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The captives who have been dumped by their healthcare insurance companies on Barack Obama’s orders are beginning to feel the pain Obama meant them to experience. Obamacare was and always will be nothing more than a stick with which to flog Americans into lining up and marching into a single payer system. Single payer is a system that involves the government paying healthcare providers what the government thinks their services are worth. The details that we have been able to dig out of Obamacare include the fact that doctors’ salaries will be determined by the government. Moreover there will be...

I actually applaud this experiment. Let’s see how it works out. Vermont, as it happens, shares a long border with New Hampshire, which prides itself on having no income tax or sales tax. Let’s watch how people vote with their feet.

The new leftist website, Vox, has an article by Sarah Kliff on Vermont’s experiment with a single-payer healthcare system. But I don’t really have much to say about what’s happening in the Green Mountain State, other than to declare that I much prefer healthcare experiments to occur at the state level. Indeed, we should reform Medicaid and Medicare and also fix the tax code so that Washington has no role in healthcare. Then the states can experiment and compete to see what works best. But that’s a topic for another day. The real reason I cite Kliff’s article is that...

Our recent interview with Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel about his provocative prediction that most employers will abandon health coverage by 2025 struck a nerve with You’re The Boss readers. It came as no surprise that Dr. Emanuel’s claim, first made in his new book, “Reinventing American Health Care,” would be swept up in the broader political and ideological debate about the Affordable Care Act. But in their many comments, readers raised interesting questions, and we took some of them back to Dr. Emanuel in another conversation that appears, edited and condensed, below. It’s worth noting that among those readers who...

**SNIP** A number of Democrats are reluctant to commit to a single payer plan before there’s a comprehensive review of the $2 billion financing system that will be needed to pay for it. Some Democratic lawmakers worry that moving to a single payer health care system in several years could be a political liability. They also want to know the details of the benefit package that will be part of a single payer program. When Senate President John Campbell raised concerns about the financing plan earlier this week, he said out loud what a number of Democrats are saying privately...

The problems with the implementation of the Affordable Care Act may be masking another major change in the way health care is delivered to U.S. consumers, experts believe. At a conference in Washington on Thursday, health care and business professionals said that there’s an increasing trend in the industry toward cutting insurance companies out of the process entirely, as large, regional hospital systems move into the insurance business. Dr. Kenneth L. Davis, CEO and president of Mount Sinai Health System, the largest health care provider in the state of New York, said that starting next year, Mt. Sinai will begin...

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...