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Healthcare, as much as the left hates to admit it, is a market item, like any other good or service. Until the mid-20th century, the provision of healthcare was like any other business; you went to the doctor, you paid him, and that was that. Granted, now modern, high-tech medicine is more expensive, and there is therefore a market for health insurance to spread that cost out. That, too, is a market item. When the government meddles in markets, they almost always screw it up. The Biden administration has never and will never learn this lesson; now, in the latest...

Last month, Ed brought up the subject of how insurance companies were reacting to scheduled cuts to Medicare which were part of Obamacare. The news wasn’t good for them, and now Democrats are moving toward full blown panic mode after HHS announced that the cuts are on the way. The Obama administration ignited a new election-year controversy Friday when regulators handed down fresh cuts to Medicare Advantage (MA).Next year, plans in the program will see their payments cut by at least 2 percent on average between ObamaCare and a regular annual update, the announcement stated.The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid...

As if ObamaCare’s botched website, coverage cancellations, and higher costs were not bad enough, the Obama Administration has quietly dealt yet another blow – this time striking millions of the nation’s most vulnerable seniors. Specifically, the Obama Administration has decided to deeply cut funding for the Medicare program’s home health benefit as a way to help pay for ObamaCare. The Administration made this announcement very quietly, waiting to do so until the very end of the last Friday before Thanksgiving, perhaps thinking that most people would not be looking. To be sure, the timing of the Administration’s quiet announcement did...

Obama's proposal will help improve the financial stability of Medicare by reducing taxpayer subsidies for retirees who can afford to pay a bigger share of costs. Congressional Republicans agree with the president on this one, making it highly likely the idea will become law if there's a budget deal this year. Currently only about 1 in 20 Medicare beneficiaries pays the higher income-based premiums, which start at incomes over $85,000 for individuals and $170,000 for couples. As a reference point, the median or midpoint U.S. household income is about $53,000. The administration is proposing to extend a freeze on the...

President Barack Obama next week will take the political risk of formally proposing cuts to Social Security and Medicare in his annual budget in an effort to demonstrate his willingness to compromise with Republicans and revive prospects for a long-term deficit-reduction deal, administration officials say. In a significant shift in fiscal strategy, Obama on Wednesday will send a budget plan to Capitol Hill that departs from the usual presidential wish list that Republicans typically declare dead on arrival. Instead it will embody the final compromise offer that he made to Speaker John Boehner late last year, before Boehner abandoned negotiations...

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...

Donald Trump blasted President Barack Obama’s senior adviser Robert Gibbs Sunday as “vicious and hateful” after the former press secretary called Trump a “right-wing nut job” on Fox News. Trump told Newsmax. “I built a net worth in excess of $8 billion, built a tremendous company, and have employed tens of thousands of people. I hardly see where I qualify under his definition.” He recently declined an offer to deliver a prime-time speech at the Republican National Convention, but he has been promising to deliver a big “surprise” at the convention in Tampa, Fla., which begins on Aug. 27. “The...

You wouldn’t know it from listening to the Obama campaign, but there’s only one Presidential candidate in 2012 who has cut Medicare: Barack Obama, whose Affordable Care Act cuts Medicare by $716 billion from 2013-2022. Today, the Romney campaign reiterated its pledge to repeal Obamacare, and promised to “restore the funding to Medicare [and] ensure that no changes are made to the program for those 55 and older.” It’s an important point of policy clarity. Left-of-center writers, such as Ezra Klein of the Washington Post,( accurately point out that Paul Ryan’s 2011 and 2012 budgets repeal Obamacare while preserving Obama’s...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Listen to this sound bite, folks. November 9th, 2009. This is Obama's first year. And he's being interviewed by our old buddy Jacob Tapper at ABC News. And they're talking about Medicare cuts in Obamacare. Listen to this... TAPPER: One of the concerns about health care and how you pay for it: One third of the funding comes from cuts to Medicare. OBAMA: Right. TAPPER: A lot of times, as you know, what happens in Congress is somebody will do something bold; and then Congress, close to election season, will undo it. OBAMA: Right. Obama In November...

As Democrats attack Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan for their proposals regarding Medicare, Republicans are circulating this clip from a November 9, 2009 interview we had with President Obama in which he not only acknowledged that one third of his health care bill was paid for by cuts to Medicare, but that he would veto attempts to undo those cuts. Watch the video below. The exchange on Medicare occurs at 2:15:

ABC's JAKE TAPPER: "One of the concerns about health care and how you pay for it -- one third of the funding comes from cuts to Medicare." BARACK OBAMA: "Right."

My Medicare patients -- and those who'll soon qualify -- are worried. Will the doctors they're used to seeing still be able to take care of them when big cuts in Medicare payments are constantly hanging overhead? Even if I keep seeing a particular patient, I don't know that I'll still be able to find specialists to examine his skin, perform his stress test, operate on his hip or remove his cataract. Medicare reimbursement to me for an average primary-care visit has remained around $50 for the past decade, even as my office expenses have skyrocketed. Cataract and hip-replacement operations...

RFFM.org's Founder and Executive Director, Dan Zanoza, will be a guest on the Dr. Laurie Roth Radio Show [www.therothshow.com] on Monday, July 26, 2010 between 6 and 7 P.M. Central time. Zanoza will be discussing a new RFFM.org project, Advocates for Seniors, Retired and Disabled (ASRD). RFFM / ASRD will soon publish a quarterly e-newsletter for subscribers with the purpose of sharing information about a segment of American society the Obama administration apparently deems politically expendable. Broadcast out of Washington state on the IRN-USA Radio Network, Roth's radio talk show is nationally syndicated and "is on a mission to examine...

"...in 2010 Medicare cuts to inpatient psychological hospitals begin on July 1st. So, the government will pay less, for fewer people, for those who suffer from mental illness... You can hear the Democrats planning this; “Hey! Cut the Crazies, no one will care!” ...Medicare Advantage cuts kick in in 2011. It doesn’t stop there, they also make Medicare cuts in home health care! ...There will be Medicare cuts in 2011 for seniors who use diagnostic imaging like MRI’s, CT scans, etc... No new physician-owned hospitals will be able to get Medicare for anything! 2011 brings cuts in Medicare payments to......

A healthcare policy expert says there are details in the Senate healthcare bill that will frighten everyone. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) has unveiled his more than 2,000-page healthcare bill with an estimated price tag of $849 billion. However, as Grace Marie Turner of the Galen Institute points out, one of the reasons the bill was scored under President Obama's $900 billion cost goal is because no one gets any benefit from the program until 2014. "So they start collecting taxes and fees now, and...the first ten years of full implementation of this bill is $2.5 trillion, and that's...

On Fox News Sunday, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs predicted the Democratic health-care reform plan will be passed and signed into law by next weekend. "We'll have the votes when the House votes, I think, within the next week," Gibbs said, and by next Sunday claimed we "will be talking about healthcare not as a presidential proposal but, I think, as the law of the land." Gibbs also said that Democrats look forward to campaigning on the passage of the health-care bill in the 2010 midterm elections. "[O]nce it passes, we're happy to have the 2010 elections be about...

As Senate Democrats hung together last week on a "test" vote on health care reform, their willingness to cut Medicare to fund their colossal plan revealed their willingness to abandon the most vulnerable among us - the frail and elderly. Many among the oldest of the old receive in-home care, something that is essential as it helps reduce hospital admissions or winding up in a nursing home. It also provides access to medical services for those with the added challenge of living in rural communities. Home health care will be a casualty of the current bill as it is slated...

Just in time for Thanksgiv ing, Sen. Harry Reid has given us a giant turkey of a health-care bill. At 2,074 pages and more than 370,000 words, it's officially "scored" as costing $849 billion over 10 years -- $400 million per page, or $2.3 million per word. But that doesn't come close to measuring its true cost. The bill uses various accounting gimmicks to hide its true cost. For example the bill doesn't include more than $200 billion needed to prevent a 21 percent cut in Medicare next year. [The CBO "score" actually assumes Reid cuts Medicare 23 percent --...

In his primetime health care address before a Joint Session of Congress, President Barack Obama promised the American people: “I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits – either now or in the future. Period.” But it is hard work adding $1 trillion in government spending while claiming with a straight face that you are not adding to the deficit. Enter White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel who has just the solution: just strip out $247 billion of the spending in the bill, pass it separately, and voila … your job just got one-fourth...

The Senate Finance Committee will perpetrate a huge fraud on the US public today. Chairman Max Baucus promises to hold a final vote on his health-care overhaul -- most of whose costs he has hidden with budgetary gimmicks. The widely reported numbers are wrong: This bill would increase the deficit and cost more than $2 trillion over 10 years. Yes, the headlines on the Congressional Budget Office's preliminary cost estimate were that the bill could cost $829 billion over 10 years and trim the federal deficit by $81 billion. But those numbers are pure fantasy -- as CBO plainly, if...