Free Republic

It’s only October, and in the mostly Democrat-run American Northeast, heating oil is already being rationed. Rationing. n America. We have natural resources so vast in this country, enough to power America for hundreds of years, and we’re not only rationing oil, we’re importing oil. And the only reason this is happening is that Democrats want it to happen. If the rationing is not bad enough, how about the average wholesale cost for a gallon of heating oil is now $4.09, compared to $2.46 a year ago? And that’s the wholesale price. So you are going to pay a lot...

Hospitals are denying patients the latest life-extending cancer drugs, a report reveals. Dozens of trusts are failing to hand out treatments for bowel, ovarian, lung and brain cancer that have been approved by the NHS watchdog NICE. Some of these drugs have been shown to boost survival rates by a quarter while others have extended the lives of terminally-ill patients by over a year.

Published on Otago Daily Times Online News Threshold raised for eye surgery By Elspeth McLean Created 13/12/2010 - 05:00 Increased demand for cataract surgery and a lack of capacity to carry out extra work has resulted in Dunedin Hospital raising the threshold for such operations. Emergency medicine and surgery group manager Dr Colleen Coop said it was a matter of finite resources versus infinite demand. The hospital was planning to carry out about 500 procedures this year, about the same number as last year. The threshold for the surgery had been increased by five points on the clinical priority assessment...

Sarah Palin asks: 'Rationed care' already?By ANDY BARR | 11/20/09 8:44 AM EST Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin early Friday morning greeted news that renewed guidelines scale back screenings for cervical cancer by asking if bureaucratic panels were already rationing care. “The recommendation from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists comes on the heels of another recommendation to limit breast cancer screenings with mammograms. There are many questions unanswered for me, but one which immediately comes to mind is whether costs have anything to do with these recommendations,” Palin wrote in a post on her Facebook page. “The current...

Obama advisor champions rationed health careBy Kate Randall 15 September 2009 Ezekiel J. Emanuel is a close advisor to the Obama administration on issues of health care policy. He currently serves as a special advisor on health policy to the director of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget and is the chair of the Department of Bioethics at the Clinical Center of the National Institutes of Health. He has authored several books, including most recently Healthcare Guaranteed: A Simple, Secure Solution for America, which elaborates his plan for restructuring the US health care system. [1] In March, Emanuel,...

Is your medical insurance bad for your health? If you have a high-deductible plan, the answer may be yes. The investment firm Fidelity recently surveyed employees at various companies who had opted for a high-deductible health plan linked to a health savings account. About half of those workers said they or a family member had chosen not to seek medical care for minor ailments as many as four times in the last year to avoid paying the out-of-pocket expenses. As any doctor will tell you, small health problems left untreated can become big problems, warns Kathleen Stoll, director of health...