Free Republic

Since winning the governor’s seat in 2010, Peter Shumlin has pledged to make Vermont the first state in the country with a single-payer health care system. But a key legislative ally now says the proposal might not be as politically viable as Shumlin seems to believe. And Senate President John Campbell says it’s time to start putting together a contingency plan. Shumlin has backed off on his promise to deliver a publicly funded plan by January of 2017. But while the timeline may have moved back, Shumlin says he’ll still reach the goal. Campbell, however, isn’t so sure. And he...

Obamacare architect Zeke Emanuel claims in his new book that the health care reform law will result in “the end of employer-sponsored insurance.” Despite President Barack Obama’s claim that “if you like your plan, you can keep it” — a talking point developed in his first 100 days in office by a tiny but influential left-wing messaging group called the Herndon Alliance — his administration has long planned to disassemble the current U.S. insurance industry as well as alter health care reform. The Daily Caller reported last June that the Obama administration was making moves to squash self-funded insurance plans,...

And that sort of a backlog has Democrats worried. POLITICO brings us up to date: Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.) is sounding the alarm this morning about a massive backlog within the Office of Medicare Hearings and Appeals. The 357,000-appeal clog delays providers from having their cases heard for longer than two years, McDermott noted in a letter to HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. ” “The agencies must review their administrative procedures and act now to protect seniors who are struggling to get Medicare payment appeals addressed,” he wrote. He argued that problems with recovery auditors have been identified as the leading...

In 2011, Vermont passed the nation's first single-payer healthcare system, "Green Mountain Care." While the law was supposed to be fully enacted by 2017, it has become apparent that there's no solid plan in place to actually pay for the healthcare of all Vermont residents. Democratic lawmakers, citing missed deadlines and past failures, have begun to call for Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin to "shelve" the plan. “The deadlines for proposing financing have been missed two years in a row now, so to me that’s very disappointing. It’s becoming clearer and clearer that there is no financing plan,” Condon told...

No, no it can’t Vermont Health Connect is a disaster. It’s a disaster even by the standards of other troubled state health care websites. And Green Mountain Care, its attempt at single payer, is an even bigger disaster. (via Ace) Al Gobeille, the chair of the Green Mountain Care Board, says additional tax revenue will be needed in order to make a publicly-financed health care system affordable for all Vermonters.And Gobeille says he won’t shy away from the challenge.“That’s the question that everybody runs from, but I’ve never run from it,” said Gobeille. “It’s going to come from a...

U.S. health insurers are struggling to set prices for their Obamacare plans in 2015 and decide which regions to return to before the deadlines for submitting those plans to regulators. --SNIP-- The result, industry executives and experts say, is that some of the larger insurers may pull out of individual markets where they already know they can't make money. Otherwise they will try to hold steady until 2016, when the number of people on Obamacare plans is expected to surge as high as 22 million. Some smaller insurers offering health plans in 2014 may back out altogether if they can't...

The Obamacare architect is now warning “insurance companies as we know them are about to die,” and confirming the long-standing speculation that President Obama’s Affordable Care Act always aimed to put private health insurance companies out of business. According to Ezekial Emanuel, the architect of Obamacare, this is a positive change to health coverage. “[Obamacare exchanges] will force insurance companies to evolve or become extinct,” he said. SEE ALSO: Michelle Obama Acts Foolishly on Stage at White House> “Insurance companies as they are now will be going away. Indeed, they are already evolving. For the next few years insurance companies...

Hillary Clinton showed more signs of flexibility Wednesday on how Obamacare is implemented, but she insisted the law is too important to “turn the clock back.” In a question-and-answer session following a lecture at UCLA, Clinton suggested she’s open to different ways of achieving the health law’s goals. She praised Arkansas — the state where she and her husband rose to political fame — for carrying out a new approach to expanding Medicaid coverage, by using the federal money to buy private health insurance for more than 100,000 low-income residents. Clinton called the move, spearheaded by Democratic Gov. Mike Beebe...

A 20-year-old memo says Hillary Clinton backed a single-payer socialist health system, believing ObamaCare-like mega-regulation to be “a crock.” As president, she’d double down on government control.It’s buried over 60 paragraphs into Alana Goodman’s investigative article in the Washington Free Beacon this week about unpublished documents exposing Clinton’s ruthlessness. […] The first lady had just launched her secretive health care task force pushing a “managed competition” approach to reform. Hillary commented “at length” to President Clinton, revealing she “thinks managed competition” is “a crock; single-payer necessary; maybe add to Medicare,” in the clipped wording of Blair's memo. …

Reforms to the formula used to ration expensive medicines will make it harder for NHS patients to get new life-saving drugs, warn campaigners. The rationing body, The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), plans to lower the cost threshold for new treatments and end the priority given to patients who are dying. The reforms are a shift to a system which the Government pledged would allow patients to ‘access the drugs and treatments their doctors think they need’. It involves changes to a complex formula, known as quality adjusted life years (QALY). And some drugs approved under ‘end...

British patients should adopt more 'pushy' American attitudes with their doctors to get drugs they are entitled to, the head of the NHS rationing body has said. Professor David Haslam, chairman of the National Institute of Health and Care Excellence (Nice), said that patients need to see themselves as 'equal partners' with doctors to get the treatment they need. And he explained that after working as a doctor near an American air force base in Cambridgeshire, he noticed that U.S. patients had a less deferential approach than local residents. Earlier this week a Government report found that a third of...

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...