Free Republic

I write this from the hospital. Seems I have lung cancer. My doctors tell me my growth was caught early and I'll be fine. Soon I will barely notice that a fifth of my lung is gone. I believe them. After all, I'm at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital. U.S. News & World Report ranked it No. 1 in New York. I get excellent medical care here. But as a consumer reporter, I have to say, the hospital's customer service stinks. Doctors keep me waiting for hours, and no one bothers to call or email to say, "I'm running late." Few doctors give...

The nation’s largest insurer announced Tuesday it will be dropping out of the Obamacare exchanges in all but a handful of states. The decision comes after the company lost nearly half-a-billion dollars on the exchange business last year and expectations it will lose even more this year. The AP reports: UnitedHealth Group Inc. said it now expects to lose $650 million this year on its exchange business, up from its previous projection for $525 million. The insurer lost $475 million in 2015, a spokesman said.UnitedHealth has already decided to pull out of Arkansas, Georgia and Michigan in 2017, and...

Total US spending on prescription drugs in 2015, at the manufacturers’ level and as measured by “invoice pricing,” jumped by 12.2% to $424.8 billion, after having already soared 14.2% in 2014! A two-year increase of 28%! So you’d think we’d get some results for all this moolah. But no. This $424.8 billion in prescription drug spending at “invoice pricing” isn’t based on what Americans or their health insurers pay. According to IMS Health, which released the report, it reflects invoice pricing by drug companies to distributors. It includes neither price concessions by drug companies nor the “mark-ups and additional costs”...

Here is what presidential aspirant Sen. Bernie Sanders said: "I believe that health care is a right of all people." President Barack Obama declared that health care "should be a right for every American." The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops: "Every person has a right to adequate health care." President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in his January 1944 message to Congress, called for "the right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health." And it is not just a health care right that people claim. There are rights to decent housing, good food and a...

An outbreak of highly drug-resistant "super-gonorrhoea" is sweeping across Britain and could become untreatable, medics fear. A national alert was triggered by Public Health England last September after the rare strain of the sexually transmitted superbug was detected in 15 people. The number of confirmed cases has now risen to 34 and, according to reports, there is "huge concern" among doctors that it is spreading across the UK. And experts said it is at risk of becoming untreatable if the only fully effective antibiotic remaining fails.

Remember how the last big increases in ObamaCare premiums took place last fall? Good times, good times. The Hill reports that insurers have begun warning that the financial model of ObamaCare remains unstable. Either they need to get approval from state regulators for another round of large premium increases, or they may bail out altogether. Even the pro-ObamaCare Kaiser Family Foundation says, “Something has to give”: Health insurance companies are amplifying their warnings about the financial sustainability of the ObamaCare marketplaces as they seek approval for premium increases next year.Insurers say they are losing money on their ObamaCare plans...

Miami (AFP) - The richest Americans tend to outlive the poorest by almost 15 years, and that gap has grown since 2001, said a major study of income and life expectancy this week. The findings, published Sunday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, were based on more than one billion tax records from 1999 to 2014, as well as government mortality statistics. The gap in life expectancy between the richest one percent and the poorest one percent was 14.6 years for men and 10.1 years for women, said the study led by Raj Chetty, an economics researcher at...

Here’s an unusual story out of Texas which seems to defy all the conventional wisdom about employment trends and wages. The local press has noticed that nursing homes are having trouble filling the health care jobs at their facilities these days. That’s particularly curious when you consider that healthcare has consistently been one of the fastest growing job markets in the country for several years now. So where are all of the trained healthcare workers who would normally fill those jobs? It seems that an increasing number of them have packed it in and left for jobs flipping burgers. (KXAN...

Veterans earned their VA health care when they signed the dotted line to serve our country. So when American Legion Commander Dale Barnett saw that a commission that is top-heavy with private hospital executives was trying to dismantle it, he had to be blunt. “I don’t understand how commissions paid by the federal government are able to break ranks, create an unapproved report and try to advance self-serving agendas while operating as congressional appointees,” Barnett said. He's talking about the congressionally-mandated Commission on Care, an entity dominated by private hospital executives and Koch Brothers-affiliated "policy experts." The commission's charge under...

In September 2009, President Barack Obama released a highly touted report on the state of health insurance prices in the United States, titled The Burden of Health Insurance Premium Increases on American Families. The report, which was published by the Executive Office of the President (EOP), painted a grim picture of health care costs.“Health insurance premiums continue to rise for American families,” wrote the authors of the EOP report. “Premiums are rising in all states and far in excess of wage growth or inflation. If we do nothing, the soaring rise of health insurance premiums will mean that millions of...

Editor's note: This piece was co-authored by NCPA Executive Director Allen West and Veterans Coalition of North Central Texas President Nekima Horton.In 2014, the four year old daughter of a serviceman stationed in Iraq nearly drowned in her family pool. She spent three and a half minutes under water before her mother found her and called an ambulance. After arriving at the hospital on the military post, the doctors realized the little girl needed to be air lifted to the nearest trauma center in Dallas, Texas, where she stayed for the next six weeks. A traumatic event for any family,...

Nearly a third of people without health insurance, about 10 million, live in families that received a federal earned income tax credit in 2014, according to a new study. But the Internal Revenue Service doesn't tell those tax filers that their low and moderate incomes likely mean their households qualify for Medicaid or subsidies to buy coverage on the insurance exchanges. That's a lost opportunity to identify people who are eligible but not receiving government assistance to gain health coverage, the researchers say. More

In August 2007, then-Sen. Barack Obama expressed his hope for the growth of socialized medicine in the United States. “[Health care] is a $2 trillion part of our economy, and it is my belief that it’s not just politically, but economically, it is better for us to start getting a system in place—a universal health care system signed into law by the end of my first term as president and build off that system to further to make it more rational … By the way, Canada did not start immediately with a single-payer system. They had a similar transition step.”...

A former NHS director died after waiting for nine months for an operation - at her own hospital. Margaret Hutchon, a former mayor, had been waiting since last June for a follow-up stomach operation at Broomfield Hospital in Chelmsford, Essex. But her appointments to go under the knife were cancelled four times and she barely regained consciousness after finally having surgery. Her devastated husband, Jim, is now demanding answers from Mid Essex Hospital Services NHS Trust - the organisation where his wife had served as a non-executive member of the board of directors.

Primary-care shortage is growing especially acute in rural areas and in parts of some cities. The doctor is disappearing in America. And by most projections, it’s only going to get worse — the U.S. could lose as many as 1 million doctors by 2025, according to a Association of American Medical Colleges report. Primary-care physicians will account for as much as one-third of that shortage, meaning the doctor you likely interact with most often is also becoming much more difficult to see. Tasked with checkups and referring more complicated health problems to specialists, these doctors have the most consistent contact...

New Jersey hospital emergency room becomes first in U.S. to end use of opioid painkillers PATERSON, N.J. -- St. Joseph’s Regional Medical Center announced it has become the first hospital in the country to implement a program that will manage patients' pain in the emergency room without the use of opioid painkillers. Painkillers most frequently used in the emergency room in the past were oxycodone, vicodin and percocet, according to Dr. Mark Rosenberg, the Emergency Department chair. “Our job here together is to look at the whole equation and understand how we can stop people from going from a prescription,...

In a moment that seemed to stun even moderator Anderson Cooper, Donald Trump named federal involvement in education and health care as top functions of the federal government, along with national security, at the Milwaukee candidates forum in Milwaukee last night. Apparently unaware that conservatives believe that a federal role in education is unjustified, and that many, including Ted Cruz, want to abolish the Department of Education, and that federal involvement in health care is anathema to his party’s base, Trump spoke of both as among the top three priorities for the feds. Putting on his surprised face, Cooper...

GOP frontrunner Donald Trump said the top three functions of the United States government are security, healthcare, and education. During CNN’s town hall in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on Tuesday night, an audience member asked Trump, “What are the top three functions of the United States government?”“Security for our nation,” Trump responded. “I would also say healthcare… [and] education.”“The top three are security, security, security,” Trump stressed, saying America needs security “so we can continue to exist as a country.”“Thousands and thousands of people are infiltrating our country,” the real estate mogul explained. “We don’t know who they are.”On top of security,...

For the past several years, Idaho lawmakers have rejected every attempt to bring Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion to the Gem State. Earlier this year, they rejected two expansion plans that were so unpopular, they failed to even earn a committee vote. But with the legislative session winding down, there’s another last-minute, backdoor attempt to expand Medicaid on the horizon. The latest plan, dubbed the “Idaho Accountable Care Waiver Act,” would require the state to “provide for managed Medicaid services” to a new class of able-bodied adults. Although the legislation nominally limits its Medicaid expansion to able-bodied adults below the poverty line,...

Insurance companies in Delaware will be prohibited from limiting health care coverage for transgender individuals. […] Additionally, companies will not be allowed to impose different premiums or rates based on a person’s identity. The policy also applies if a person is undergoing a gender transition. …