Free Republic

The Nordic model, known for high taxes and its cradle-to-grave welfare system, is getting a radical makeover as nations find themselves cash-strapped. During the post-war period, the Scandinavian economies became famous for a "softer" version of capitalism that placed more importance on social equality than other western nations, such as Britain and the United States, did. Sweden aims to make sure people can see their general practitioner within one week, which the organization said was a modest goal in and of itself. "The target for maximum wait in Sweden to see your primary care doctor (no more than seven days)...

First, a tidbit from the far left Democracy Now:"Dr. Quentin Young, Longtime Obama Confidante and Physician to MLK" (Martin Luther King) ____________________________ And now from "The Obama File"...RE: QUENTIN YOUNGThe primary figure who delivered Obama to the single-payer camp was Quentin Young, an 86-year-old retired physician who was a longtime friend and neighbor of Obama in Chicago.  Young joined the Young Communist League as a teenager in the late 1930s.  From the mid-1940s through the mid-1970s, he was closely associated with the Communist Party.  In October 1968 he was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was probing...

The Obama administration is reportedly delaying enforcement of another aspect of ObamaCare, one that prohibits employers from providing better health benefits to top executives than those being offered to regular employees. According to The New York Times, tax officials said they would not enforce the provision in 2014 as they had not yet issued the appropriate regulations. The Affordable Care Act, commonly known as ObamaCare, says employer-sponsored health plans must not discriminate “in favor of highly compensated individuals” with respect to either eligibility or benefits, and provides a tax break for employer-sponsored insurance, while demanding employers not provide better coverage...

Every year thousands of Canadian have no choice but to seek medical care outside of the country’s single-payer health care system, according a report from a Canadian free-market think tank. In 2013, nearly 42,000 Canucks left their homeland to avoid long wait times and inferior care that plagues their centralized health system. The report from the free-market Fraser Institute found that 41,838 Canadians became “medical tourists” in 2013 and sought care outside of their hockey-loving country. While there were slightly fewer people fleeing the Canadian health system in 2013 than the previous year, the number leaving still amounts to nearly...

MONTPELIER, Vt. -In a rare move, a Democratic senator held the floor for much of the Senate Republicans' caucus Thursday. "I know that I'm in a forum of skeptics and I want to emphasize that I am a supporter. I introduced a financing bill because I believe in it but I also think it's important to have an honest discussion about what this is going to cost and how to do it," said Sen. Peter Galbraith, D-Windham County. Act 48 required Gov. Peter Shumlin to explain how to pay for a single-payer system last January. He cited implementation delay for...

The prospects for single-payer health care -- adored by many liberals, despised by private health insurers and looking better all the time to others -- did not die in the Affordable Care Act. It was thrown a lifeline through a little-known provision tucked in the famously long legislation. Single-payer groups in several states are now lining up to make use of Section 1332. Vermont is way ahead of the pack, but Hawaii, Oregon, New York, Washington, California, Colorado and Maryland have strong single-payer movements. First, some definitions. Single-payer is a system where the government pays all medical bills. Canada has...

Among the many legitimate criticisms of the 2008–09 Wall Street bailout was that it created a situation in which profits are private but losses are public, being borne by taxpayers who extended liberal loans and outright subsidies to various firms in order to head off total paralysis in the credit markets. Critics right and left regarded the combination of private profits and public losses as inherently objectionable — but Barack Obama and congressional Democrats apparently saw in the Wall Street bailout a model for health-insurance reform. And, surprise: Buried deep within the Affordable Care Act are not one but two...

Robert Laszewski—a prominent consultant to health insurance companies—recently wrote in a remarkably candid blog post that, while Obamacare is almost certain to cause insurance costs to skyrocket even higher than it already has, “insurers won’t be losing a lot of sleep over it.” How can this be? Because insurance companies won’t bear the cost of their own losses—at least not more than about a quarter of them. The other three-quarters will be borne by American taxpayers. For some reason, President Obama hasn’t talked about this particular feature of his signature legislation. Indeed, it’s bad enough that Obamacare is projected by...

You remember the “risk corridor” provisions, right? If a new ObamaCare plan comes in under budget, the insurer pays the difference between the actual cost and projected cost to HHS. If it comes in over budget, HHS pays the difference to the insurance. It’s a way for insurers to spread risk among the industry with HHS as middleman. (The bit in the excerpt about the White House modifying the rules for its new “transitional policy” is a reference to this.) Problem is, there’s no cap on how much HHS might need to pay out if lots and lots of plans come in...

Well, our progressive friends are once again calling for single payer health care. The ironic pretext this time is that Obamacare has collapsed into chaos … But the advocates of the “Affordable Care Act,” as these people stubbornly refer to it, refuse to accept that the crackup was caused by the inevitable incompetence of government bureaucrats. They believe the real problem was avaricious insurance executives. Thus, people like Michael Moore, Paul Krugman and even Colin Powell urge us to cast out the money changers and wholly surrender our health care to the tender mercies of the federal government.

They’re nervous. “We are becoming increasingly concerned about momentum that is quickly building among some leading conservatives for elimination of the risk corridor and reinsurance programs,” [Blue Cross Blue Shield Association CEO Scott] Serota wrote…“Their efforts, along with growing support for repealing the risk corridor and reinsurance programs, could combine to create a perfect storm to, at a minimum, dissuade the Administration from modifying risk corridor program rules to provide increased funding in light of the recent ‘transitional policy’ allowing insurers to offer consumers the option to renew their 2013 health plans for 2014,” Serota wrote.In attached talking points, seemingly...

Those who have elected to keep close tabs on the reactions to Obamacare’s blotchy rollout will presumably have noticed that it has been marked by admissions of guilt. The latest such confession comes from The New Republic’s Noam Scheiber, who bluntly conceded yesterday that “Obamacare actually paves the way toward single payer.” Pushing back against Michael Moore’s unsettling criticisms of the law, Schreiber tweeted: Noam Scheiber @noamscheiber Dear liberals bummed about Obamacare: Don't sweat it. It's going to get us to a single-payer system before long. http://www.newrepublic.com/article/116105/obamacare-will-lead-single-payer-michael-moore … 11:42 AM - 6 Jan 2014 26 Retweets 12 favorites This, Scheiber...

"...That's why we're modernizing our unique system. Under the new approach—made possible by the Affordable Care Act and approved by the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services—Maryland will implement a groundbreaking new system of health care delivery. Using the rate setting structure, the state will set global budgets and other alternative approaches to payment that reward clinical systems of care for providing improved outcomes at lower costs. Support for this new demonstration has come from a coalition of the hospitals, the insurance companies and the state all working together with a common vision....Under the new model, our hospitals have committed...

Those who have resisted the idea that the HealthCare.gov web site and Obamacare in general may have been intentionally designed to create confusion and chaos [1] as a means for imposing a single-payer healthcare system on a currently unwilling populace are going to have a tough time explaining away yet another recently discovered “quirk.”To be clear, I’m not claiming, as some have inferred from previous columns, that there is a widely orchestrated chaos-creation plan, or that any attempt to capitalize on the current bedlam to impose single-payer is destined to succeed. What I am saying is that the evidence...

WASHINGTON – While all eyes are on the ObamaCare rollout, an ambitious health care experiment is going forward in Vermont that would create a government-run alternative know as a "single-payer" system -- and it's starting to attract more attention from liberals frustrated with the Affordable Care Act's implementation. Democrats' faith in ObamaCare has been shaken by the technical failures of the federal and state insurance exchanges as well as, in some cases, premium increases. In Vermont, however, they see a potential first step toward the kind of national government-run health care system some have advocated for years. Filmmaker Michael Moore,...

Now it can be told. Emphasis on “now”:Precisely. ObamaCare will stumble along for the rest of the year, with a new wave of public irritation to come once small businesses start dumping employees onto the exchanges en masse, but the prospects for repeal will remain dim even if the GOP takes back the Senate. The numbers in Congress just aren’t there to beat an Obama veto, and by 2017 so many millions will have been assimilated into the program that some critical mass of GOP centrists will end up taking a “mend it, don’t end it” approach. Only an adverse-selection...

Last week the liberal documentary-maker Michael Moore prompted indigestion across the progressive wonk community by pronouncing Obamacare “awful.” In a New York Times op-ed, he bemoaned the way the president’s law preserved the health insurance industry rather than replacing it with a Medicare-for-all style single-payer system. The good news, Moore conceded, is that the previously uninsured (and often previously uninsurable) can get finally get coverage. The bad news is that their coverage will often be lousy and pose an enormous financial burden. He ended by calling for activists to lean on state politicians in an effort to beef the law...

<p>TODAY marks the beginning of health care coverage under the Affordable Care Act’s new insurance exchanges, for which two million Americans have signed up. Now that the individual mandate is officially here, let me begin with an admission: Obamacare is awful.</p>

Michael Moore calls ObamaCare "awful" in today's The New York Times, part of a blistering op-ed attacking the president from the far left.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpAyan1fXCE