Free Republic

President Obama’s most recent budget request would reduce borrowing by $1.1 trillion over the next decade compared with current law -- almost entirely through higher taxes on the rich, large estates and smokers, congressional budget analysts said Friday. In addition to raising nearly $1 trillion in new taxes, the president’s blueprint would also cut spending modestly, according to the analysis by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. However, those savings include money the government never intended to spend anyway, such as a contingency fund for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and nearly $300 billion in unneeded disaster relief. Obama also...

President Hollande of France recently got a whiff of what is coming from an open letter addressed to him by a 20-year old student named Clara G. “This will probably shock you, but it is mainly for fiscal reasons,… simply because I do not feel like working all my life to pay taxes, a large part of which will only service the 1.9 trillion Euros of debt that your generation has kindly left us. If these borrowings had at least been invested to prepare the future of the country, if I was getting a small benefit from them, it would...

Executive Summary Unlawful immigration and amnesty for current unlawful immigrants can pose large fiscal costs for U.S. taxpayers. Government provides four types of benefits and services that are relevant to this issue: Direct benefits. These include Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance, and workers’ compensation. Means-tested welfare benefits. There are over 80 of these programs which, at a cost of nearly $900 billion per year, provide cash, food, housing, medical, and other services to roughly 100 million low-income Americans. Major programs include Medicaid, food stamps, the refundable Earned Income Tax Credit, public housing, Supplemental Security Income, and Temporary Assistance for Needy...

During the health care debate, liberals argued that government had to a moral duty to enact legislation that expanded health insurance among lower-income individuals. But a landmark study published in the New England Journal of Medicine dramatically undermines this assumption and shatters the rationale behind the law’s Medicaid expansion. In 2008, Oregon expanded its Medicaid program, but because the state could not cover everybody, lawmakers opened up a lottery that randomly drew 30,000 names from a waiting list of almost 90,000 and allowed them to apply for the program. This created a unique opportunity for health researchers, ultimately allowing them...

Medicare Already Means-Tested, Retirement Expert Says 01 May 2013 The Obama administration's controversial proposal to "means-test" Medicare recipients is ostensibly aimed at generating more cash for the government from those who can afford it - or squeezing more money out of upper-income seniors, depending upon one's point of view. But according to a University of Illinois expert on retirement benefits, the Medicare program is already means-tested. Law professor Richard L. Kaplan says whenever the issue of cutting Medicare emerges, one of the first ideas to "fix" the program is to make its upper-income beneficiaries pay more. "Indeed, the claim is...

If you want a glimpse into the future of Obamacare, take a look at the hospital where I was born, in a small coal-mining and smelting factory town outside of Pittsburgh. The mines and factories closed down long ago, and while fracking is bringing some new, younger faces into the area, it’s still mostly comprised of seniors and low-income people. Consequently, the local hospital relies heavily on Medicare and Medicaid payments, and it’s going bankrupt. A white knight then appeared in the form of Highmark, part of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association. And as of April 30, Blue...

In late 2010, Dr. Grady Snyder saw the writing on the wall. He was burned out, his revenue was shrinking and it was getting too expensive to run his rural practice in Pueblo, Colo. It was time to quit. On August 19, 2011, Snyder sold his practice to a local hospital 30 miles away. "I gave up on health care in America," he said. Later that year, he moved to Australia and took up rural medicine there. The choice was heart-wrenching for Snyder. He didn't want to feel like he was abandoning his nearly 5,000 patients, and he'd been the...

6 arrested in alleged kickback scheme at Sacred Heart Hospital April 16, 2013|By Jason Meisner | Tribune reporter An elderly man was admitted to Sacred Heart Hospital on Chicago's West Side in late February, intubated and sedated for more than a week and scheduled for an emergency tracheotomy even though it was medically unnecessary, federal prosecutors allege. After a hospital administrator raised questions, the surgery was postponed. Later that day, the administrator asked the longtime owner of the hospital, Edward Novak, if he was upset about the cancellation. "Tell me about it! Tell me about it!" Novak allegedly replied. What...

Per rules, AP stories cannot be posted. Rundown is that the lack of payments from insurers and Medicare is causing doctors to leave the island and leaving residents in a serious situation where there are not enough doctors to provide services.

If you watch daytime TV or have been stuck watching daytime TV while visiting your parents, surely you’re familiar with The Scooter Store. The power wheelchair vendor has had some trouble lately, including accusations of Medicare and Medicaid fraud, a raid by the FBI, and even a lawsuit from the company’s hometown, of New Braunfels, Texas. The company laid off most of its employees, and plans to deal directly with health care providers, rather than blanketing the airwaves and selling directly to consumers. Those investigations came after a scathing investigative piece by CBS News about the company. (Warning: the video...

Is ObamaCare the reform to end all other reforms? The massive health care law's problems are well known. Major tax hikes and Medicare cuts will fund a massive new government program rather than shore up the nation's finances. ObamaCare already is encouraging companies to cut jobs and work hours. With the administration delaying the insurance exchanges that might help small businesses until 2015, even ObamaCare cheerleaders are growing worried. And the law will leave tens of millions of Americans without health coverage. That's the best-case scenario, the government's own estimates agree. But ObamaCare doesn't just roil the health care system....

I never paid much attention to what Roger Ebert said about movies. Given that I usually take-in only three or four films a year, Ebert’s analysis of any particular film or actor or “scene” just wasn’t going to be something that would capture my attention. But the final seven years or so of Ebert’s life offer some seriously thoughtful and thought provoking lessons, for those who still care to learn. Whether you reside on the right or left side of the political and cultural aisle doesn’t much matter. Consider some of the facts of Ebert’s final years, and the implications...

Cancer clinics across the country have begun turning away thousands of Medicare patients, blaming the sequester budget cuts. Oncologists say the reduced funding, which took effect for Medicare on April 1, makes it impossible to administer expensive chemotherapy drugs while staying afloat financially. Patients at these clinics would need to seek treatment elsewhere, such as at hospitals that might not have the capacity to accommodate them. “If we treated the patients receiving the most expensive drugs, we’d be out of business in six months to a year,” said Jeff Vacirca, chief executive of North Shore Hematology Oncology Associates in New...

Cancer clinics across the country have begun turning away thousands of Medicare patients, blaming the sequester budget cuts. Oncologists say the reduced funding, which took effect for Medicare on April 1, makes it impossible to administer expensive chemotherapy drugs while staying afloat financially. Patients at these clinics would need to seek treatment elsewhere, such as at hospitals that might not have the capacity to accommodate them. “If we treated the patients receiving the most expensive drugs, we’d be out of business in six months to a year,” said Jeff Vacirca, chief executive of North Shore Hematology Oncology Associates in New...

The longstanding feud between hospitals and Medicare contractors is intensifying as a House bill proposes new restrictions on anti-fraud efforts in Medicare. Recovery audit contractors (RACs), professionals who cut mistaken or fraudulent payments from the Medicare program, are pushing back against the bipartisan Medicare Audit Improvement Act, arguing the government will forfeit billions of taxpayer dollars in improper healthcare payments if hospitals are given more leeway. The stakes are high this year as Washington seeks to pare back waste, fraud and abuse. RACs charge that the new bill from Reps. Sam Graves (R-Mo.) and Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) will severely undercut...

To all freepers on social security disability, when checking my direct deposit into bank account. I was reduced by $136.65. Has this happened to anyone else.

WASHINGTON — President Obama had Senate Republicans nodding in agreement during a recent ice-breaking dinner as he described a basic problem for the nation’s fiscal future: For each dollar in taxes that Americans pay for Medicare, they ultimately draw about $3 in benefits. What’s more, he added, most people do not understand that. By his point that evening, the president was referring to the widespread and incorrect view, especially among older Americans, that Medicare recipients get only what they have paid for through taxes, premiums and medical co-payments. Now that misperception is making it all the harder for politicians to...

When Congress returns from its spring break the week after next, it will dive back into the debate over federal entitlement spending – most of which pays for benefits for retirees.  House Republicans and Senate Democrats have already unveiled their largely incompatible budget outlines, so Washington will be watching President Barack Obama’s budget, due to be released April 10, for any proposals that could represent a middle ground. And this week, several news outlets are reporting that the president’s budget will offer spending restraints on Medicare and Social Security that go beyond what most congressional Democrats currently support.

Over the next 10 years health reform will impose upon us about $1 trillion in new taxes and it will take another $716 billion out of Medicare, imperiling access to care for the elderly and the disabled according to Medicare's Office of the Actuaries. It will impose a mandate to buy health insurance on most people and fine us if we don't comply. It will compel all but the smallest employers to provide insurance to their employees and fine them if they don't. Since economic theory teaches that workers pay for health benefits with lower wages and fewer non-health...

Medicare and Medicaid do not pay for sex-change surgery, but that may change. In response to a formal request from a transsexual woman, the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced on March 28 that it has launched a formal “reconsideration” of its current refusal to cover surgical treatment for “gender identity disorder.” …

For the first time since 1981, when it dubbed sex-change operations "experimental," Medicare has opened the door to covering transexual operations, adding to the growing list of operations that would be allowed under Obamacare. Acting on a new request, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services said it is starting a new analysis that could lift the spending ban for sex-change operations with a goal of making a decision two days after Christmas and on the eve of Obamacare kicking in January 1. A 30-day public comment period just opened on the proposed "National Coverage Determination." "Surgical Treatment for Gender...

Last month, the Obama Administration moved forward with new Medicare spending cuts that few outside ardent industry observers noticed. If put into place, however, these cuts will mean significantly less money in the pockets of some 14 million senior citizens around the country. But with health care costs projected to rise another three percent, these reductions couldn’t come at a worse time. When President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law, he simultaneously authorized $200 billion in cuts to the Medicare Advantage program. At the time, the Congressional Budget Office projected that the health care reform law’s cuts would...

[Today is the third anniversary of the signing of Obamacare. This thread is a piece of an essay written in plain language to liberals in the first person, but also for conservatives that focuses on how government interference in the marketplace inflates the cost and degrades the quality of healthcare in America. It also exposes the real vultures of American healthcare with a 13% profit margin! Enjoy...] Healthcare Costs As Herman Cain poignantly states, “We don’ have a healthcare crisis in America. We have a healthcare cost crisis in America.” A liberal mantra has been that America needs Obamacare because the free market...

As I mentioned yesterday, the medical device tax that went into effect last January is just one of the many insidious job-killing measures contained within ObamaCare, but it is an especially terrible one. The 2.3 percent excise tax is meant to raise a handsome $30 billion to pay for ObamaCare over the next decade, except that, added bonus: It’s going to stifle innovation and competition in an industry that provides all manner of life-saving medical devices, from MRIs to pacemakers to blood tubes.And this hasn’t just been a Republican refrain, by the way. Thursday night, the Senate voted overwhelmingly to...

Republicans are losing elections they could win by slavishly clinging to untenable solutions for skyrocketing health care costs that voters reject. The House Budget Committee, chaired by Paul Ryan, is proposing a plan to balance the budget in 10 years. That requires lowering the trajectory of Medicaid and Medicare costs, which account for 24 percent of federal spending. Ryan proposes offering seniors the choice of a subsidy to buy private insurance or continuing in the existing Medicare system, and giving the states block grants to manage Medicaid. Conservatives believe seniors could shop for health insurance, as they do for groceries,...

If allowed to go into effect, a March 1 notice from HHS (the Department of Health and Human Services) will eliminate Medicare payments for tests and referrals ordered by physicians not enrolled in the Medicare program, as of May 1. "Because of Medicare's increasingly costly and restrictive rules placed on doctors, many Medicare-eligible patients are receiving medical care from physicians not enrolled in the program," states Jane M. Orient, M.D., executive director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS). "This looming change by HHS will deprive the patients of benefits for blood tests, x-rays, and specialist consultations—benefits for...

During a conversation about Republican Paul Ryan‘s House GOP budget plan, Fox host Bill Hemmer and Democratic Rep. Chris Van Hollen (MD) got into what can be described as a “fiery interruption-fest,” with the latter accusing Fox of not handling the topic in a “fair and balanced” manner. About midway through the conversation, Hemmer dismissed Van Hollen as having just repeated “talking points” on the Democratic Party’s desire for a “balanced approach” to fiscal reform — i.e., spending cuts and tax increases. The congressman did not take kindly to that characterization. “Don’t belittle statements by calling them so-called talking points,”...

More doctors are telling their older patients they'll no longer accept Medicare. Likewise, poorer patients on Medicaid are receiving similar news. East Texas News visited with one Nacogdoches doctor putting the brakes on Medicare/Medicaid reimbursements and the hardship the decision is causing for patients. Dr. Kelly Moon is a primary care physician. She has a lower percentage of older patients, so she can afford to place this sign announcing she will no longer accept government insurance. "It's very bad, and I feel horrible for my patients, and it's a very unfortunate situation," Moon said. The situation is that doctors are...

Late Friday afternoon, The Scooter Store's chief executive notified employees that — effective immediately, but “with certain exceptions” — they'd been placed on unpaid furlough. In an email, CEO Martin “Marty” Landon told employees not to return to work unless they receive notice from the company's human resources department. The Scooter Store, one of the nation's largest suppliers of power wheelchairs and scooters, had about 1,800 workers as of last month. That's following the announcement in February that it had cut 150 positions. About 1,200 employees worked out of its New Braunfels headquarters. The furloughs came a little more than...

Senate Democrats are finally beginning the process of writing a budget after four years of dereliction. They will almost certainly include some changes to Medicare, the largest driver of federal spending and debt. But unfortunately, there are indications that they intend to focus on the small piece of Medicare (10.6 percent in 2012) that is actually working well: the Medicare Part D prescription drug program. The drug companies cut a deal with the White House early in Obama’s first term to provide the funding for pro-Obamacare TV commercials and street organizing in exchange for favorable treatment in that bill. But...

According to dispatches from Washington, Representative Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, was considering an acceleration of his “premium support” plan for Medicare, in order to help the House produce a budget resolution that eliminates the deficit in ten years. This led to shudders from moderate Republicans and howls from liberal Democrats, forcing Ryan to retreat. But Ryan may now have a more politically attractive way to reform Medicare, one that saves even more money. Here’s the background: In January, in response to demands from fiscal conservatives who didn’t want to raise the debt ceiling, House speaker...

This week I gasped in horror when I learned that Obama care had ordered Medicare to cut reimbursement for 4 million diabetic seniors by 66%. It also reduced all the companies that were supplying blood sugar monitoring supplies from 1000 to 15. I also learned via the research of Elizabeth Vliet M.D. that one of her 80 year old patients was told he was not covered anymore by Medicare when he went to the pharmacy so couldn’t get his medication. His choice was to pay cash or die. Pause for a second and snap out of being mildly annoyed and...

Dr. John Natale of Illinois graduated with honors from Loyola University, graduated medical school from Northwestern University School of Medicine and went on to complete eight years of arduous postgraduate study to become a highly trained thoracic and cardiovascular surgeon. For over 20 years he practiced his specialty at a hospital in Illinois, doing extremely complicated cases, including treating ruptured aortic aneurysms. Although these cases have greater than 10 percent intraoperative mortality in the recognized medical literature, Dr. Natale never lost a patient on the operating table.

Dr. John Natale of Illinois graduated with honors from Loyola University, graduated medical school from Northwestern University School of Medicine and went on to complete eight years of arduous postgraduate study to become a highly trained thoracic and cardiovascular surgeon. For over 20 years he practiced his specialty at a hospital in Illinois, doing extremely complicated cases, including treating ruptured aortic aneurysms. Although these cases have greater than 10 percent intraoperative mortality in the recognized medical literature, Dr. Natale never lost a patient on the operating table.

Those of you outside the medical services industry have probably never heard the phrases “DME” (Durable Medical Equipment) or the more formal DMEPOS (Durable Medical Equipment, Prosthetics, Orthotics and Supplies). You’ve also probably never heard of Medicare’s DMEPOS Competitive Bidding program, and now that I’ve said it, your first thought is probably, “Hey, bringing competition to the medical marketplace! That sounds like a great idea! After all, competition brings down prices while improving service, right? So who could be opposed to that?” Well, a lot of us, actually. Not because we’re evil monopolists bent on holding onto our little fiefdoms...

[SNIP] So here's the truth about the "generational theft" theme: It's wrong on the numbers and wrong on the implications. Let's start with that 7-to-1 spending ratio on seniors versus children. Among the flaws in the calculation is that the vast majority of government dollars spent on children comes from state and local governments, which pay most of the cost of education. On a per capita basis, state and local spending on kids swamps the federal government's spending 8 to 1. Moreover, there are twice as many children 18 and under as seniors 65 and over (this 2008 figure also...

President Obama's sequester -- he designed it, he demanded it, and it is about to kick in -- will have many consequences, some bad, some very helpful. On the negative side, Stars & Stripes reports that Department of Defense officials are exploring how to collapse the school week to four days at some schools on military bases that serve the children of our troops. This is an incredible admission of the president's indifference to the troops he leads. As he has played politics for the past four months since his re-election, he has used the military and its personnel and...

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...

A health insurance company headed by an old friend from Obama's days as a community organizer got a $340 million federal loan to establish Obamacare co-ops in New York, New Jersey and Oregon despite having a chronic record of consumer and regulatory complaints. The New York-based Freelancers Insurance Company has been rated the "worst" insurer for two straight years by state regulators, and data compiled by a national insurance association show an extremely high rate of consumer complaints. The firm was founded in 2008 by Sara Horowitz, who worked with Obama before his career in elective politics to launch Demos,...

Are you as shocked as Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY)? Somehow, I rather doubt it, and I don’t think Jason Mattera is as surprised as the front-page pic suggests, either. Confronted with the new CBO analysis that shows more than seven million Americans will lose their present health-insurance coverage from ObamaCare despite his repeated assertions that no one would lose their coverage, Rep. Engel tells Jason in this Andrea Tantaros Show video debuting exclusively at Hot Air that Congress can always go back and fix what's not working.Funny --- Jason doesn't recall that being mentioned as an option, and neither do...

Though Democrats denied it during the 2012 campaign, Obamacare cut Medicare by $716 billion in order to partially fund $1.9 trillion in new entitlement spending over the next ten years. A big chunk of those Medicare cuts came from the market-oriented Medicare Advantage program. Cleverly, the Obama administration postponed the Medicare Advantage cuts until after the election, so as to persuade seniors that everything would be just fine. But the election is over. On Friday, the administration announced that it would be significantly reducing funding for the popular program. Obama’s proposal, according to one analyst, “would turn almost every plan...

Hey, remember when President Obama crusaded against Medicare fraud and vowed to crack down aggressively on scammers who've bilked the program out of an estimated $90 billion? Like Archie and Edith Bunker used to sing: Those were the daaaays. While Democrats pretend to protect the elderly and disabled, leaders of the People's Party have pocketed gobs of campaign contributions from fat-cat donors tied to massive Medicare rip-off schemes. Let's talk some more about Dr. Salomon Melgen, shall we? We now know that the jet-setting Florida eye doctor who flew beleaguered Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., to several alleged sex romps in...

Are childrens’ car seats driving down the fertility rate in America?Jonathan V. Last sees car seats as part of a “huge constellation of factors in modern life” that “nudge” people toward having fewer children, he said during an interview about his book, What to Expect When No One’s Expecting: America’s Coming Demographic Disaster.Last said car seats effectively create a small “tax on people who want to have more than two kids” by making it harder to fit three kids into a normal sedan, which encourages parents to buy a larger car. This penalty may not dissuade people who already want...

Obama gun control gambit covers his attack on Medicare President Barack Obama wipes his eye as he talks about the Connecticut elementary school shooting, Friday, December 14, 2012, in the White House briefing room in Washington. Tue Feb 5, 2013 8:18AM GMT 7 86 6 By Dr. Webster G. Tarpley The human losses of mass shootings are shocking. But who can take Obama seriously as a humanitarian, when he has sent killer drones over the world to attack women and children, and when his infamous illegal practices include Terror Tuesdays at the White House, when proscription lists are drawn up...

Our major public policies are based on the assumption that America will continue to enjoy growth. Economic growth and population growth. Through most of our history, this assumption has proved to be correct. These days, not so much. Last week, the Commerce Department announced that the gross domestic product shrunk by 0.1 percent in the fourth quarter of 2012. And the Census Bureau reported that the U.S. birth rate in 2011 was 63.2 per 1,000 women age 15 to 44, the lowest ever recorded. Slow economic growth and low population growth threaten to undermine entitlement programs like Social Security and...

Journalist Bill Moyers, who worked as an assistant to President Lyndon Johnson, shared memories in a column last year about how his old boss thought about our entitlement programs. It was under Johnson, who championed the "Great Society" in the 1960s, that a good portion of the runaway government spending we are trying to get under control today originated. Johnson signed into law Medicare, Medicaid, the War on Poverty programs, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Moyers recounted that for Johnson, Social Security and Medicare "were about a lot more than economics." He recalls a time when the Johnson administration...

Commentators both left and right agree that Barack Obama's second inaugural speech Monday was highly partisan, with shout outs to his constituencies on the left and defiance of his critics on the right. Obama quoted the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and made brief reference to Abraham Lincoln's sublime Second Inaugural ("blood drawn by lash and blood drawn by sword"). But there was not much in the way of "with malice toward none, with charity for all." There were more references than in many inaugural speeches to specific programs and policies. One interesting question is what the practical effect...

Almost everyone seems to agree that some combination of Social Security reform, Medicare reform and Medicaid reform is essential to any long-term fix of the federal government’s fiscal woes. But few in Washington are prepared to face the political challenges of such reform. Perhaps it would help if we stopped calling these federally financed benefits “entitlements.” In any legal sense of the term, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are not entitlements. Unlike public employee pensions, which are contractual obligations now threatening to bankrupt state and local governments, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits can be modified, or even eliminated, by...

President Barack Obama’s second inauguration speech promised a sharply ideological second term where the “the people” will use government to accomplish the tasks that he declared cannot be accomplished by individuals. “No single person can train all the math and science teachers we’ll need to equip our children for the future, or build the roads and networks and research labs that will bring new jobs and businesses to our shores,” he declared in a 2,103-word speech that included numerous campaign-style jabs at his political opponents. “Now, more than ever, we must do these things together, as one nation and one...

In the fights over the fiscal cliff and now the debt ceiling, many conservatives were adamant: Republicans should reach an agreement with President Obama only in exchange for serious cuts in entitlement spending. It is the entitlements — Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security — that will drive future deficits, the conservatives argued, and without real cuts, the nation’s debt will spiral out of control in the not-too-distant future. Some Republican lawmakers have been stressing that point for weeks and demanding that the president agree to “real cuts” before any deal could be struck. But what has emerged from the House GOP...