Free Republic

April 12, 2012 No Obamacare Exchanges Whatever SCOTUS does, states should refuse to create exchanges. By Michael F. Cannon Obamacare had a bad couple of days before the Supreme Court — so bad that President Obama made some ill-considered comments about the Court from which he still hasn’t totally backpedaled. Though the oral arguments over the individual mandate and severability were encouraging, we cannot count on the Supremes to kill Obamacare. Opponents must keep fighting it on all fronts. The most important front right now is to ensure that states do not create the health-insurance exchanges Obamacare needs in order to...

When restaurant customers learned that the waiter they called Angel was in the hospital with kidney failure, they stuffed bills into a collection jar to help support his family. His brother offered something more precious: a healthy kidney to restore his life. But for two years, the obstacles to the transplant seemed insuperable. Angel, the father of two American-born children, is an illegal immigrant. And a maze of conflicting health care and immigration policies meant that while the government would pay for a lifetime of dialysis, costing $75,000 yearly, it would not pay for a $100,000 transplant that would make...

State lawmakers have advanced a bill that would restore prenatal care to mothers who lost Medicaid coverage two years ago, including illegal immigrants. Sen. Kathy Campbell of Lincoln sponsors LB 599, saying that Nebraska’s practice of funding prenatal care of the unborn child of poor women should return, including the unborn child of an illegal immigrant. “The child will be a U.S. citizen at its birth,” Campbell stated in her opening. “Would we not want that child to be healthy? Would we not want healthy babies?” Nebraska had provided prenatal care through Medicaid until 2010 when federal officials objected. Approximately...

On Monday the Supreme Court begins three days of oral arguments concerning possible — actually, probable and various — constitutional infirmities in Obamacare. The justices have received many amicus briefs, one of which merits special attention because of the elegant scholarship and logic with which it addresses an issue that has not been as central to the debate as it should be. Hitherto, most attention has been given to whether Congress, under its constitutional power to regulate interstate commerce, may coerce individuals into engaging in commerce by buying health insurance. Now the Institute for Justice (IJ), a libertarian public interest...

Hormone treatments for transgendered detainees, abortion services and extensive outlets for complaints — these are just a few of the reasons Texas Republican House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Lamar Smith is not pleased with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) recently released Performance-Based National Detention Standards (PBNDS). In the spirit of detention reform, in 2011, for the first time since 2008, ICE finished its revision of detention standards for those being held for being in the country illegally. Those new standards were released this month. ICE has already started to implement the changes. “PBNDS 2011 is crafted to improve...

Without a new kidney, Jesus Navarro will die. Although the Oakland man has a willing donor and private insurance to pay for the transplant, he faces an additional hurdle in the race to save his life: He is an illegal immigrant. That fact prompted administrators at UC San Francisco Medical Center to refuse to transplant a kidney from Navarro's wife because they cannot be sure he will receive adequate follow-up care. Their decision taps into the tension between health care and immigration policies in the state and the role medical professionals should play in trying to save the lives of...

GALVESTON — Two months ago Francisco Martinez feared the University of Texas Medical Branch would ship him back to Mexico with a broken back and an uncertain fate because he is undocumented. Instead of going to Mexico, three days before Christmas he moved from his hospital bed at UTMB into temporary housing in Houston with his family.

Herman Cain spoke with passion and conviction today before a Capitol Hill audience about the essential importance of repealing Obamacare and replacing it with “market-driven, patient-centered reform.” He spoke at a forum organized by the Congressional Health Care Caucus, chaired by Texas Rep. Michael Burgess, M.D., that was inundated with dozens of reporters and televisions cameras. They got a big dose of health reform when what they really wanted was to ask him about the National Restaurant Association sexual-harassment controversy. He didn’t take those questions. Instead, he talked about the destructive impact of Obamacare, which is driving up costs and...

PHOENIX - He collapsed while playing soccer, and now he's on life support -- but his wife says the hospital wants to ship him to Mexico. A few days makes the difference between a man receiving state-assisted medical care and possibly being shipped off to Mexico on life support. When Jesus Cornelio collapsed and fell into a coma, he didn't have his papers. A few days later, they arrived in the mail. Jesus and Evelyn grew up on the same street, became friends, later high school sweethearts, and recently newlyweds. At 23, Evelyn is a non profit worker that cannot...

A longtime federal fugitive who was an undocumented immigrant cost taxpayers more than $350,000 in healthcare at Miami-Dade hospitals before he died last year, a county investigative report has revealed. The Miami-Dade Office of the Inspector General said the patient was a Colombian who fled the United States in 1983 after a cocaine smuggling conviction but returned under a false name. In 26 visits to the Jackson Health System from 2003 through 2010, his care cost $201,716 — $155,334 in charity care paid by Miami-Dade taxpayers and $46,382 paid by Medicaid, the state-federal program for the poor. The man also...

ATLANTA (AP) — Atlanta's safety net hospital on Wednesday reached an agreement with a private dialysis provider to continue treating a group of indigent patients, some of whom became critically ill after their life-sustaining treatment was cut off last week when a previous contract expired.

Twenty-two former Grady Memorial Hospital patients, many of them uninsured illegal immigrants, had potential life-saving dialysis treatments discontinued Thursday after a contract between the hospital and a national dialysis provider expired.Most of the patients, because they are in the country illegally, don’t qualify for Medicare, which covers dialysis for most Americans with end-stage renal disease. Without regular dialysis, experts say, people suffering from the disease can die within weeks. The emergency room is now the immigrants’ only option, said Dorothy Leone-Glasser, president of the nonprofit Advocates for Responsible Care. “These patients are left in a very dangerous situation,” she said....

A new survey of 368 midsize to large companies found that 29% of them are considering terminating their active employee health care plans when Obamacare is full implemented in 2014. Only 71% of employers surveyed said they did not expect to drop their health coverage, while 20% said they did not know and 9% said they were planning to exit.The latest survey, conducted by Towers Watson, echoes an ealier survey by McKinsey & Co. finding that 30% of private-sector employers were planning to drop their employee health insurance coverage by 2014. When the Congressional Budget Office crunched Obamacare's spending numbers,...

Being told you have a cavity is one of the most cringe-worthy bits of information that could ever grace your ears. Going under the dentist's drill to have a pearly white repaired is expensive, time-consuming, and sometimes painful, but that may soon change thanks to researchers at the University of Leeds' School of Chemistry. A high-tech fluid is being developed there that could help your teeth repair themselves before they ever become a problem. [...]

Latest performance data reveal number of English patients waiting more than 18 weeks has risen by 26% in last year. New NHS performance data reveal that the number of people in England who are being forced to wait more than 18 weeks has risen by 26% in the last year, while the number who had to wait longer than six months has shot up by 43%. ... The British Medical Association said the longer waits and fewer treatments were inevitable: "Given the massive financial pressures on the NHS, it was always likely that hospital activity would decrease and waiting times...

Uh-oh. "O: A Presidential Novel," written by Anonymous and published by Simon & Schuster — otherwise known as Simon & Sh-h-h-h — has journalists chafing to speculate on who or what is behind the cheeky fiction centered on the upcoming 2012 presidential election. The Democrat-blue-hued cover features a golden O and a pair of sky blue ears; the publisher already has confabulated reader polls that plumb opinion of President Obama and the political affiliation of the mysterious scribe, who could easily be, oh, White House adviser David Plouffe. Also included: a waggish list of those who did not write the...

(ORDER LIST: 562 U.S.) MONDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 2010 CERTIORARI DENIED 10-446 KERCHNER, CHARLES, ET AL. V. OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF U.S., ET AL. The motion of Western Center for Journalism for leave to file a brief as amicus curiae is granted. The petition for a writ of certiorari is denied.

This is breaking on Huffington Post. I looked at the comments and don't believe Palins kids said these things. The comments are private on facebook with Palins kids. Bristol supposedly commented on a comment from one of Willows classmate who posted on Facebook that Sarah Palins Alaska would fail. Willow then chimed in and called the guy a faggot and then went on a tirade back and forth as other people joined in the argument slandering Sarah and bringing up the Nailin Palin porn video and also calling Bristol fat. Again I personally believe all this Facebook page is fabricated...

Two weeks ago Shout Bits discussed the perverse consequences of Obamacare – the elimination of health care options for individuals. Because of Obamacare’s many mandates, no private insurer can profitably offer new individual policies, so carriers are leaving the marketplace en masse. Further evidence that Obamacare will destroy private insurance and force individuals into a single payer system was delivered by Humana this week in a Letter outlining how Obamacare will limit choices for individual policy holders. A highlight of the letter is the new concept of ‘grandfathered’ plans. Essentially, Humana acknowledges that new policies will be much more expensive...

Chris Nelson, who's retiring after two terms as South Dakota's secretary of state to challenge Rep. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin (D-S.D.), gets asked by Kevin Woster whether he believes President Obama is a citizen of the United States. Nelson doesn't know. [M]eeting the constitutional qualifications to be President is a very important issue. If President Obama isn’t constitutionally qualified, it would be the biggest scam ever perpetuated on the American people. MANY people contacted me as Secretary of State prior to and after the election asking how Obama could be on our ballot given this controversy. Absent a court finding that...