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'They should not be ridiculed, vilified, or worse' Air Force medical providers and support staff assigned to COVID Theater Hospital-1 arrive for a farewell ceremony hosted by the staff of Eisenhower Hospital, Rancho Mirage, California, Aug. 28, 2020. (U.S. Army photo by Lt. Col. Charles Calio) At a Senate hearing, six prominent physicians called for removing obstacles to outpatient therapies for COVID-19 they contend are saving lives. The testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs on Tuesday was the second part a hearing organized by Chairman Ron Johnson titled "Early Outpatient Treatment: An Essential Part...

Health insurance premiums in California are expected to rise nearly 18 percent in 2019 as a result of federal policy changes enacted by Congress and the Trump administration, according to an analysis released Monday by the Urban Institute left-leaning think tank.

Congressional Republicans were one step closer to realizing their hopes for tax reform on Thursday as it appeared as though the House and Senate had reconciled nearly all of the legislation. Hearing the recommendations and concerns of the public, the Republicans preserved the current tax codeÂ’s deductions for student loans, medical bills, and added a $10,000 cap for state and local taxes. But of the three major network news outlets, NBC was the only one that left them out of their evening broadcast. Instead of reporting what was known to be in the GOP tax reform bill, NBC Nightly News...

With the Senate GOP on the verge of passing their version of tax reform on Thursday, NBC Nightly News continued their week-long series where they claimed to break down the tax bills. But in reality, they only sought to stoke the fears of those who weren’t familiar with it. “Once aligned with the House version, it will affect your take-home pay as it adds new credits, takes away some popular deductions and slashes corporate taxes,” announced Anchor Lester Holt at the top of the program, as Capitol Hill Correspondent Kasie Hunt bemoaned how Democrats had no input.After Holt suggested that...

The 2016 election offered lots of lessons to Democrats about the nature and temperature of the electorate. Elizabeth Warren thinks she has diagnosed exactly what they want and need for 2018 and 2020, and has gone on a tour of Massachusetts working-class communities to lay out her vision. However, the Wall Street Journal report on her campaign exposes an amusing — and likely fatal — contradiction at the heart of her message: So far, so good. Donald Trump’s voters — the ones Warren wants to win back for Democrats — really distrust Washington and the political elite. What does Warren...

On Friday’s Morning Joe, MSNBC panelist Donny Deutsch pushed the typical liberal “tax cuts for the rich” narrative as he slammed the Republican health care reform bill: "The other side of the aisle will call this as a redistribution of wealth. Obviously, parties are given to hyperbole, but the reality according to the Center [for] Tax Policy is that 90 percent of the benefits in this plan go to families making $700,000 a year or more, the one percent. That is a fiscal reality." He demanded of Senator Rand Paul (R-KY): "How do you explain that to some of the...

In order to rebut some letters to our local paper, I need the total number of medical insurance companies that have either, pulled out of counties or states, or have raised their premiums in the same. Need sources of the above.

Guy has written extensively on the death spiral of Obamacare. From rising premiums, loss of insurance, and health care companies feeling the financial squeeze, President Obama’s health care overhaul is crumbling. In North Carolina, Blue Cross Blue Shield, which is the state’s largest insurer that offers Obamacare plans to all of its 100 counties, says the financial losses have been immense. CEO Brad Wilson told The News and Observer in February of 2016: “In year one [2014], five percent of our ACA customers consumed $830 million in health care costs. That’s how much money went out of our door to...

UnitedHealth cured the Ingenix stigma by simply changing its name to OptumInsight. It’s as though they made a deal with a witness protection program. Like other large medical insurers, over the years, they sustain fines for federal racketeering, skirt state laws by systematically reducing, denying and delaying payments owed to doctors for medical care and pay fines in the billions and still they continue on! Who dispenses Medicare and ACA money? Who controls the prices that the exchanges charge? And who is operating the very workings of the exchanges? That would be the leaders of the pack, UnitedHealth and Optum....

* Many CEOs are angry with the Obama administration thanks to three new cases challenging parts of his 'wellness program' * In order to participate in the 'wellness program' and receive a low health care rate under Obamacare, employees must take a physical * Now it is being argued in three cases that forcing someone to take a physical for work violates the Americans with Disabilities Act * The CEOs now have a number of ways they can undermine Obama because of this developmentLeading U.S. CEOs, angered by the Obama administration's challenge to certain 'workplace wellness' programs, are threatening to...

Next year, 35 percent of uninsured people would rather pay the upped fine for not having health insurance than buy Obamacare coverage — up 6 points from this time last year, when the penalty was hundreds of dollars lower. According to a Gallup poll released Thursday, 55 percent of the uninsured said they’re planning on getting coverage in 2015, but 35 percent are fine with just paying the individual mandate’s tax on going uninsured. In November 2013, just 29 percent of the uninsured said they were willing to pay the $95 fine in 2014 for remaining uninsured. But in 2015,...

On Friday, the Supreme Court issued a one-paragraph order in Little Sisters of the Poor et al v. Sebeluis et al. It told the Sisters that for the case to continue with no enforcement of the Affordable Care Act's contraception mandate, they need only to inform the government in writing "that they are non-profit organizations that hold themselves out as religious and have religious objections to providing coverage for contraceptive services." That's easy, because that's what they are, and that's their position. As a result, the government has been "enjoined from enforcing against the applicants the challenged provisions of the...

"Obama approval ratings turn around," exulted the msnbc.com landing page headline for Traci G. Lee's January 9 story, "Positive start to 2014 for Obama: poll." Lee set about spinning the results of the latest Quinnipiac Poll, which shows President Obama sitting atop a 41 percent approval rating, up from a low of 38 percent in December, but still a net negative approval rating. Lee used the slight uptick in approval as a springboard to forecast that the president's economically liberal spending agenda could change his and his party's fortunes (emphasis mine): Obama is likely to use his upcoming State of...

So it's come to this. During the past week, the Associated Press reported today, "Federal health officials," meaning "the Obama administration," began "urging" (i.e., "telling") counselors and navigators around the country to stop using paper applications for Obamacare coverage, "because of concerns those applications would not be processed in time." It seems that either Team Obama or AP (my money is on AP) doesn't mind risking criticism for waiting to let this news out until a weather- and sports-dominated Saturday. It's apparently okay to keep those who don't know any better, i.e., those who went to the trouble of printing...

Maybe the folks running the HealthCare.gov call centers don't have an enemies list. Instead, based on the experience of Fox News's Jim Angle, it might be an enemies directory, with anyone they're aware of in the media and perhaps other organizations included therein. That's what one almost has to think based on the experience Angle relayed via Twitter Friday (HT Twitchy; individual Angle tweets are here, here, and here): The body of Angle's report was also important, because it showed how another aspect of President Obama's core promise to the Americans people — this time, it was "If you like...

Friday's Poll Do you support the Affordable Care Act? Yes No

When Sean Recchi, a 42-year-old from Lancaster, Ohio, was told last March that he had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, his wife Stephanie knew she had to get him to MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Stephanie’s father had been treated there 10 years earlier, and she and her family credited the doctors and nurses at MD Anderson with extending his life by at least eight years. Stephanie was then told by a billing clerk that the estimated cost of Sean’s visit — just to be examined for six days so a treatment plan could be devised — would be $48,900, due in...

Dr. Susan Rutten Wasson sits on the corner of a bed in the cramped bedroom of Alice Johnson, a 91-year-old Osakis resident everyone calls "Grandma Alice." She's examining Johnson's arm, which is swollen, she's determined, because of a tight sleeve cuff. Also in the room are Alice's daughter, Ione, and granddaughter, Anne, who lives downstairs in the farmhouse Johnson has occupied for decades. A Rottweiler mix as big as a Shetland licks the face of 18-month-old Sarah, Rutten Wasson's daughter, who sits on the doctor's lap. It's more a scene from the days of frontier medicine than from the modern...

The doctor was the victim of "bad luck," medical board saysThe state Board of Medicine has ruled a South Florida surgeon, who took out a healthy kidney instead of a gallbladder during an operation, wasn't inept or careless. The board said Bernard Zaragoza is a good doctor, but he had bad luck. We'd say it was the patient who had the worst luck. The unidentified man died of heart failure three weeks after the surgery. In 2007, Zaragoza operated on an 83-year-old patient who was having some internal issues in Miramar. The patient's kidney was located where his gallbladder should...

Note: The following text is a quote: THE BRIEFING ROOM THE WHITE HOUSE Office of the Press Secretary ______________________________________________________________________ FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE July 7, 2009 Statement from the President on Health Care Reform "I am pleased by the progress we're making on health care reform and still believe, as I've said before, that one of the best ways to bring down costs, provide more choices, and assure quality is a public option that will force the insurance companies to compete and keep them honest. I look forward to a final product that achieves these very important goals." ###