-time workers must offer affordable health insurance to at least 70% of their staff. This "employer mandate" was supposed to take effect in 2014, but the Obama administration delayed it to this year. And those that don't comply face hefty penalties. Companies will be fined if they don't offer coverage and even just one of their workers gets subsidized insurance on an Obamacare individual exchange. For 2015, the fine is $174 a month times the number of full-time employees (minus 80...

Conservative radio host and Landmark Legal Foundation President Mark Levin has submitted an amicus brief in support of the petitioners in King v. Burwell, the Obamacare legal case that will be heard by the Supreme Court on March 5, 2015. The case addresses whether "the Internal Revenue Service may permissibly promulgate regulations to extend tax-credit subsidies to coverage purchased through exchanges established by the federal government under Section 1321 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act." Essentially, the case looks at whether federal subsidies are legal and available to people living in states that did not set up their...

The Supreme Court is heading in the wrong direction by allowing a corporation to impose its religious beliefs on its employees, according to David Gans, the director of the Human Rights, Civil Rights, and Citizenship Program at the Constitutional Accountability Center.Gans co-authored the new book titled Religious Liberties for Corporations? Hobby Lobby, the Affordable Care Act, and the Constitution with Ilya Shapiro, a senior fellow in constitutional studies at the Cato Institute.“This is the first time the Supreme Court has said corporations have this right in more than 200 years in our nation’s history,” Gans said during an event at...

The Affordable Care Act may become even more of a nightmare with Hillary Clinton in the White House, says Betsy McCaughey, chairwoman of the Committee to Reduce Infectious Deaths and former lieutenant-governor of New York. "Hillary could make it worse," McCaughey said Friday on "The Steve Malzberg Show" on Newsmax TV, referencing Clinton's attempt to launch a heathcare plan when her husband, Bill Clinton, was president. "Hillarycare back in November 1993, all 1,362 pages of it . . . was far more coercive than Obamacare." For example, said McCaughey, a medical doctor, Clinton's plan was far more rigid than President...

California's health exchange is violating the law by canceling private coverage for up to 95,000 people because they might qualify for Medi-Cal, the state's insurance commissioner says. At issue is health insurance for some of the poorest Californians whose incomes aren't high enough to even qualify for subsidized policies in the Covered California exchange. The state marketplace is notifying thousands of policyholders that their federal premium subsidies for Obamacare coverage will end Dec. 31 and their private health plan won't be renewed starting in January. Instead, these people will be put into Medi-Cal, the state's Medicaid program for low-income residents....

So-called Obamacare “architect” Jonathan Gruber was called to testify at a Tuesday House regarding his past controversial remarks about the creation and passage of the health care law. While many of the testy exchanges that occurred during the hearing were covered and even trumpeted by conservative media, a furious Mark Levin said the exercise was pointless. “The very Republicans grilling this guy don’t plan to do a damn thing about Obamacare! They’re not going to use the power of the purse to control any piece of it!” Levin shouted on the air. “So, what is the point of a hearing?...

If you like your health care plan, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has a Christmas surprise for you! When will this new present arrive? December 25th. In an ongoing effort to keep Obamacare numbers elevated, CMS has embarked on the next step of its government takeover of healthcare. It seems CMS is taking a page from Jonathan Gruber’s book; rather than allowing the “stupid” masses to make a decision on their own health plan, CMS has proposed a new rule that includes an overly reaching provision allowing CMS to re-enroll anyone who has not made the annual...