Free Republic

A new CNN poll is out. Strikingly, it shows that only 39% of Americans support all or most of Obamacare, which is drastically below the 51% mark the same polling found at the beginning of the year. More and more Americans see themselves, their family members, and friends losing jobs, losing benefits, and losing security. But Republicans refuse to fight to defund the legislation. We are reduced again to Senator Mitch McConnell engaged in head pats for conservatives designed to generate seal claps from activists. Senators McConnell, along with Senators Cornyn of Texas, Coburn of Oklahoma, Coats of Indiana, Alexander...

A document House Majority Leader Eric Cantor distributed to all House Republicans on Tuesday, obtained by Breitbart News, confirms that he is planning to make it appear as though the House is voting to defund Obamacare while using a legislative procedural trick which would allow the Democrat-controlled Senate to strip defunding language from the Continuing Resolution. * * *

The federal government granted Indiana a year-long Obamacare waiver on Tuesday, allowing the state to continue to run its own Medicaid pilot program, The Washington Post reports. Indiana, along with Iowa and Arkansas, requested major exemptions from the law, and is the first state to receive one. “Securing a waiver to continue the Healthy Indiana Plan is a victory for Hoosiers enrolled in this innovative program and will ensure that Indiana remains at the forefront of consumer-driven healthcare in the United States,” Republican Gov. Mike Pence said in a statement. Pence will now consider expanding Medicaid under the state’s “Healthy...

Eric Cantor is always looking for new and imaginative ways to screw conservatives. He has Pete Sessions (R-TX), as Rules Chairman, helping him with his latest creative way to screw conservatives. I’ve already well documented Pete Sessions’s increasingly bitter attitude toward Ted Cruz and staggering contempt of his own constituents who want to defund Obamacare. Cantor and Sessions’ latest idea tops even his most absurd shenanigans. The plan is to pass the real CR that fully funds Obamacare, then pass a fake bill that defunds Obamacare. The Senate will pass the CR, and throw the defunding bill in the garbage....

Text of the Continuing Resolution (CR) that will fund the government for 60-75 days will be released on Tuesday, the conservative source said, before a House vote on Thursday. The move comes abruptly as conservatives are ramping up their final push on House leadership with a big Tea Party rally outside the Capitol on Tuesday calling for Obamacare’s defunding.House Speaker John Boehner’s spokesman Michael Steel told Breitbart News the “CR will include defunding ObamaCare,” but would not specify whether or not a certain procedural “trick” the GOP leadership used in a similar situation in 2011 will be employed yet again.Breitbart...

Louisiana Republican Rep. Bill Cassidy might be feeling some empathy for Mitt Romney after a challenger has compared his past health care bills to Obamacare. On Wednesday, Rob Maness, who is running against Cassidy in the 2014 Senate race, coined the term “Cassidycare,” attacking the congressman for bills he proposed as a state senator that bear similarities to some of the components of the Affordable Care Act. The two are challenging Sen. Mary Landrieu, a Democrat who has represented the Bayou State since 1997. “Mary Landrieu was the deciding vote on Obamacare through the Senate but Mr. Bill Cassidy, who...

<p>110,000 current and soon to be eligible retirees working for IBM woke up to an unpleasant surprise this morning, when the WSJ reported that as a result of soaring healthcare costs, the tech bellwether giant will be terminating its company-sponsored health plan and instead giving (soon to be former) beneficiaries a lump sum payment to buy coverage on a health-exchange: a move which the WSJ characterized as indicating that employers are unlikely to keep providing the once-common benefits as medical costs continue to rise. The reason why all IBM retirees will have to find alternative, third-party, retirement coverage upon hitting the Medicare eligible age of 65 is that "IBM said the growing cost of care makes its current plan unsustainable without big premium increases." And to avoid those premium increases, the costs will find a clearing price either in a private exchange (supposedly competitive, realistically monopolistic), or will end up commingled with other public healthcare funding. End result: IBM benefits, everyone else loses.</p>

Health Reform: More bad news for Obama-Care this week: Another state announced huge rate increases, and another labor union rebelled over the harm it will do to members. Yet, this train wreck just keeps on rolling. ObamaCare may very well be the worst law ever passed by the federal government in the history of the U.S. The public didn't want it in the first place — going so far as to elect a Republican senator in solidly Democratic Massachusetts to try to stop it — and they've hated it ever since. The latest IBD/TIPP poll finds that just 38% want...

Turning back the clock to 2012, President Barack Obama took a shot at defeated rival Mitt Romney. Speaking about how funding education ought to be a bipartisan idea during remarks in Scranton, Pa., Obama suggested the same should be the case with his signature health care law. “These are ideas that should have bipartisan support,” Obama said of his education priorities. “Of course, so should Obamacare, it’s actually a really good idea. It’s going to work. It used to be a Republican idea. There’s a governor of Massachusetts who set it up. It’s working well.”

Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, number 4 in House GOP Leadership, said the effort by conservatives to defund ObamaCare is "not realistic." She advocated a piece-meal approach to repeal, delay or defund individual provisions of the sweeping health care overhaul. The debate will likely dominate discussions within the Republican caucus when Congress returns next month. “To get the entire bill repealed, or defunded, is probably not realistic,” McMorris Rodgers said. “But I do think there are provisions in the law that we can get delayed, or provisions in the law we can get defunded.” The government's spending authority expires on September...

Via the Daily Caller. No surprise that he feels this way, but I believe his comments here are the first time he’s pooh-poohed a shutdown publicly. Which, in itself, tells you what a terrible idea the GOP leadership thinks it is: McConnell’s desperate to pander to tea partiers in hopes of avoiding a serious primary challenge in Kentucky next year but the thought of a shutdown is simply a bridge too far, even though he’s getting killed for it on sites like Red State. In fact, John Cornyn, McConnell’s deputy in the Senate leadership and another guy who’s terrified of...

The chairman of the House Budget Committee says there's a better way of repealing President Barack Obama's health care law than shutting down the government this fall — a path some Republican conservatives are backing. “We, all Republicans, want to repeal and replace Obamacare. … We’re having a debate about the best way of achieving that goal, the best strategy,” Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said Sunday on CBS News’s “Face the Nation.” Ryan, who was the GOP vice presidential nominee in 2012, pointed out that a government shutdown wouldn't impact entitlements, including Obamacare. “Rather than sort of-swinging for the fences...

Once upon a time, some of us counted heads and concluded that there was little chance of ObamaCare ever becoming law -- or, if through some mischance it did, ever staying law. But now after the passage of a number of years and any amount of public and private maneuvering, our naiveté has evolved into a much more realistic view of politics. We now know, for example, that if the left-wing liberal power structure get the chance to put another notch in their gun, they'll pull the trigger, no matter how many innocent people wind up shot... --snip-- Indeed, examples...

We must be forever vigilant in protecting and defending our Country — because one mistake, one terrorist attack that we don’t prevent, can cost untold lives and suffering. That said, we must also do the smart and Constitutional thing, and not just everything we can think of, and get away with, with terrorism as the excuse. With that in mind, lets look at this from a medical perspective: Let’s say you’re healthy overall but you develop a cough, it’s lasted for a month, and it seems to be getting worse. It might just be allergies, or bronchitis, or pneumonia, or...

An aggressive push by Tea Party lawmakers to defund ObamaCare is increasingly pitting Republicans against Republicans, as some party leaders and conservative pundits claim the goal is not achievable this year -- and could irresponsibly risk a government shutdown. Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, and his allies in the Senate are trying to round up support for a pledge to oppose any budget bill that funds the health care law. They're emboldened by the administration's recent decision to delay a key part of the law, arguing the move shows it's not ready for prime time. "Businesses don't like it. Individuals hate...

Had someone like former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush entered the 2012 Republican primary, Mitt Romney says he might not have entered the presidential race. In an interview with Dan Balz for the Washington Post reporter’s soon-to-be released “Collision 2012: Obama vs. Romney and the Future of Elections in America,” Romney said that he would have seriously considered staying out of the presidential race if someone of Bush’s caliber declared his candidacy. “I knew how grueling the process was, and I felt that there may be others who could be more effective in actually winning and then getting America on course,”...

Populism is fun. “I never thought I’d see the day when the White House, the president came down on the side of big business but left the American people out in the cold as far as his health care mandate is concerned,” Cantor told reporters after House Republicans met for their weekly closed-door meeting. “And we, as House Republicans, are not going to sit still for that.”…“What the president did is outrageous,” Boehner said. “The idea that we’re going to give big businesses a break on Obamacare but we’re going to punish small businesses and families? It’s wrong. And we’ll...

In an almost-impossible-to-believe collapse of principle and political smarts, the House GOP appears committed to stalling out the bipartisan effort to repeal the onerous, job-destroying medical device tax.In an interview with me on Thursday, House GOP Deputy Whip Peter Roskam attempted to explain why the House Republicans would not be moving a stand-alone repeal bill, even though the Senate’s test vote on repeal passed by a 79-20 margin the week before the Easter recess began.The transcript of my interview with Roskam is here.A week ago Roll Call’s David Drucker had reported that House Ways and Means Committee Chair David Camp...

Watching "Time" editor Rana Foroohar in action on Morning Joe today, it was quickly evident how, on a range of issues from gun control to gay marriage, she toed a predictable liberal line. But it wasn't until talk turned to health care that it became apparent just how far out Foroohar is on the left. She sang the praises of single-payer on steroids--the socialized system in the UK. Willie Geist had cited a USA Today article reporting on a non-partisan study projecting medical claim costs to rise an average of 32% under ObamaCare, and as much as 80% in Ohio....

Women in Britain are dying quicker of breast cancer than in comparable countries, even though they are being diagnosed at the same time, suggesting care on the NHS is not as good as it is elsewhere. Academics at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine found the proportion of women in the UK surviving at least three years after being diagnosed was 87 to 89 percent, which was similar to Denmark. In Australia, Canada, Norway and Sweden three-year survival was 91 to 94 per cent for the period examined, between 2000 and 2007. Britain’s breast cancer survival rates have...