Free Republic

A federal appeals court on Tuesday dealt a setback to the Affordable Care Act, ruling that premium subsidies provided through the federal health exchange in 36 states are invalid under the writing of the law.Here's the practical effect of the ruling, if it withstands the rest of the legal process: More than 5 million, generally low-income Americans who received tax credits through the federal exchange to purchase health insurance would see their premiums explode.Avalere Health, an independent healthcare firm, released an analysis last week showing that individuals who received premium subsidies for health insurance would see a premium hike of about...

President Obama’s old Harvard Law professor, Laurence Tribe, said that he “wouldn’t bet the family farm” on Obamacare’s surviving the legal challenges to an IRS rule about who is eligible for subsidies that are currently working their way through the federal courts. “I don’t have a crystal ball,” Tribe told the Fiscal Times. “But I wouldn’t bet the family farm on this coming out in a way that preserves Obamacare.”

Reform: Probably hoping no one would notice, regulators late last week exempted from ObamaCare five U.S. territories where it was failing. Will they do the same once it´s obvious ObamaCare is failing everywhere else? When the geniuses in Congress and the White House were writing the ObamaCare legislation, they made a slight mistake. The law imposed ObamaCare´s guaranteed issue and community rating insurance mandates on the five territories — which have a combined population of more than 4 million — but it exempted them from the individual mandate and didn´t offer any subsidies. Not surprisingly, the insurance markets quickly collapsed...

Results of a new study show HIV rates have declined in the US. According to the report, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), from 2002 to 2011 there was a 30 percent decline in diagnosis of HIV nationwide. Despite the decrease in diagnosis, challenges still remain. Trends in HIV The study authors looked at trends in HIV during the time period among persons age 13 and older, finding 493,372 persons were diagnosed with HIV in the US. The results came from data that is part of the National HIV Surveillance System of the CDC. The biggest...

Johns Hopkins Hospital has agreed to a $190 million settlement with more than 8,000 patients of a gynecologist who secretly photographed and videotaped women's bodies in the examining room with a pen-like camera he wore around his neck, lawyers said Monday. Dr. Nikita Levy was fired in February 2013, days after an employee alerted hospital authorities about her suspicions. Levy committed suicide 10 days later. Investigators discovered roughly 1,200 videos and 140 images in his home. "All of these women were brutalized by this," said the women's lead attorney, Jonathan Schochor. "Some of these women needed counseling, they were sleepless,...

The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) likes to present itself as the champion of the little guy. But officials of SEIU Healthcare—“the fastest-growing union of healthcare, child care, home care and nursing home workers in the Midwest”—aren’t averse to a little high-living. For example, in FY 2013 officials of SEIU’s Illinois-Indiana healthcare division (SEIU-HCII) chalked up more than $1.1 million in travel expenses—$13,000 of it on D.C. hotel expenses rung up at President Obama’s second inaugural. The union designated all that travel as “representation activity.” Also claimed as a “representation” expense: a $6,000 liquor store tab for “beverages for...

Much as Democrats would like to distance themselves from Obamacare, somehow the unpopular legislation keeps coming back to haunt them. On the official Colorado state website under healthcare, the discredited Obamacare talking point “If you like your plan, you can keep it” appears not once, but twice. ... As of January, nearly 340,000 Coloradans and more than five million people nationwide had lost their health insurance because of President Barack Obama’s signature law. The claim was popularized by the president in 2009 and rated the “Lie of the Year” by the left-leaning PolitiFact, and the Washington Post gave it one...

Last September, I shared a disconcerting video showing an unfortunate young woman getting her OB/GYN exam from a very creepy version of Uncle Sam. Well, you’ll be pleased to know that “Creepy Uncle Sam” does not discriminate. In this video, a young man faces the unpleasant experience of getting his prostate checked.

The Department of Veterans Affairs needs $17.6 billion in additional funds over the next three years to meet patients’ needs and fix the troubled agency’s problems, its acting director said Wednesday. Testifying for the first time on Capitol Hill, interim VA Secretary Sloan Gibson told the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee that the money would help VA medical centers decrease appointment waiting times and hire more doctors. But the request divided lawmakers. Democrats, including Sen. Jon Tester of Montana, supported the appeal, while Republicans, including Sen. Mike Johanns of Nebraska, questioned whether VA care would improve if it received additional funding....

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)Politicians here have not even figured out how yet to implement their new law requiring us to pay for everybody else’s health care, and already people are clamoring to legalize drugs that are, at the very least, hazardous to their health. The good people of Colorado and Washington state can now buy and smoke pot without violating state laws. The movement to do so is spreading among other states like a hot tropical virus through a detention facility on the Mexican border. I, for one, have never really cared one way or the other if people choose to smoke pot....

Another day, another VA tragedy. An Albany nurse claims dying New York Veterans were denied painkillers. Instead they were given salt water mixtures. Valerie Riviello, a nurse at the Albany Stratton VA medical center, claims that fellow employees had reported to her that dying veterans were denied painkillers such as morphine to ease their pain. Instead, they were given salt water mixtures. Riviello told the Times Union: Among stories that nurse Valerie Riviello has heard from other employees at the Albany VA is one about dying patients who were supposed to receive morphine to alleviate pain, but instead got a...

A recent poll suggests that a majority of Americans believe Jesus would have backed universal healthcare. According to a YouGov survey released earlier in July, 55 percent of respondents believe that Christ would have endorsed the issue. Despite this majority, a slight minority of American Protestants believed that the Jesus they knew would have supported universal healthcare. Only 48 percent of Protestants suggested this, in contrast to the 57 percent of Catholics who argued that their religion's founder would have backed it. Aside from Jesus, 46 percent of Protestants and 55 percent of Catholics themselves backed the policy. In addition...

I recently returned home after two weeks of engagements in New Zealand and Australia focusing on empowerment through reading. The Kiwis and Aussies are not very different from Americans, even though they inhabit the opposite side of the globe. I was struck by the way many people perceived the political atmosphere in the United States. Although the well-educated individuals who have access to all of the American cable channels tend to be well informed on the issues, most people had only heard that America has finally repaired its broken medical system with the advent of Obamacare and now everyone, including...

Health Reform: Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman says critics of ObamaCare should cease and desist, because the law is "working." Given his track record on health care analysis, we'll politely ignore this advice. In 2011, the same Krugman declared the Veterans Health Administration was "a huge policy success story, which offers important lessons for future health reform" because, among other things, "it's free from the perverse incentives created when doctors and hospitals profit from expensive tests and procedures." It turns out the VHA is more akin to a cesspool of bloated bureaucracy, mismanagement, deadly delays and cover-ups. A couple years...

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Friday it had uncovered a new safety breach at its bioterror research laboratories involving dangerous avian flu, just as it was investigating the failures behind the potential exposure of researchers to live anthrax bacteria. In its first findings from an internal probe into the anthrax incident last month, the CDC said multiple failures by individual scientists and a lack of agency-wide safety policies had led to the potential exposure of more than 80 lab workers to the dangerous bacteria at its campus in Atlanta.

Vasectomy can increase risk of developing lethal prostate cancer Scientists have identified a link between having a vasectomy and developing lethal forms of prostate cancer Laura Donnelly, and Claire Carter 10:00PM BST 10 Jul 2014 Men who have a vasectomy face an increased chance of developing prostate cancer and a higher risk of contracting the most aggressive form of the disease, a study has found. The Harvard research on 50,000 men, the largest study to examine the link between sterilisation and cancer, found that those who had the procedure had a 10 per cent greater chance of developing the disease....

WMBF in Myrtle Beach, SC, reported Wednesday on the growing trend of businesses hiring only part-time workers, due to an inability to afford Obamacare. This situation leaves workers without healthcare and without a full-time income or other benefits. Local staffing agencies say more small business are starting to hire more part time employees. Not because there is more full time work, but as WMBF reporter Mandy Noell found out, it's because they can't afford to have more full time employees. Obamacare places requirements for health care benefits that many small businesses just cannot afford to pay. As a result, they...

The Supreme Court’s decision last week in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby has pushed all the buttons that could be expected when sex and religion intersect. Many on the right are celebrating because they value religious expression and feel rather less excited about sex, especially of the non-procreative variety. And much of the Left is outraged because religion is generally considered of far less import while sexual freedom has a high priority. But both sides are missing the point. It is true that your boss shouldn’t be deciding whether or not your insurance plan includes contraceptives. It is also true that...

Buried in a largely overlooked government audit of the Obama-Care exchanges is a finding that casts still more doubt on the reliability of the 8 million enrollment number commonly cited by the administration and the press. In a section titled "Other Issues," an inspector general report released last week found that the HealthCare.gov marketplace couldn't show it had been reconciling its monthly enrollment numbers with insurance companies. That's despite the fact that the law specifically calls for this reconciliation, and the fact that, as the IG report notes, "the federal marketplace obtained the services of a contractor to reconcile enrollment...

Nine out of ten hospital wards may be at risk of overheating, increasing the dangers for vulnerable patients who are left sweltering in temperatures of more than 26C (78.8F), government advisers have warned. Poor ventilation, thin walls, low ceilings and big windows that can barely be opened are contributing to temperatures far exceeding acceptable levels during hot weather, according to the Committee on Climate Change. One fifth of domestic properties could also already be overheating, with flats especially vulnerable, it finds. The number of people dying prematurely from overheating could triple to 7,000 per year by the 2050s as global...

Nearly twice as many people are expected to drop out of Colorado’s state-run health care exchange in the coming years than originally projected, leading to nearly $2 million lost in associated fees for the financially embattled program over the next two years. Connect for Health Colorado originally projected that 13 percent of enrollees will either leave the exchange in fiscal 2015 or fail to pay their bills, but now they project the figure to be as high as 24 percent, according to the Denver Post. If that’s the case, the exchange will lose out on about $1 million in fees...

As Americans scrambled ahead of the July Fourth holiday weekend on Thursday afternoon, the Department of Health and Human Services released 1,296 pages of new regulations dealing with payment rates to doctors and hospitals. The timing of the news release is part of a long pattern for President Obama's administration, which has often used holidays as an opportunity to dump dense regulatory changes when most reporters and Americans are focused on their holiday plans. The release came at 4:15 p.m. Last year, the Obama administration used the days surrounding the July 4th holiday as an opening to announce a delay...

Thom Throp is a Kingsport insurance agent who's sold over sixty Affordable Care Act plans. Like thousands of others, he logged on with great interest to read a story from The Tennessean newspaper about a Maryville couple forced to separate after 33 years of marriage so the wife could keep health insurance. "We are in a situation in trying to get as many people covered as possible. People are falling in the proverbial crack," Throp said. (snip) So if expanding Medicaid isn't the answer, then what is? Throp tells us, even in a tight economy, that couples like the Drains...

Federal investigators are probing a whistleblower's allegations that applications for veterans seeking health care benefits may have been improperly purged from the VA's Health Eligibility Center in suburban Atlanta. Eligibility Center program specialist Scott Davis .. that health benefit applications for more than 10,000 veterans may have been improperly purged from ... Davis said the VA placed him on paid administrative leave after he filed the complaints

The threats to Obamacare just keep on coming…… A case before the U.S. District Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia may determine the Affordable Care Act was written in such a way that it prevents the federal government’s HealthCare.gov web site from offering subsidies. Now such a ruling would have a long way to go before it actually would become enacted — and a lot of legal hoops would have to be jumped through — but such a finding could be a show-stopper for Obamacare. More than 5 million of the 8 million who signed up for Obamacare...

Bias: You'd think that a government audit showing how ObamaCare couldn't tell whether millions of enrollees were eligible for the subsidies they're getting would be front-page news. Instead, the press hid it from view. If you wanted to read in the New York Times about these findings — which detailed rampant problems verifying eligibility and income information from millions of ObamaCare applicants — you had to dig 17 pages into the news section. In the Washington Post, the story was on page 11, after stop-the-press-stories like a change in House travel reporting rules and a puff piece on the new...

<p>While it is just a tragic anecdote, the latest story surrounding the chronic and too often fatal inefficiency of Veterans Affairs hospitals is illustrative of a much larger problem.</p> <p>“A veteran who collapsed in an Albuquerque Veteran Affairs hospital cafeteria, 500 yards from the emergency room, died after waiting 30 minutes for an ambulance,” the Associated Press reported on Thursday. “Officials at the hospital Thursday confirmed it took a half an hour for the ambulance to be dispatched and take the man from one building to the other, which is about a five minute walk.”</p>

Despite the controversy it has generated, the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the Hobby Lobby case was rather straightforward. The Religious Freedom Restoration Act, passed nearly unanimously in 1993 by a Democratic-controlled U.S. Congress and signed into law by President Clinton, set up certain tests to ensure that federal policies do not overly burden the free exercise of religion. And the court's majority ruled that a mandate forcing business owners to purchase insurance coverage for their workers that includes contraception coverage that violates their religious beliefs failed those tests. Critics of the ruling have framed this protection of religious liberty...

Insurance companies operating in New York State's marketplace are expected to ask for double-digit premium hikes next year, according to new filings from the companies. Capital New York reports the average requested increase was 13%. The New York Post reports that number at about 12%. But the bigger insurers are seeking a bigger premium hike — according to Capital, the six most popular plans in New York are requesting an average increase of almost 15%. The Post reports that Excellus Health Plan, which has about 24,000 customers, is requesting a 19.7% hike. MVP Health Plan, which has nearly 33,000 customers,...

A devastating new Health and Human Services (HHS) Inspector General report released on Tuesday reveals that the Obama administration has yet to determine whether 1,295,571 of the over 8 million Obamacare enrollees are U.S. citizens lawfully in the country. The finding, located on page 11 of the report, states that 44% of the remaining 2,611,780 application "inconsistencies" are related to verifying "Citizenship/national status/lawful presence." Another 960,492 application inconsistencies were related to verifying whether subsidy applicants provided accurate income information.

WASHINGTON — Federal officials can’t resolve 85 percent of 2.9 million “inconsistencies” on applications for ObamaCare even after nine months of trying, according to new data provided by the administration. Most of the problems involve certifying citizenship and income, key components of the national health plan. But some of the problems are downright nutty. One unidentified state-run marketplace cited situations in which infants and young children were “erroneously identified as incarcerated, according to federal data,” the inspector general for the Health and Human Services Department revealed Tuesday. Just 425,000 problematic applications have been resolved out of 2.9 million that states...

Accountability: Two new audits reveal failures in ObamaCare on a scale even we didn't think possible, with unresolved discrepancies, rules violations and technology problems that expose taxpayers to massive overpayments. In the first of a series of ObamaCare audits, the Health and Human Services inspector general found 2.9 million "inconsistencies" in applications submitted to the federal HealthCare.gov exchange in the first five months of open enrollment. In other words, the Social Security numbers, income, family size, citizenship or other information applicants provided didn't match existing government data. Some 1.3 million of the problems involved citizenship, and an additional million involved...

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...

NORMAN, Okla.-- As expected the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in favor of Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood on Monday. To be clear this case was not decided to any degree on the basis of the First Amendment. The ruling was based entirely on statutory grounds of the The Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (RFRA) which prevents the “Government [from] substantially burden[ing] a person’s exercise of religion even if the burden results from a rule of general applicability” unless the Government “demonstrates that application of the burden to the person—(1) is in furtherance of a compelling governmental interest; and (2)...

Two new reports from the Health and Human Services Department's Inspector General say the new federal healthcare insurance market is having trouble verifying whether people are eligible for the health insurance they are receiving, or the federal subsidies that help them pay their premiums. One of the two Health and Human Services inspector general reports found 2.9 million inconsistencies in the federal marketplace. It said the federal marketplace was unable to resolve 2.6 million of them because the Centers of Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) system for determining eligibility was “not fully operational.” The reports looked at the exchanges between...

Time to check in on the Healthcare.gov quagmire, where health department officials are facing 2.6 million "inconsistencies" — places where information submitted on an application failed to match government records — that were supposed to be resolved months ago. Income and citizenship status are causing the most problems, followed by employer-sponsored minimum coverage, Social Security number, non-employer sponsored minimum coverage, incarceration status, and Native American status. All these factors affect an applicant's eligibility for insurance and subsidies. The department expected some applicants would have problems with their applications, either due to errors or deliberate lies, and it budgeted 90 days...

ACTON (CBS) – “He was steadfast. He took care of us, all of these years.” Suzanne Chase of Acton was talking about her husband, Doug, a Vietnam veteran who was diagnosed with a brain tumor in 2011. In 2012, she tried to move his medical care to the Veterans Affairs hospital in Bedford. “It was so difficult for him to take the ambulance ride into Boston, we wanted to be closer.” They waited about four months and never heard anything. Then Douglas Chase died in August 2012. But two weeks ago, he got a letter, from the VA in Bedford,...

Brandon Webb, a former U.S. Navy SEAL and now Editor-in-Chief of SOFREP.com, posted a sobering article today on the failures of the State Department in regards to our former military contractors working overseas. Brandon tells us the story of a CIA paramilitary and former Navy SEAL, Matthew Wojciechowski, who, while on TDY (temporary duty assignment) in ‎the Middle East, endured severe chest pains while on a mission. Instead of the medical professionals at the U.S. Embassy assisting him, they performed a stress test on him, took his vitals and sent him back to work. They denied him further treatment, leaving...

Today, the Supreme Court ruled that people cannot be forced by the government to provide contraception if it specifically conflicted with their religious beliefs, and that unions cannot force non-members to give them money. Liberals showed their knowledge of current events by saying that the justices who ruled in favor of Hobby Lobby were "five white men," despite the fact that one of them, Clarence Thomas, is black. In case you are liberal and don't know who Clarence Thomas is, here is a picture of him: Despite the fact that Mr. Thomas is not white, uneducated liberals (who, I remind...

Health Reform: After years of singing the praises of universal health care, college professors are now shocked at how badly it has turned out — for them. Adjunct professors are steamed at the way their employers are interpreting the Affordable Care Act's employer mandate, which forces them to cover full-time but not part-time workers. Typical of liberals, they blame their employers instead of the job-killing law they supported. Starting Jan. 1, ObamaCare makes employers offer all full-time workers health insurance or pay a fine. In response, hundreds of colleges have simply cut instructors' course loads to dodge coverage. Others are...

Climate change is happening, and with that will come more deaths from heat-related illness and disease, according to a report released Tuesday. The report, spearheaded and funded by investor and philanthropist Thomas Steyer, former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, examines many of the effects of climate change for business and individuals. "One of the most striking findings in our analysis is that increasing heat and humidity in some parts of the country could lead to outside conditions that are literally unbearable to humans, who must maintain a skin temperature below 95°F in order to...

For ordinary consumers, the answer varies. A lot of Americans who never had insurance before have indeed been able to find health coverage AND health care, (they're two different things, after all). But a lot of Americas have lost their previous plans, and now they're having trouble finding actual doctors to treat them even under their more expensive coverage. Whether the ACA has actually helped more citizens than it's hurt has turned into a partisan war of statistics. That war will be waged for years to come. While I believe the new law will ultimately hurt more people than it...

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?

Enrollment: ObamaCare loyalists are trumpeting a new Kaiser Family Foundation survey finding that more than half of those who enrolled had been uninsured. But the survey's findings are nothing to cheer about. First, nobody knows exactly how many ObamaCare enrollees were previously uninsured, because the administration didn't bother to ask for that information when people signed up. So it's been up to pollsters to figure out what happened, and previous surveys showed that only a small percentage of ObamaCare sign-ups came from the ranks of the uninsured. The new Kaiser survey, in contrast, found that 57% of those getting coverage...

While it is satisfying to watch Barack Hussein Obama’s presidency coming apart, it has made him a dangerous enemy who will strike without warning. He is being exposed as a fraud and the pressure of being found out is driving him to be increasingly reckless and dangerous. He’s quickly morphing into something resembling a wounded animal. His latest assault on us, his American enemies, involves erasing our Southern border to allow tens of thousands of unaccompanied illegal alien children and gang members to walk in, sit down and start demanding whatever they think they are entitled to get. We’re hearing...

This week the Associated Press reported that an audit of the Department of Veterans Affairs showed that more than 57,000 patients are still waiting for initial appointments more than 90 days after requesting them. An additional 64,000 are enrolled, but have never seen a doctor. The audit also found that 13 percent of VA schedulers said their supervisors told them to lie about wait times so they seemed shorter. One veteran told CBS News, "It's always poor service. I think I've gotten better service at the DMV." For anyone still doubting how seriously the situation at the VA has...

The Americans who qualify for tax credits through the new federal insurance exchange are paying an average of $82 a month in premiums for their coverage — about one-fourth the bill they would have faced without such financial help, according to a new government analysis. But the analysis shows wide variations among states in the premiums that people are paying for their new insurance, the amount the government is picking up and the proportion who qualify for the subsidies. The 28-page report, by the Department of Health and Human Services, is the government’s first effort to gauge the affordability and...

If you could pick any healthcare system in the world, it probably wouldn’t be the U.S.’s. According to a new report from The Commonwealth Fund, titled “Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, 2014 Update: How the U.S. Health Care System Compares Internationally,� the U.S healthcare system is the most costly in the world, but it ranks poorly compared to other countries on most measures of performance.Among the 11 nations assessed by The Commonwealth Fund — Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK and the U.S. — the U.S. ranks last, as it did in four...

The embattled Phoenix branch of the Department of Veterans Affairs apparently has paid out $10 million in bonuses during the past three years, far more than previously reported. The Arizona Republic obtained and published the bonus records after seeking them from the VA for months. The documents showed 4,188 bonuses were paid in that period to more than 2,150 employees.

In 1968 when I enlisted, my enlistment contract guaranteed me that for the rest of my life I could be seen at any VA hospital or clinic for free for the rest of my life on a tier system. 1st. To be seen were service connected disabilities. 2nd to be seen were active duty personnel and their families. 3rd. And last to be seen were all other veterans. You could walk-in and wait and you may have to wait all day but you would be seen by a doctor. All medications were free at any veterans hospital or clinic, no...