Free Republic

The president’s health care law is unworkable, and he knows it. That’s why, on Wednesday, he was forced to sign the PACE Act to protect millions of small business workers from higher costs and coverage disruptions under ObamaCare. Our goal remains to repeal and defund all of ObamaCare – as we’ve voted a number of times to do – and until then we will continue to do everything in our power to protect Americans from the law’s disastrous impact on jobs, the economy, and hard-working families. Since 2011, the president has now signed at least 10 House bills that dismantle,...

As local employees sign up for their 2013 benefits, many are learning that they’ll lose a bigger chunk of their paychecks to health-care costs. For the first time, central Ohio employers will deduct, on average, more than $2,000 from their workers’ paychecks next year to help pay ever-pricier health-care premiums, according to a recent survey by benefits consultant Aon Hewitt. The survey included 113 employers in the Columbus area that represent 79,000 employees. Cost-shifting is just one way that employers have long tried to handle higher health-care costs. Local health-benefit experts say they’re seeing several other strategies emerge, too. For...

WASHINGTON, DC – The Obama administration’s chief actuary at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) notified Republican leaders Saturday that the “very tight time frame” and “complexity” of the Democrats’ health spending bill would prevent them from fully analyzing the costs and efficacy of the bill before the House voted on the legislation. The letter was in response to a request from House and Senate Republicans.

YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio -- They said he couldn't be coached. James Traficant played quarterback for the University of Pittsburgh, and was drafted and released by the Steelers. But when his pro football career didn't pan out, he ended up in politics -- serving 17 years in Congress. "I got involved in politics, like a fool," Traficant said, sitting in the back booth of the Yankee Kitchen diner. "Made a lot of enemies. Found myself in prison and seen the underside, the underbelly, of the United States of America." The colorful Traficant, 68, is free after seven years in prison. He was...

Obamacare will result in the largest expansion of abortion since Roe v. Wade. How? As it stands now, Roe gives individual states leeway in writing and enacting their own restrictions on abortion and the Supreme Court has upheld those state restrictions. These include 24-hour wait periods, parental consent for minors seeking abortions, prohibiting abortion after a certain week of pregnancy, etc. If abortion coverage is included in federally mandated health care, those state laws and restrictions will be rendered null and void. Abortion becomes an “essential health service” that cannot be restricted. In a bitter and deadly irony, all choice...

Scheiner, 71, was Obama's doctor from 1987 until he entered the White House; he vouched for the then-candidate's "excellent health" in a letter last year. He's still an enthusiastic Obama supporter, but he worries about whether the health care legislation currently making its way through Congress will actually do any good, particularly for doctors like himself who practice general medicine. "I'm not sure he really understands what we face in primary care," Scheiner says.