Free Republic

The California Democratic Party recently adopted its own Nicene Creed. While the Christians’ profession of faith numbers almost 400 words, Democrats offer a more succinct five: “I believe in single payer.” The mantra hits voters focused on Tuesday’s elections hard and often. Blah, blah, blah…single payer… blah, blah, blah… single payer… blah, blah, blah… single payer… blah, blah, blah. What sounds surreal today may soon become real.In the governor’s race, twelve Democrats race to outdo the others on their absolute, airtight fidelity to a total state takeover of healthcare, which, of course, its proponents never describe in such terms. Instead,...

The Health Service Executive (HSE) should be “dismantled and reassembled” following the smear test scandal, cervical cancer patient Emma Mhic Mhathúna has told RTE’s Late Late Show. Ms. Mhic Mhathúna (37), a mother of five, is one of scores of Irish women who were wrongly told they had normal smear tests through the CervicalCheck screening program. Asked about the action taken by the Government in recent days to deal with the fallout from the controversy, Ms Mhic Mhathúna told Ryan Tubridy “talk is cheap”. “They’re afraid of me because I’m telling it like it is,” she said. “They have cost...

One of the most glaring signs that the Democratic Party has shifted even farther leftward since the 2016 election is in the way most Democratic candidates are embracing Senator Bernie Sanders's single-payer health care plan, which he calls "Medicare for All." As a candidate pushing this idea in 2016, Sanders was criticized by the Democratic Party establishment for proposing universal health care, telling voters it was politically unrealistic and a non-starter.  Hillary Clinton and congressional Democrats were proposing minor tweaks to Obamacare rather than overhauling the entire health care system. But the hard lurch to the left by Democrats, which...

Donald Trump tweeted that Britain's National Health Service is "broke and not working." All too true: expenses have forced 40% of walk-in health centers to close, all elective surgery in January to be cancelled, and primary care has been decimated, it's not surprising that problems have surfaced. It is just as predictable that the usual call for "more money" echoes around the UK. All this is the result of economic laws that have been completely ignored since the days of Aneurin Bevan, the father of the UK NHS. The first is the Law of Rationing. In short, "Everything is...

Today, breast cancer kills 39 percent fewer women than 25 years ago. Prostate cancer kills 52 percent fewer men, the American Cancer Society announced last week. You can thank new technologies that detect cancer early and defeat it for many of the lives saved. Americans diagnosed with most types of cancer have better odds of surviving it in the U.S. than anywhere else on the planet. But watch out. These staggering achievements are at risk. A chorus of Democratic politicians is kicking off 2018 with renewed calls for universal, government-run health care. Leading the pack for single-payer are presidential contenders...

Every hospital in the country has been ordered to cancel all non-urgent surgery until at least February in an unprecedented step... The instructions... which will see result in around 50,000 operations being axed - followed claims by senior doctors that patients were being treated in “third world” conditions... Hospitals are reporting growing chaos, with a spike in winter flu leaving frail patients facing 12-hour waits, and some units running out of corridor space. [The] NHS medical director...ordered NHS trusts to stop taking all but the most urgent cases, closing outpatients clinics for weeks as well as cancelling around 50,000 planned...

Around 55,000 planned procedures are expected to be axed in a desperate attempt to free up beds, the Evening Standard reports. One senior doctor claimed that patients are being treated in “third world” conditions in some hospitals. Other NHS trusts have abandoned basic rules that state that men and women should be kept on separate wards and some patients are facing a 12-hour wait to receive Accident and Emergency care as hospitals run out of space. The emergency has been preceded by a growing flu crisis, and as of Tuesday, 12 NHS trusts covering millions of people have said they...

Hospitals’ inability to keep up with the demand for care on Tuesday night prompted NHS England to tell them to take unprecedented measures to try and stabilise the service. They included cancelling outpatient appointments and day case surgery, extending an existing ban on non-urgent surgery until the end of the month and deploying consultants in A&E units to assess if patients really are a medical emergency. Amid growing evidence of chaos as the NHS’s winter crisis bites, hospitals are being forced to create makeshift wards for patients, growing numbers are declaring a black alert – an official admission that they...

Pope Francis on Thursday urged lawmakers to ensure that health care laws protect the “common good,” decrying the fact that in many places only the privileged can afford sophisticated medical treatments. The comments came as U.S. lawmakers in Washington, D.C., have been debating how to overhaul the nation’s health insurance laws. In a message to a medical association meeting at the Vatican, Francis expressed dismay at what he called a tendency toward growing inequality in health care. He said in wealthier countries, health care access risks being more dependent on people’s money than on their need for treatment. […] Without...

NHS England chief executive Simon Stevens has warned five million people will be left waiting for treatment if the Government does not increase health service funding in the Budget. Mr Stevens said failure to increase funding would add one million people to the waiting list by 2021. Speaking at the NHS Providers conference in Birmingham, Mr Stevens said: "NHS England's assessment of the funding position is that the Budget for next year falls well short of what is needed to look after patients and their families at their time of greatest need. Mr Stevens said the NHS would not be...

The British National Health Service (NHS) has provoked a firestorm by temporarily banning surgeries on people who smoke, and those who are obese. Patients who smoke must quit for at least 8 weeks before non-urgent surgery and obese people must lose weight before the NHS gives the go ahead. The Telegraph: In recent years, a number of areas have introduced delays for such patients - with some told operations will be put back for months, during which time they are expected to try to lose weight or stop smoking. But the new rules, drawn up by clinical commissioning groups (CCGs)...

As the American health care system continues to spend more and get ranked lower than other developed countries, many progressives have suggested a shift to single-payer health care as a solution. Such attitudes have been exacerbated by recent Republican attempts to reign in government health care spending, prompting 52% of Democrats to say that they support a government takeover of health care (this is up from 33% in March 2014). The shortcomings of the US status quo (and any potential Republican reforms) are greatly exaggerated, and adopting a single-payer system is likely to only worsen our quality of care. Who...

For the past century, socialists, progressives, communists, statists, and an increasing number of Democrats have supported the imposition of a government-run socialized medical care system in the United States. Every Democrat president since FDR (except JFK and possibly Jimmy Carter) has spoken in favor of or introduced a plan for socialized medicine. Now, it finally appears that a critical mass has been achieved and the Rubicon has been crossed. A Quinnipiac University national poll on August 3, 2017 reported “Replacing the current health care system with a single payer system in which Medicare covers every American citizen is a...

We’re not all socialists yet but we’re getting there. A majority of Democrats are, in any case. The single-payer numbers in Morning Consult’s new survey not only aren’t surprising, they’re right in line with what other studies have showed this year.

Americans are not prepared to take big chunks out of their paychecks for socialized medicine, and they’re not keen to move far left. Today is single-payer day. Bernie Sanders is introducing the Medicare for All Act of 2017, and this time he’s no lone socialist crying in the progressive wilderness. A total of 15 Democratic senators are backing his bill, including most of the top Democratic contenders for the presidency. As the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake observed yesterday, “The dam is breaking.” The New Republic, among others, is even arguing that single-payer is becoming the newest “litmus test” for the...

A video from 1987 shows Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) has not always considered single-payer health care a slam dunk for progressive reformers. Sanders said Medicaid for every American "would bankrupt the nation" while he was mayor of Burlington, Vermont, in a clip posted by the NTK Network. Speaking with physician Milton Terris on his local television show "Bernie Speaks with the Community," Sanders discussed the possibility of implementing single-payer health care in the U.S. "You want to guarantee that all people have access to health care as you do in Canada," Sanders said. "But I think what we understand...

A video from 1987 shows Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) has not always considered single-payer health care a slam dunk for progressive reformers. […] “You want to guarantee that all people have access to health care as you do in Canada,” Sanders said. “But I think what we understand is that unless we change the funding system and the control mechanism in this country to do that—for example, if we expanded Medicaid [to] everybody,” Sanders added. “Give everybody a Medicaid card—we would be spending such an astronomical sum of money that, you know, we would bankrupt the nation.”

President Trump vowed to veto Sen. Bernie Sanders' bill to create a government-run healthcare system if it passed the House and Senate. "Bernie Sanders is pushing hard for a single payer healthcare plan - a curse on the U.S. & its people..." Trump tweeted Thursday afternoon "...I told Republicans to approve healthcare fast or this would happen. But don't worry, I will veto because I love our country & its people." The Vermont Independent introduced the bill Wednesday with the backing of 17 Democratic senators, including potential presidential hopefuls Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Kamala Harris of California, Cory Booker of...

Democrats may be hoping to gain a midterm wave. They may be hoping even more to boot Donald J. Trump from the White House in 2020. The president’s response to the Charlottesville violence, the rolling back of the Deferred Action of Childhood Arrivals, Russian collusion hysteria, the slow pace of enacting his agenda—all of these things have Democrats grinning, expect that they shouldn’t. The party’s own operatives and data crunchers have run through the numbers based on focus groups, and Democrats are still heading for the electoral ditch. They still have yet to mount an effective attack against the...

Sarai was 25 years old when she died of Wilson’s disease, an inherited disorder that causes liver failure. A liver transplant could have cured her, but she was uninsured and was denied an appointment at two prominent Chicago transplant hospitals, including my own. Sarai’s plight was brought to my attention when a local religious group held a hunger strike advocating transplant access for Sarai and other uninsured patients. When she died, her congregation marched seven miles, holding her photograph and lugging coffins emblazoned with her name, to launch a sit-in in front of Northwestern University Hospital. Her death certificate named...