Free Republic

There’s an old saw about cooking frogs: Place them in cool water, and then turn up the heat. The frogs fail to respond to gradual temperature change, and by the time the water gets near the boiling point, the frogs are unable to jump out and save themselves. That is what President Obama and the Democrats have had in mind with Obamacare, which they planned would lead to single-payer, socialized medicine. However, their incompetent “chefs” have placed ordinary citizens directly in a boiling health care caldron. Americans are reacting with extreme reproach, and it is progressivism and the Democratic Party...

Springsteen Guitarist: ObamaCare 'Almost Worthless' By Noel Sheppard Created 12/14/2013 - 2:27pm Steven Van Zandt, the guitarist for Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band, came down strongly on ObamaCare Thursday. In a video interview, Van Zandt said Barack Obama's signature legislation is "almost worthless." Van Zandt believes we're having the wrong conversation in this country. "We waste two years talking about healthcare, and I’m like, why are we talking about healthcare when we should be talking about health?" he said. "I spend six months a year in Norway," offered Van Zandt. "Healthcare’s free in Norway because everybody’s healthy." "You can’t even...

Some 1.6 million Americans have registered for Obamacare, but more than nine-out-of-10 of them actually signed up for Medicaid, a trend that could end up slamming federal and state government budgets. Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security already account for 48 percent of federal spending, writes economist Michael Tanner, a senior fellow for the Cato Institute, in an article for The New York Post. But with Obamacare adding to the Medicaid costs, "we are picking up speed on the road to insolvency," Tanner writes. The Medicaid program is already the third-largest government program in the United States, coming in only behind...

Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, who remains as determined as ever to substitute Obama administration talking points for the truth, gave it her best effort in yesterday’s session before a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee. It was an underwhelming performance at best. As key dates approach and more facts about the government overhaul of the health care system emerge, it is becoming apparent that the ObamaCare scheme is headed for structural disaster — and will take tens of millions of Americans with it. [SNIP] All of the above, including anemic enrollment numbers for private insurance while Medicaid...

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell has waded into the health care debate with a broad endorsement of the kind of universal health plan found in Europe, Canada and South Korea. "I am not an expert in health care, or Obamacare, or the Affordable Care Act, or however you choose to describe it, but I do know this: I have benefited from that kind of universal health care in my 55 years of public life," Powell said, according to the Puget Sound Business Journal, last week at an annual "survivors celebration breakfast" in Seattle for those who, like Powell, have...

President Obama’s Affordable Care Act is practically dead. Meanwhile, the old system it was meant to replace is dead. Thus, Americans face a long and bitter struggle over what kind of health care system they will have.

Some of us knew from day one. Others took a while to honestly look at what Obamacare is; still others have dug in and decided to fight the truth. None of what they say now matters; Obamacare is the cruelest hoax perpetrated upon the American people in our history. It is a document filled with evil trip wires designed to destroy us, beat us down and put us under socialist rule. This begs the question: Who wrote this bill? The answer is Robert Creamer, a federal felon. He’s the husband of Marxist Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky, an evil screeching creature that...

President Barack Obama, the quintessential leftist, would have us believe, as would all leftists, that his overarching motivation is his compassion but, like most leftists, reveals through his actions that his driving passion is not so much concern for his fellow man as it is an obsession to control people. That explains why Obama isn't the slightest bit sympathetic about people losing their health care coverage as a direct result of his fraudulent advertising on Obamacare and why, so far, he has callously resisted all calls for a reset of the worst policy train wreck on the longest policy train...

Obama scoffs at people who call him a 'socialist': 'You gotta meet real socialists' By JENNIFER EPSTEIN | 11/19/13 4:32 PM EST President Obama on Tuesday dismissed critics who call him a "socialist," suggesting they meet some real socialists if they think he's one. "People call me a socialist sometimes," he said at the Wall Street Journal CEO Summit, addressing 100 top business leaders. "But, no, you gotta meet real socialists. You’ll have a sense of what a socialist is," he said to laughter from the crowd. "I'm talking about lowering the corporate tax rate, my health care reform is...

<p>Are Obama and his boss Valerie Jarrett stupid? NO they are not STUPID. Why is Obamacare so drought with insurmountable "glitches"?</p> <p>My take on this planned instigated fiasco: Hussein Obama and his inner handler Valerie Jarrett are intent on destroying the private Insurance industry.</p>

(Reuters) - President Barack Obama blamed Republicans on Tuesday for contributing to the troubled rollout of his signature healthcare insurance plan and said it will be hard to "rebrand" Obamacare after his administration fixes a website used to sign up for the program. "We should have anticipated that that would create a rockier rollout," Obama told a Wall Street Journal conference."One of the problems we've had is one side of Capitol Hill is invested in failure," Obama said.Obama said he thinks the website will be fixed on time for people to "catch up" and shop for insurance by key deadlines,...

If there’s one thing Obamacare’s supporters and opponents can agree on, it’s that Obamacare is unprecedented. Never before did the federal government require every American to buy a commercial product. Never before did it attempt to use its spending powers to coerce states into implementing a federal program. And never before did it so fundamentally rewrite the rules of such a major economic industry – one that makes up about a seventh of the national economy. With Obamacare, the federal government decided it would run, not just a business, but an entire industry of businesses. Imagine if the government decided...

JONATHAN GRUBER, M.I.T.: Let’s start with understanding that we're not talking about the vast majority of Americans. This law is really leaving those with employer insurance, those with government insurance alone. We’re talking about a small minority of Americans that buy insurance on their own through the individual market. CHUCK TODD: Still millions of people. GRUBER: Exactly. It's 12 million people, about a third of which will end up paying more under this law. And that as you said in the introductions sort of the idea. We currently have a highly discriminatory system where if you’re sick, if you’ve been...

At times it seems like the sheer magnitude of bad news about ObamaCare can redound to its own benefit. It’s easy for individual pieces of bad news to get lost in the sea of failure that has characterized the Obama administration’s signature “achievement.” That might be the case with the most important story to appear about ObamaCare this week, from Tuesday’s edition of the New York Times. The paper reported that the Obama administration has ruled that the federal health-care program be exempted from the category of laws considered “federal health care programs.” Now, this is obviously dishonest: the federal...

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on Friday said that new requirements imposed on insurance companies by Obamacare will require those companies to treat mental illness and addiction that same as physical illness, creating "the largest behavioral health expansion in a generation."

ven as stories pour in of Americans facing steeply higher health insurance premiums and canceled coverage, Team TISI +0.13% Obama just imposed new regulations that will make those problems worse. It’s almost like they can’t help themselves. On Friday, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced new regulations mandating health insurers cover mental and behavioral health to the same extent they cover physical health care. A “mental health parity” mandate was passed by Congress in 2008, but Obama officials claim health insurers aren’t fully complying. (You’ll just have to overlook the irony of the Obama administration, which has postponed...

If Texas Sen. Ted Cruz were in California, we would start a recall on him. Cruz is wasting hard-working Americans' money in our Senate. It was immoral for Cruz and the other Republicans to shut down government to keep Americans from getting affordable health care. America is tired of the Republicans' hating President Barack Obama so much that they want to keep 50 million Americans from being able to afford health care. When the health care reform law becomes fully operational it will bring the cost of America's health care down. In time, we can make changes and put into...

Unable to persuade everyone that the numerous recordings documenting him promising that those who like their current health insurance could keep it were doctored to cut off a qualifier limiting the promise to “only if it hasn't changed since the Affordable Care Act was passed,” President Obama apologized for “taking advantage of people's stupidity and abusing their trust in me.” “If I had said at the outset that tens of millions of Americans would be forced off of insurance plans that we consider sub-standard we never would've been able to get Congress to pass the law,” Obama explained. “It should...

The failure of the Obamacare website took many by surprise. But Glenn Beck thought there’s at least one person who saw the trainwreck coming: President Obama. Beck called Obama a “Marxist revolutionary” and argued that he knew all along the health care site wasn’t ready and just didn’t care. New reports show that the White House knew the website would have a bumpy rollout three yeas ago, and Beck said the inability of the White House to handle this means that the health care information of anyone who signs up on the site is “not secure.” If Obama had done...

President Obama continues to alter his signature promise in selling the Affordable Care Act back in 2009 and 2010. "If you like your plan, you can keep your plan," he said back then. But that simple pledge has had to change as the Affordable Care Act has been implemented and a small percentage of Americans, albeit millions of people, have received cancellation notices from their insurance companies. And for the second time in two weeks, he's tweaked the line. When President Obama spoke Monday night to a group of supporters, he said: "While virtually every insurer is offering new, better...