Free Republic

Editor's note: This article was co-authored by Tim Graham.The end of the Supreme Court term was depressing for conservatives. The double-whammy of a 50-state mandate for gay marriage and the upholding of Obamacare sounded the alarms for religious freedom. All that unease is measurable. Credit The Washington Post for doing precisely that. The polling team has just reported, "Liberals have won a string of victories on gay marriage and health care reform this year, but a new Washington Post-ABC News poll finds a large majority of Americans are unhappy with where the nation is headed on social issues." They found...

As we approach the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon Johnson signing the Medicare bill into law (July 30th), what better time to consider the seemingly intractable problem of healthcare? FDR tried to include a federal health insurance component into the Social Security Act of 1935, but backed off. Harry Truman, his successor, took up the cause again in 1945, 1947, and 1949. JFK would pick up the banner in 1961. During the 1965 signing, LBJ called the 81-year-old Truman “the real daddy of Medicare,” and presented him and his wife Bess with the first two Medicare cards. With the passage...

Senate Republican leaders will use a must-pass highway bill to start another fight over the president’s health care law. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell plans to introduce an amendment to the transportation bill to fully repeal “Obamacare.” […] The Senate is rushing to complete the highway legislation before states face a cutoff of highway and transit aid one week from now. …

Entitlements: Medicare's latest annual report, issued days before its 50th anniversary, seems to show that, thanks to ObamaCare, it has a long and healthy future in front of it. But it's not true. Not by a long shot.

St. Paul Public Schools employees are likely to see their health benefits curtailed as the school district looks to avoid financial penalties set to begin in 2018. The Affordable Care Act's "Cadillac Tax" provision will charge employers an excise tax on high-cost plans -- 40 percent on every dollar over $10,200 on individual and $27,500 on family plans. Jeni Simon, a consultant with Aon Hewitt, told school board members Tuesday that companies already are redesigning their health plans in order to avoid paying the tax. A survey found 92 percent of U.S. employers expect their health plans to change by...

Anthem said on Friday it would buy Cigna in a deal valued at $54.2 billion, creating the largest U.S. health insurer. Cigna shareholders will get $103.40 per share in cash and 0.5152 Anthem shares. The deal comes three weeks after Aetna struck a deal to buy Humana for $37 billion and is part of an industry-wide consolidation of the health insurance industry following the roll-out of the Obama government's health-care reform law.

Deal could reduce the number of major U.S. insurance companies from five to three. U.S. health insurer Anthem Inc is close to finalizing negotiations to acquire peer Cigna Inc and could announce a roughly $48 billion deal as early as this week, two people familiar with the matter said.

Hey, employers, don’t even think about reimbursing your workers’ health-insurance premiums. Beginning this month, the IRS can levy fines amounting to $100 per worker per day or $36,500 per worker per year, with a maximum of $500,000 per firm. This Internal Revenue Service penalty is not written into the Obamacare law. The amount is over 12 times the statutory amount in the Affordable Care Act of $3,000 per worker per year. That is what an employer is charged when one of its employees gets subsidized care on one of the health-care exchanges. It’s 18 times the $2,000 penalty for not...

There's a battle brewing behind the scenes to keep health plans affordable for consumers. The Obama administration weighed in this week, sending letters to insurance regulators in every state and Washington, D.C., that ask them to take a closer look at rate requests before granting them. In Maryland, for example, the dominant insurer on the exchange, CareFirst, is asking for a rate increase of 30 percent for some of its plans. In Kansas, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas is seeking increases averaging 37 percent. Insurance industry consultant Robert Laszewski says that forcing people to change plans in order...

Beginning this month, the IRS can levy fines amounting to $100 per worker per day or $36,500 per worker per year, with a maximum of $500,000 per firm. This Internal Revenue Service penalty is not written into the Obamacare law. The amount is over 12 times the statutory amount in the Affordable Care Act of $3,000 per worker per year. That is what an employer is charged when one of its employees gets subsidized care on one of the health-care exchanges. It’s 18 times the $2,000 penalty for not offering adequate health insurance. The $100 fine is applicable not only...

(Photo: Facebook/Clenard Childress) The Rev. Clenard Childress uses controversial sign to protest NAACP's support for abortion that features a Confederate flag and an aborted baby at the organization's annual meeting held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in July 2015. A black New Jersey pastor and pro-life activist protested the NAACP's support for abortion at the organization's convention held in Philadelphia last week, where he posted a sign that included both an aborted baby and a Confederate flag. Rev. Clenard Childress, the president of the Life Education and Resource Network, the largest African-American pro-life group in the U.S., used this sign that...

Speaking of patriarchy and white supremacy, Kohn didn’t mention that abortion targets African-American babies as well as baby girls. Kohn’s tweet also referenced Sandra Bland, a “Black Lives Matter” activist who police say committed suicide in jail after her highly criticized arrest was caught on camera . But in the reaction to her tweet, Twitter users focused on Planned Parenthood:

You’ll be a patient some day soon. Your life will depend on having trusted, skilled advocates in your corner. Patients are often scared, frequently dependent on others for life, and in great need of a sense of safety and care. This intimate vulnerability is the basis for the Hippocratic oath, medical ethics and patient confidentiality. But how cared for and safe do you feel in today’s health care system?

I admit that I am truly baffled and quite irked by the decision of Premiere Radio Networks to hire Senator John McCain's daughter, Meghan McCain, to host the nationally syndicated radio talk show, America Now. I'm baffled, because America Now is carried on conservative talk radio stations, and Meghan McCain is not a conservative (more on that in a moment), so conservative talk show listeners will tune out each time she signs on. That's a fact. We are bombarded with leftist media tripe everywhere we turn. We don't want it on our conservative talk stations, too, thank you very much....

No group in the United States today is making a stronger stand for liberty than the Little Sisters of the Poor, an order of Catholic nuns dedicated to running nursing homes for the elderly poor. Every friend of freedom should rally to their cause. The federal government is now seeking to deny these sisters freedom of conscience. It has already taken its case against their liberty all the way through the U.S. Court of Appeal for the 10th Circuit. If the government succeeds, it means Catholic nuns in this country can no longer freely exercise their Catholic faith. They must...

“Population Health” is an Orwellian extension of UnitedHealth’s plan to profit at the expense of the real health of the people. In our opinion, the term Population Health is a blatant attempt, supported by Obamacare and the current administration, to unilaterally alter the way in which medicine is practiced in the United States. Population Health has been around for years but it’s still being defined today. Tom Sullivan, Executive Editor of HIMSS Media gives some clues in his post, “What exactly is ‘population health,’ anyway?” but confirms that “what has become eminently clear is that defining population health depends on...

Republican 2016 presidential candidate Ben Carson recently made the assertion on a Iowa conservative radio show that the "purpose" behind Margaret Sanger's founding of the abortion giant Planned Parenthood was to "eliminate black people," and also questioned whether or not President Barack Obama realizes that. While the 63-year-old retired neurosurgeon was going in and out of reception during his phone interview with radio host Jan Mickelson on WHO Radio in Des Moines, Mickelson played a clip of an Obama speech from last year where the president defended Planned Parenthood and even said "Thank you Planned Parenthood. God bless you." When...

Pediatric neurosurgeon and GOP presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson says this week that Planned Parenthood’s claim that obtaining fetal tissue from abortions is important for medical and scientific research is “spurious.” “There’s nothing that can’t be done without fetal tissue,” Carson said on Fox News Channel’s The Kelly File. “[I]t’s been over-promised what the benefits of fetal research would be. And very much under-delivered.” Yet, the promise of medical research was the defense given for the discussion by Planned Parenthood’s senior medical director, seen in an investigative video, describing how to abort a baby in such a way that allows...

Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider, received $528.4 million in taxpayer funding, according to its 2013-2014 annual report, [1] which runs from July 1, 2013 to June 30, 2014. The report shows that Planned Parenthood received $528.4 million in “government health services grants and reimbursements” during a one-year period, the latest figures available. That means it received an average of $1,447,671 in taxpayer funds per day and an average of $60,320 every hour. Several members of Congress [2], as well as some GOP presidential candidates, are calling for Planned Parenthood to be defunded after a video surfaced showing Dr....

In response to the first undercover video from the Center for Medical Progress’s investigation into Planned Parenthood’s sale of aborted babies’ body parts, Fox News’ senior political analyst delivered Monday what the Gospel Coalition’s Justin Taylor calls “the best 1.5 minute commentary on abortion ever heard on network news.” In it, Brit Hume says the video exposed “the especially brutal nature of abortion” behind the industry’s “veil of antiseptic tidiness.” After lamenting the deaths of 55 million preborn babies since Roe v. Wade, Hume expressed hope that America would someday look upon its past of legal abortion-on-demand “with horror and...