Free Republic

A 58-year-old patient came to see me one Monday morning not long ago. He was like so many in his age group — he had spent the weekend getting in a week's worth of exercise. His left knee was sore, and he wanted an MRI. He was not a professional athlete with a huge stake in his physical well-being, and he had not fallen on it or twisted it; it was simply sore from his three-mile jog on Sunday morning. "It's covered by insurance," he told me. Never mind that there was no medical indication to qualify this particular hurt...

She claims “I’ve got a plan for that” on just about every issue, but the proverbial cat got Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s tongue on health care. And you can bet that’s Warren’s plan. Rather than answering tough questions about the single-payer health care scheme she now endorses, Warren wants to keep the focus on 1) bashing insurance companies and 2) telling people they will receive great health care under socialized medicine. Telling people they will lose their current coverage, and figuring out how to pay for this $30 trillion-plus system? Warren doesn’t want to bother answering questions about those minor details.

According to the records, in Fiscal Year 2018 the U.S. Health and Human Services Civil Rights Office received over a thousand complaints, alleging conscience violations or religious discrimination. That’s significantly more than in any year recorded under the previous presidential administration. One complaint came from a Catholic nurse working at the University of Vermont Medical Center. The unnamed nurse claims that her employer forced her to take part in an abortion, though she had informed the hospital of her pro-life beliefs. The nurse was scheduled to help a patient who had suffered a miscarriage, but when she walked into the...

Make Insurance company's a non non'trade able commodity! Hold all government as though they to are just citizens. Use all laws to enforce insider trading! Enforce this law by doubling prison sentences for all GOVERNMENT...including writing laws or crafting laws!

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said Friday she does not envision a single House Democrat breaking ranks to vote in favor of the Obamacare replacement bill that GOP leaders are pushing on Capitol Hill. “I don’t see any Democratic votes for what they are doing — none,” Mrs. Pelosi, California Democrat, told reporters at a breakfast sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor. “It isn’t even about Democrats or Republicans, it is about meeting the needs of the American people.” Republicans advanced their proposal through two committees this week. The bill has come under fire from both conservative and liberal lawmakers....

Alright, let's do this. Ready to answer your health care questions. Keep 'em coming with #AskPOTUS. pic.twitter.com/wK8RDF2H0i — President Obama (@POTUS) July 1, 2015

No one at the VA has gotten the ax for falsifying records that showed veterans waiting months for medical care. And no one will probably be fired for continued incompetence at the VA. Washington Times: The number of veterans seeking health  care but ending up on waiting lists of one month or more is 50 percent higher now than it was a year ago when scandal over false records and long wait times wracked the Department of Veterans Affairs, The New York Times reported. The VA also faces a budget  shortfall of nearly $3 billion, the Times reported in a story posted...

Link to complaint filed by Virginia Attorney General challenging the health care law as beyond the authority of Congress under the Commerce Clause

Updated at 11:22am EST. Minority Leader Boehner says that Pelosi still doesn't have the votes.

Good morning, Capitolists! An item in today's Washington Post by the intrepid Paul Kane and Lori Montgomery details a possible strategy contemplated by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called a "self-executing rule," which would let the House amend the Senate health care bill without ever voting to pass it. In layman's terms, House Democrats would get the benefit of doing something without having to bear the pain of doing it. Why didn't we think of that?? If you can't find us later today, we're probably out filing a patent request for a self-executing four-mile jog and a self-executing six-week diet. Until...

An alarming find comes to us via the inveterate investigative blogger Jane Hamsher, often seen on TV news programming. The Senate bill contains a lifetime limit placed on the care that ill patients can receive. The next time an Obamabot mocks your assertion that the legislation would ration care, or if you dare to use the incendiary phrase “death panels” — if a lifetime limit on treatments and drugs isn’t a death sentence, please tell me what is! — you can tell them that Jane, a very liberal blogger, cancer survivor and all-around fine person, has unearthed the following in...

In the 1,500-page bill that Obama, Pelossi and Reid tried to force through Congress in two weeks without allowing for ANY public review (so much for Obama's lies about "transparency"), guess what: GET READY FOR A MAJOR FISHING EXPEDITION ON ALL YOUR TAX RECORDS. -- Section 431(a) of the bill says that the IRS must divulge taxpayer identity information, including the filing status, the modified adjusted gross income, the number of dependents, and “other information as is prescribed by” regulation. That information will be provided to the new Health Choices Commissioner [GET READY FOR ANOTHER OBAMA "CZAR"] and state health...

Maybe it's me but I noticed today sites everywhere all of a sudden are referring to Obama's plan as the "Public Health Care Plan" and no longer as the "Government Health Care Plan" ?

WASHINGTON — The introduction of the Medicare prescription drug benefit means that soon the government will be picking up almost half of the nation's healthcare costs, a report released Wednesday shows. At the same time, private-sector spending on healthcare also will increase, according to economists and actuaries for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Writing in the online edition of the journal Health Affairs, the federal agency's economists and actuaries predicted that the continuing increases in public and private healthcare spending would lead to "heightened pressure to find ways to slow cost growth without compromising quality of access." The...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A task force led by the U.S. Surgeon General is still drafting its report on drug importation, but one conclusion is already clear: Savvy shoppers can find cheaper prescription drugs in American pharmacies. The new cost comparison by the task force found that "if patients will shop around they, very often, can beat the Canadian price," William Hubbard, FDA associate commissioner for policy and planning, said Tuesday, providing a first glimpse of one of the task force's early conclusions. For years the drug regulatory agency, which is part of the 13-member task force, has said it questions...

Mercy Healthcare Sacramento is the most aggressive local hospital chain when it comes to collecting unpaid bills from the poor and uninsured, yet it enjoys the same tax breaks and financial perks all of the county's nonprofit hospitals get by promising to provide charity care. .snip. Mercy, owned by Catholic Healthcare West, filed four times as many collections cases in the local court and sought 11 times more in total payments as any other health care system operating in the Sacramento market. .snip. We are not a finance company," said David Amos, the CHW executive who oversees patient financial services...

Montreal – A 21-year-old man died of appendicitis after he was refused treatment at an emergency clinic because he didn't have his provincial health card with him. Gerald Augustin complained of stomach pains on Thursday but the receptionist at the St-Andre medical centre told him he had to return home to get his health card. He didn't make it back to the clinic in Montreal's east end. About four hours later, a friend alerted police and called an ambulance for the man, who had a fatal attack of appendicitis in his apartment. He was pronounced dead in hospital. Rouslene Augustin,...

HIPAA, the stringent new federal medical-privacy law, took effect in April, and soon had what may be some rather drastic unintended consequences in the town of Craig, Colo.: "To protect the privacy of those needing medical help, 911 dispatchers stopped mentioning residents' names in radio calls to emergency response teams. That made it more difficult for the teams to find addresses," which critics charge may have contributed to the death of a local heart attack victim. Moreover, thousands of doctors "have stopped sending out appointment-reminder postcards, figuring the cards could be read by someone other than the patient. Some doctors...

<p>WASHINGTON — Nearly 40 million Americans uninsured, drug costs rising, doctors dropping out of Medicare.</p> <p>Real problems that Republicans are hoping the first doctor/incoming Senate majority leader can fix during the next legislative session -- before health care issues become a liability for the White House.</p>