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Seth Moulton had earned two medals in Iraq for his valor. He’d witnessed brutal combat in four tours with the Marines. But none of that mattered when he showed up at the Veterans Health Administration hospital in Washington, D.C., where staff could not find records. “We’ll consider taking you as a humanitarian case,” a hospital staffer told Moulton, unaware that the would-be hernia patient was also a newly elected Massachusetts congressman. Thus began Moulton’s frustrating experience with the Veterans Affairs health system, a personal sampling of a chronically troubled medical bureaucracy that has drawn complaints from veterans, demands for improvements...

Editor's Note: Steve Chapman is off. The following column is by Veronique de Rugy. How can we produce better health for more people at a lower cost, year after year? By lifting all the rules and barriers that prevent health care innovators from bringing new lifesaving products to consumers and force doctors to beg bureaucrats and insurance administrators for permission to save lives. For years, free market types focused most of their attention on how to provide better health insurance coverage than their liberal counterparts. But is this the right approach? Health care coverage is different from health care. Though...

In a new ad for the Affordable Care Act, a woman named Julie Adams explains how the ACA saved her life: “I’ll always remember how affordable health care saved my life,” said Julie Adams. “If Congress tries to take that away, I’ll remember that, too.” The Community Catalyst Action Fundwrote about the ad, saying that “Americans have not had enough opportunity to hear personal stories like Julie’s” and claiming that Julie was able to catch her cancer early because of the ACA. It went on to state that for 20 years before the enactment of the benefits of ACA she lived in fear getting sick and didn’t...

I rarely do follow-up columns. I’m averaging one every ten years. And while my last such exercise resulted in a written apology from the White House (for accusing me of making up facts over its removal of Churchill’s bust), today’s is not a complaint. It’s merely a recognition that the huge response elicited by last week’s column, “Why Doctors Quit,” warrants both rebuttal and clarification. Physicians who responded tended to agree with my claim that doctors are being driven out of the profession by the intrusions, interferences, regulations, mandates, constraints, and sundry other degradations of their vocation that are the...

Quietly, in August 2014, one of the largest health insurance companies lost their tax exempt status in the State of California: Blue Shield of California. Established in 1938, it’s been well known for years that this company and its real owner, California Physicians’ Service, Inc. (CPS), quietly scooped up billions in tax exempt revenue. They also managed to confound the government even further by calling themselves a Foundation! The California State Franchise Tax Board is known to be ruthless in hunting down fraud. Finally, after decades of deceit, Blue Shield’s tax evasion scam got the axe. But that isn’t stopping...

The Sinister Bridge between Evidence-Based Medicine and Electronic Health Records. The Federal government is closing in on every aspect of our society. Medical data is one of several key components required to make their collection and consolidation complete. Words mean something. They are not just utterance or grunts. Yet, we have been taught to swallow words without really considering their meaning. In this, the corporate and governmental propaganda machine has succeeded well. We give up our lives based on a kind of mass failure to understand what is really meant by a word or a phrase. Weapons of Mass Destruction,...

The state Senate on Tuesday approved a hotly debated measure that would allow many immigrants in the country illegally to sign up for special healthcare programs that would offer the same benefits as Medi-Cal. “We are talking about our friends. We are talking about our neighbors and our families who are denied basic healthcare in the richest state of this union,” Lara told his colleagues.

Last week, in unusually breathless tones, the Associated Press reported on the new crisis in the interminable national health care debate, the so-called “underinsurance” phenomenon. As the AP reported, “A different health care issue has emerged for Democrats…It’s not the uninsured, but the problem of high out-of-pocket costs for people already covered. Democrats call it underinsurance”. The article goes on to argue that the Democrats will use the issue to spearhead their pitch to working class voters in the 2016 elections. We can expect that this issue will be used rally the Democrats base, to bash George W. Bush, and,...

About a decade ago, a doctor friend was lamenting the increasingly frustrating conditions of clinical practice. “How did you know to get out of medicine in 1978?” he asked with a smile. “I didn’t,” I replied. “I had no idea what was coming. I just felt I’d chosen the wrong vocation.” I was reminded of this exchange upon receiving my med-school class’s 40th-reunion report and reading some of the entries. In general, my classmates felt fulfilled by family, friends, and the considerable achievements of their professional lives. But there was an undercurrent of deep disappointment, almost demoralization, with what medical...

Five years after the passage of ObamaCare, there is one expense that’s still causing sticker shock across the healthcare industry: overhead costs. The administrative costs for healthcare plans are expected to explode by more than a quarter of a trillion dollars over the next decade, according to a new study published by the Health Affairs blog. The $270 billion in new costs, for both private insurance companies and government programs, will be “over and above what would have been expected had the law not been enacted,” one of the authors, David Himmelstein, wrote Wednesday. Those costs will be particularly high...

Track star and Ivy-League freshman student Madison Holleran, age 19, had been a “happy go lucky,” though achievement-oriented, kid all her life, according to her father. She had no history of mental illness. At home for Christmas break last year, she broke down and told her parents that she had been having suicidal thoughts and was depressed. Her mother said that “I was shocked. She’s never been depressed before,” according to the Daily Mail. “I knew she needed a therapist, but I couldn’t get her an appointment because it was weekend.” Madison seemed to respond somewhat to the TLC she...

Health Reform: Looks like ObamaCare premiums will skyrocket for many next year. So what do Democrats propose? New insurance mandates that will drive premiums up even higher. Which one is the stupid party again?

Greta:Off the Record By the end of June, the US Supreme Court could make a ruling that impacts 8 million people on ObamaCare - and the Obama administration has no contingency plan

Back in 2009, when Congress was debating the Affordable Care Act, many liberal Democrats felt it did not go far enough — that it should be even more sweeping, even more expansive, even more costly. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, one of the Senate's most liberal Democrats and a veteran of many legislative battles, urged his colleagues on the Left to go ahead and pass the bill. "The key to this is that this modest home, we can put additions onto it in the future," Harkin told MSNBC's Rachel Maddow in December 2009. "But if we don't have the starter home, we're...

In a Midtown specialist’s office, I confessed the secret that’s been weighing on my mind. “My health insurance expires at the end of May,” I told the doctor. I had a lot of questions for him: How much does an uninsured visit cost? What is the fewest number of follow-ups we can do this year? Do you have payment plans available to patients paying cash?

While premium filings aren’t expected from the federal government until next month, a report from The Wall Street Journal released Thursday provides a snapshot of preliminary 2016 rate filings from health insurance market leaders in 11 states. The figures represent average increases in premiums proposed by the largest carriers in each state that has made requests public. A separate report from the Associated Press notes that the largest carrier in South Dakota has proposed a 42.9 percent increase in premiums in the individual market. Increases are subject to review by the states and will be finalized in the fall.

Proposals set the stage for debate over federal health law’s impact. Major insurers in some states are proposing hefty rate boosts for plans sold under the federal health law, setting the stage for an intense debate this summer over the law’s impact. In New Mexico, market leader Health Care Service Corp. is asking for an average jump of 51.6% in premiums for 2016. The biggest insurer in Tennessee, BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee, has requested an average 36.3% increase. In Maryland, market leader CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield wants to raise rates 30.4% across its products. Moda Health, the largest insurer on the...

A Bronx man died in police custody last week after police responded to a 911 call. An Iraq combat veteran in El Paso, Texas, serving a two-day DWI sentence died after being subdued by guards. A woman died after being Tasered by sheriff's deputies in a Fairfax, Va., cell. What they had in common, besides expiring abruptly while in the hands of law enforcement officers, is mental illness. Denis Reyes was afflicted by bipolar disorder. James Brown reported being diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Natasha McKenna had a history of schizophrenia. We used to warehouse the mentally ill in overcrowded,...

Why Do We Blindly Dance to the Same Old Music? Continuing our examination of the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JC), you’ll find the story is very complex. But, in the end, if one follows the money, the real WHY behind the JC is quite simply GREED. The JC is one of the main spiders, unseen by most, who continue to spin this deadly web at our expense. They have powerful partners with executives who enjoy virtual immunity from one of the greatest protection rackets of all time. It turns out that my suspicion of the JC is...

As Alice in Wonderland might say, a curious tax just got curiouser. The burden to states could mount to $13 billion in less than a decade. ... It works like this: State governments pay insurers for the tax. The insurers then pay the tax to the federal government. The federal government then reimburses part of the cost to the states. It may sound absurd, but it's not amusing to state governments, which wind up losing 54 cents for every dollar of the insurance tax. State taxpayers end up the biggest losers, without any added benefit to their state's low-income Medicaid...