Free Republic

Climate Change: Major U.S. corporations have set up a Web site calling for a global climate treaty to be signed in Copenhagen. Considering recent evidence of massive climate fraud, perhaps they should reconsider. Many will remember the classic soft drink ad campaign where young people from many nations gather on a mountaintop and sing that they'd like to buy the world a Coke, the theory being that sharing a soda was the key to world peace. That sort of naivete has led peoples and governments around the world to accept at face value the outright fraud perpetrated by the Milli...

Control: The House and Senate climate bills contain a provision giving the president extraordinary powers in the event of a "climate emergency." As chief of staff Rahm Emanuel says, a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. If you thought the House health care bill that nobody read has hidden passages that threaten our freedoms and liberty, take a peak at the "trigger" placed in the byzantine innards of both the House-passed Waxman-Markey bill and the Kerry-Boxer bill just passed by Democrats out of Sen. Barbara Boxer's Environment and Public Works Committee. As Nick Loris of the Heritage Foundation points...

Health Care Systems: A return to private health care is rising from the grass roots north of the border. While we rush headlong toward socialized medicine, Canadians are saying, "No, thanks — been there, done that." We recently told the story of Ava Isabella Stinson, born 13 weeks premature at St. Joseph's hospital in Hamilton, Ontario. She weighed all of two pounds and had no time to be put on a waiting list. But there were no open neonatal intensive care beds for her at St. Joseph's or anywhere else in the entire province of Ontario it seems. Canada's perfectly...

Medical Care: A leaked report shows that Vancouver's health authority is considering cutting thousands of surgeries to balance the budget. However organized, government-run health care inevitably leads to rationing.Defenders of ObamaCare continually point out that their plan is not like Canada's, that holding that country's system up as an example of impending medical doom is invalid. Canada's system is different. Instead of having a single national plan, Canada's national health insurance, a kind of public option, is composed of 13 interlocking provincial and territorial plans, all framed under the Canada Health Act. But based on a report leaked to the...

The race in Congress to pass bipartisan healthcare legislation this summer hit a rough spot yesterday as key senators raised doubts about whether they could sort out complex policy disagreements in time. Republicans called on Democrats to slow the pace of deliberations, and Democratic leaders sounded decidedly less confident about speedy approval amid festering divisions. Members of the Senate Finance Committee, which is searching for a bipartisan compromise, acknowledged they were not close to a deal. Last spring Democratic leaders set an aggressive timetable for passage of universal healthcare coverage, agreeing to vote before the Aug. 8 recess, return in...

Maybe Congress believes that the "other white meat" is good for you, because the health care bill is loaded with it, even though people are already choking on the price tag. In one more example that the Democratic Party-run congress is just not listening to the will of the people, both the house and Senate versions of the developing Obamacare legislation has special "pet projects" designed to make the representatives more popular in their districts. Included are projects that have nothing to do with providing universal health insurance such as adding lighting to a playground or clearing a walking path...

Health Reform: A critically ill premature baby is moved to a U.S hospital to get the treatment she couldn't get in the system we're told we should emulate. Cost-effective care? In Canada, as elsewhere, you get what you pay for.Ava Isabella Stinson was born last Thursday at St. Joseph's hospital in Hamilton, Ontario. Weighing only two pounds, she was born 13 weeks premature and needed some very special care. Unfortunately, there were no open neonatal intensive care beds for her at St. Joseph's — or anywhere else in the entire province of Ontario, it seems.

This is an article filled with good links, that demonstrates Obama's effort to pretend to offer us a choice, but really the supporters of socialized medicine are out of the closet on the destruction of private health care as a whole. It is not about the efficacy of socialized health care, it is about showing how we are not really being offered a choice, and it demonstrates the slipping support for the plan. http://www.examiner.com/x-14881-Political-Buzz-Examiner~y2009m6d25-Obamas-Health-Care-Reform-debacle

If not, then why does the current bill exempt Members of Congress?"If you don't have health insurance, you'll be able to get the same kind of health insurance Members of Congress get for themselves." --Barack Obama, "Closing Argument" speech, Canton, Ohio, October 26, 2008 In a rare moment during last night's Democrat Party health care infomercial on ABC, President Obama was challenged by Dr. Orrin Devinsky, a neurologist and researcher at the New York University Langone Medical Center. Dr. Devinsky asked if Obama's wife or one of his daughters was sick and the plan the President proposed limited tests and...

852 - Pages in the bill 120 million - Number of individuals who could lose their current coverage as a result of the government-run plan reimbursing at Medicare rates created in the bill, according to non-partisan actuaries at the Lewin Group 4.7 million - Number of jobs that could be lost as a result of taxes on businesses that cannot afford to provide health insurance coverage, according to a model developed by Council of Economic Advisors Chair Christina Romer

According to IRS data, the bottom 50% of wage earners paid a total of 2.99% of all taxes – almost none...

ABC's White House special struggled for viewers President Obama's town hall meeting on health care delivered a sickly rating Wednesday evening. The one-hour ABC News special "Primetime: Questions for the President: Prescription for America" (4.7 million viewers, 1.1 preliminary adults 18-49 rating) had the fewest viewers in the 10 p.m. hour. The special tied some 8 p.m. comedy repeats as the lowest-rated program on a major broadcast network. The special was shot at the White House and featured the president answering questions about his health care plan. The president's primary message was that those who like their current insurance will...

If passed, President Obama's proposal for a government run option will doom us all to US Government Run Health Care “I strongly believe that Americans should have the choice of a public health insurance option operating alongside private plans,” Obama wrote. “This will give them a better range of choices, make the health care market more competitive, and keep insurance companies honest.” Logic dictates that a government operated health plan would be able to charge less than one operated by the private sector. Even if all other things were equal since the government plan would not have to make a...

There may be no limit to how far establishment media reporters will go in their attempt to prop up the public perception of failing state-run health care programs. The latest example comes from Massachusetts. The Bay State's CommonwealthCare (aka RomneyCare, so nicknamed because Governor Mitt Romney, rumored to be a Republican and pictured at right, championed the legislation's passage and signed the bill in 2006) continues to implode -- as anyone with a brain could have predicted, and as many, including yours truly (fourth item at link), did predict. Despite deep cuts, which essentially amount to large-scale rationing of care...

President Barack Obama on Wednesday night opened the door further than he has in the past to taxing health benefits to pay for health care reform.

President Barack Obama left the door open to a new tax on health care benefits Wednesday, and officials said top lawmakers and the White House were seeking $150 billion in concessions from the nation's hospitals as they sought support for legislation struggling to emerge in Congress. "I don't want to prejudge what they're doing," the president said, referring to proposals in the Senate to tax workers who get expensive insurance policies. Obama, who campaigned against the tax when he ran for president, drew a quick rebuff from one union president.

Only by expanding government control of health care can we bring down its cost. That's the faulty premise of the various proposals for health reform now being batted around Washington. The claimed cost control depends on politically safe ideas such as preventive care or the adoption of electronic health records. And neither -- even according to the Congressional Budget Office -- will do much to reduce spending. If these proposals are implemented and fail to produce savings, government will turn to a less appealing but more familiar tool to cut costs: the regulation of access to drugs and medical services....

The Senate is about to pay off the unions for helping get Obama elected. Senator Max Baucus (D, Mont.) looks to be about ready to propose a plan to pay for Obama’s massive, more than $1 trillion in new government spending on healthcare by instituting a new tax on many employees that currently have healthcare through their workplace (nearly 1 in 8 workers according to Peter Barnes). Never having been “income” before, Senator Baucus is prepared to claim it is and will be taxed accordingly. … unless, of course, you happen to be a union member. If you are a...

While still good, President Barack Obama's political health is deteriorating, threatened by what he thought would be balm -- his ambitious plan for a government takeover of health care. Mr. Obama remains slightly more popular than most presidents have been in their opening months. But his job approval rating has drifted down to 60% in the RealClearPolitics.com average. His disapproval numbers have nearly doubled to 33%. More troubling to Team Obama is the growing gap between the president's approval rating and declining support for major items on his policy agenda. Independents are increasingly joining Republicans in opposition to administration initiatives...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: CNBC, an interview just moments ago, Warren Buffett, big early supporter of the Bamster's, huge Obama supporter says there's been little progress over the past few months in the economic war being fought by the country. "We haven't got the economy moving yet," Buffett said. And of course he's right, except Goldman Sachs is out there saying they had a record first half of 2009, or they're going to pay record bonuses or some such thing and Citibank's giving people raises of 50% while the unemployment rate skyrockets at 10%. "While the economy is a shambles and...