Free Republic

Why thieves love America’s health-care system! INVESTIGATORS in New York were looking for health-care fraud hot-spots. Agents suggested Oceana, a cluster of luxury condos in Brighton Beach. The 865-unit complex had a garage full of Porsches and Aston Martins—and 500 residents claiming Medicaid, which is meant for the poor and disabled. Though many claims had been filed legitimately, some looked iffy. Last August six residents were charged. Within weeks another 150 had stopped claiming assistance, says Robert Byrnes, one of the investigators. Health care is a tempting target for thieves. Medicaid doles out $415 billion a year; Medicare (a federal...

Health care is at the front line in a power play for America. A White House official announced Wednesday that the Trump administration will continue President Barack Obama’s unconstitutional payment of cost-sharing reduction (CSR) subsidies to insurers through August.Despite outward appearances and media commentary, this is not ultimately about health care. The Affordable Care Act is focused on nationwide leveling of American incomes. Redistribution of workers’ wages is taking place through skyrocketing premium subsidies and billions in illegal CSR subsidies.Congress never appropriated money for CSR payments, which are estimated to be around $10 billion in 2018. The payments are...

Now that President Trump has signaled his support for the RAISE Act, many Americans are being forced to think about the merits and pitfalls of our legal immigration system. One important problem that has received no attention is how the large-scale immigration of foreign physicians has contributed to the atrophying of our medical schools. Specifically, America’s universities can no longer train enough medical practitioners to meet the nation’s healthcare demands—America relies on the immigration of foreign professionals to maintain its healthcare system, and standard of living. In a sense, we rely on imported physicians like we rely on foreign oil....

President Donald Trump continued his attacks against individual Senate Republicans, criticizing Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.) and his pivotal health-care vote at a news conference Tuesday at Trump Tower in New York City.

The Politics of Theft, Medical System Style This column demands a response, so here you go."There is nothing more we can do here. We tried everything else, and now it's time to do the right thing (ed: Single Payer). It's the American way."Well, let's see. I count three lies in three sentences, four if you call "Single Payer" the American Way. Let's start with the first: There is nothing we can do here. Sure there is. We could start with my one sentence extortion-stopping bill.. We could then follow up with the linked bill outline from that article, which you...

BRUNSWICK, Ga. — The long August congressional recess, which Republicans hoped would begin a conversation about tax reform and must-pass budget measures, has so far seen another round of angry town halls focused on President Trump and the stalled effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Over just one day, in three small towns along Georgia’s Atlantic coastline, Rep. Earl L. “Buddy” Carter (R-Ga.) spent more than four hours answering 74 questions, many of them heated. Just three focused on tax reform; nearly half of all questions focused on health care. “We did our job in the House,” Carter said...

Ancient Egyptians, employing an arduous system of hieroglyphics to represent numbers in their ignorance of zero, displayed a man holding his hands over his head for 1,000,000 in seeming astonishment that numbers ran so high. Americans presented with our national health care bill increasing resemble that hieroglyphic. We average more than $10,000 per person this year in health care expenses. This collectively amounts to more than $3 trillion, a figure approximating nearly a fifth of our gross domestic product. Few nations pay even half that portion, and similar nations do not expend anything close to such an exorbitantly high percentage...

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While some Americans, including politicians, continue to push for single-payer healthcare, a Canadian is helping people in his country get care in America – because the healthcare system where he lives, he says, "simply does not work." As many people know, Canada has single-payer healthcare. That means the government runs and controls the delivery of all healthcare. Under that system, people wanting plastic surgery – for example – would foot the bill; but procedures, including cardiac bypass, can be done, albeit not always in a timely manner. Will liberals in America ever be convinced that single-payer (government-run) healthcare isn't the...

Minster for Health Bent Høie of Norway’s governing Høyre (Conservative) party has promised broadened healthcare options should the party continue to govern after the upcoming general election.

CARSON CITY, Nev. (KOLO) - Nevada Insurance Commissioner Barbara Richardson issued the following statement in response to a request by Anthem under Nevada Revised Statute 679B.190(5)(b) regarding Anthem’s announcement that it will be withdrawing plans from Nevada’s Exchange in 2018: “On July 28, 2017, Anthem submitted a Notice of Intent to withdraw from the Silver State Exchange for Plan Year 2018. As such, Anthem will no longer have a presence in Nevada’s individual health market with the exception of catastrophic plans which can only be purchased off the Exchange throughout the state. These plans restrict availability to consumers under 30...

The slippery slope is real.  Once the state gets in the business of killing off its citizens via euthanasia, the brutal logic of economics works its way through the system.  In Canada, which legalized euthanasia just over a year ago, one of the most important forums for political discussion, Maclean's Magazine, published an article arguing that doctors ought to be paid a premium for killing off euthanizing terminal patients. And of course, it was all so reasonable in tone.  It really is a lot of work for the doctors, you see. Most providers need to meet with their patient a couple times...

Virginia GOP donor Bob Heghmann, a retired attorney, filed a lawsuit Thursday against the Republican National Committee (RNC) and Virginia Republican Party to get his donations back after the Senate’s failed attempt to repeal and replace Obamacare. Heghman argues that the groups should apply more pressure on lawmakers to complete health care reform or return campaign donations, as members of Congress have failed to deliver on their top campaign promise. The suit alleges that the Republican Party “has been engaged in a pattern of racketeering which involves massive fraud perpetrated on Republican voters and contributors as well as some Independents...

Every few years, the media gets low on ammo and decides they’re going to make a collective push to talk about bringing a single-payer healthcare system to the United States. And every few years, people who understand economics and business have to point out to them that it won’t work. This is one of those times. What is Single-Payer Healthcare, Anyway? When a term gets used so frequently for so long, it’s easy for there to be some misunderstanding. While the idea of single-payer healthcare gets thrown around a lot, would you be surprised that many people don’t even...

It wasn’t that long ago when one of the reasons people from the US were afraid to move to places like Mexico and Panama was because of the fear of substandard healthcare. Now, one of the reasons people from the US do move to places like Mexico and Panama is because of access to what is generally acknowledged to be comparable quality healthcare at a discount of from 50% to 75%+. In our study, Expat Report: How is Healthcare Abroad? we asked expats who had moved to Panama, Nicaragua and Belize their opinions on the cost of healthcare they received...

The death of little Charlie Gard in England's single-payer health care system should be a lesson to the millions of people advocating for such a system here in the United States.So many aspects of that case horrified me. It wasn't that the government said that it could no longer justify spending additional money on Charlie's care; that's to be expected in a system of rationed care (which is what single-payer is).No, it was that Charlie's parents were forbidden from taking him elsewhere for care at their own expense. In a very real sense, Chris Gard and Connie Yates lost de...

Thank you Senator McCain for standing up for the people of Arizona and voting against the bad health care bill.

The National Institutes of Health has chosen four community partners to join its All of Us precision medicine research program, which seeks to gather data from at least one million people in the United States to improve health. The program is part of the Precision Medicine Initiative created by President Barack Obama in 2015 and was formerly known as the PMI Cohort. The partners will receive a combined $1.7 million to raise awareness about the research program among African Americans, Hispanics and Latinos, seniors and the LGBTQ communities. Researchers will use the data collected from the program to learn how...

After fighting Republicans tooth-and-nail for years on their plans to repeal and replace ObamaCare, Democrats have in a matter of days started touting a slew of proposals aimed at improving the ailing health care system. The Democrats’ scramble to tackle the problem comes after Senate Republicans endured a high-profile failure on their so-called ‘skinny repeal’ replacement bill last week, leaving unclear whether Republicans can ever get the votes to go it alone on health care. Given the difficulty in locking down GOP support, some Republicans have welcomed the prospect of bipartisan talks. At the same time, some Democratic ideas --...

One in four terminally ill people who need expert end-of-life care are not receiving it because of funding pressures, the hospice movement has told Sky News. Hospice UK said as many as 118,000 people in the UK with terminal or life-limiting conditions are not able to access palliative care from its members. On average, hospices most of which are charities, receive just one-third of their funding from the NHS and rely on donations, shops, bequests and investments for the rest. Hospice UK said two-thirds of hospices had their NHS funding cut or frozen last year. It argues that with more...