Free Republic

Health Overhaul: Jonathan Gruber isn't the only one who got rich off ObamaCare. Several big government contractors are raking in megabucks to help the government take over the nation's health care system. Gruber made news when it came to light that the Obama administration had paid the stupid-American-calling MIT economist roughly $400,000 to help build ObamaCare, and several states paid him big bucks as well to build their exchanges. But this is just the tip of the ObamaCare bonanza. In the last fiscal year, Health and Human Services spent $21 billion on contracts with private firms. That's more than it...

Mary Strause, a filmmaker in Wisconsin, logged on to Amazon’s video-streaming service in late May so she could share a link to her latest project, a docuseries that harshly criticized the U.S. health care industry. She was surprised to see that her video had vanished. Ms. Strause had no way of knowing it, but the video had been taken down after a law firm working for UnitedHealth Group, one of the country’s largest health care companies, sent a letter warning Amazon and another streaming service, Vimeo, that the video was defamatory. It was the latest salvo in an aggressive and...

In a press conference on Monday, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz announced a landmark agreement with the nation’s largest health insurers to tackle the number one healthcare problem plaguing hundreds of millions of Americans: prior authorization. Prior authorization is the requirement for doctors and patients to get advance approval from insurance companies BEFORE certain treatments, tests, or procedures are covered. It was meant to control costs, but for 85% of Americans, it’s become a serious barrier to care. “Doctors like myself are continually struggling with this issue,” Dr. Oz said, explaining how the...

The U.S. Department of Justice is carrying out a criminal investigation into UnitedHealth Group (UNH.N), opens new tab for possible Medicare fraud, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday. UnitedHealth said it had not been notified by the DOJ about the "supposed criminal investigation reported," and the company stood by "the integrity of our Medicare Advantage program." The stock fell 8% in after-hours trade following the report. The health insurer has been under pressure for months. On Tuesday, UnitedHealth Group's CEO, Andrew Witty, stepped down unexpectedly, and the company simultaneously suspended its 2025 financial forecast due to rising medical costs....

Many of us cheered in January of this year when Marilyn Tavenner, the woman who headed the disastrous rollout of the healthcare.gov website, announced she’d be stepping down from her position as Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). At the time, we weren’t too focused on who would be replacing her. Waiting in the wings was Andrew M. Slavitt, now Acting Medicare Chief, who had been biding his time as CMS’ deputy administrator since July 2014. Even though he’s been accused of possible cronyism and conflicts of interest, Andy Slavitt has a special brand of insurance...

Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” said the reaction to the killing of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson showed “people’s anger” about the insurance industry. On MSNBC, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) said, “You can only push people so far and then they start to take matters into their own hands.” Warren later stated, “Violence is never the answer. I should have been much clearer that there is never a justification for murder.”

From my open enrollment next year, what would be some good alternatives to United healthcare. I'm new to all this Medicare stuff. It's unbelievably confusing to somebody as simple as me. Thank you

A web page listing the corporate leadership team behind Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield (BCBS), one of America's biggest health insurers, has disappeared from the company's website. The disappearance of the page listing the provider's 25 highest-ranking employees was highlighted in a post shared to the r/antiwork subreddit on Reddit by the user u/wendysdrivethru. The web page appeared to have vanished after the fatal shooting of CEO of UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson, in New York in what police described as a "premeditated, preplanned targeted attack." Newsweek has reached out to Anthem BCBS via email for comment. (snip) The sudden disappearance of...

he words scrawled on the bullets used to kill UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson closely resemble the title of a book criticizing insurance companies and the tactics they use to deny claims, it has been revealed. Health insurance boss Brian Thompson, 50, was shot in the back and calf early on Wednesday by a masked man who appeared to be waiting for him outside the Hilton hotel in Manhattan, before succumbing to his injuries in hospital. Detectives investigating the shooting reportedly found shell casings with the words 'depose', 'deny' and 'defend' inscribed on them. They are now working to determine what...

Even the left now admits that Obamacare failed. The former Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary who helped oversee implementation of the disastrous Obamacare law just argued that “27-28 million” Americans have no health insurance. And that’s about 10 years after the Affordable Care Act, also known as “Obamacare,” was enacted in 2010.

Detectives investigating the murder of UnitedHealthCare CEO Brian Thompson reportedly found shell casings with the words 'deny', 'defend' and 'depose' inscribed on them. Police sources told ABC News that casings were found at the scene with the cryptic messages left on them. Detectives are now working to determine what the words mean and if they could possibly hint at a motive for the slaying of the 50-year-old. Officers are still searching for the unknown assailant who gunned down Thompson outside of the Hilton Hotel in Manhattan on Wednesday morning. Authorities say he fled the scene on foot before then making...

The Justice Department is suing to block UnitedHealth Group’s $3.3 billion purchase of Amedisys, citing concerns the combination would hinder access to home health and hospice services in the U.S. The antitrust complaint, filed in Maryland by the Justice Department and four states’ attorneys general Tuesday, argues that a potential merger is illegal because the two companies are “such large competitors” already — and the deal would give UnitedHealth too much control in many local markets. That would mean less choice for patients looking for affordable care, the suit alleges, as well as fewer employment options for nurses seeking competitive...

UnitedHealth cured the Ingenix stigma by simply changing its name to OptumInsight. It’s as though they made a deal with a witness protection program. Like other large medical insurers, over the years, they sustain fines for federal racketeering, skirt state laws by systematically reducing, denying and delaying payments owed to doctors for medical care and pay fines in the billions and still they continue on! Who dispenses Medicare and ACA money? Who controls the prices that the exchanges charge? And who is operating the very workings of the exchanges? That would be the leaders of the pack, UnitedHealth and Optum....

As many as 3 million New Yorkers may be fraudulently reaping taxpayer-funded Medicaid and other public health insurance benefits at a potential cost of $20 billion a year, a staggering new study claims. About 5.5 million Empire State residents have incomes low enough to meet the standard eligibility limits for Medicaid or the Essential Plan, a related public health insurance program. But with expanded eligibility rules under Obamacare and an increased demand for a controversial homecare program, enrollment has swelled to 8.5 million, a potential surplus of 3 million.

a worrying majority of Democrat voters are completely ignorant of the political positions of Kamala Harris... voters who backed Joe Biden in the 2020 election ... ... A whopping 81 percent of those polled were totally clueless about Harris’ support for the elimination of private health insurance. ... Harris made a stand on the issue while sparring with other Democratic candidates leading up to the 2020 election, backing the single-payer system dubbed “Medicare for all” ... Most people polled are also unaware of Harris’ work as border czar under Biden. Harris and her mainstream media allies have worked hard to...

Vice President Kamala Harris’s run for the White House in 2019 may seem like a political lifetime ago, and Democrats are hoping she can elude scrutiny in a lightning campaign. But Ms. Harris is a California progressive, and if you like your health insurance—ever heard that line before?—you’ll want to look at the Vice President’s record. Harris campaign aides are whispering that she no longer supports single-payer healthcare, but travel back to Ms. Harris’s Senate tenure. She co-sponsored a bill from Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders that would set up a single-payer system in the U.S. in four years. That would...

Mark Cuban is issuing a big warning to self-insured employers: If your company receives pharmacy rebates through employee benefits, prepare for an eventual lawsuit. "It’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when," he wrote on X on July 22. "The inevitable class action suit will dwarf the tobacco settlements." Mr. Cuban's comments come as large employers are beginning to face lawsuits from their workers over claims of mismanaging health and pharmaceutical benefits and violating their fiduciary duties under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act. ERISA requires self-funded employers acting as health plan fiduciaries to make an effort...

If you are experiencing increased healthcare insurance and prescription costs, one reason may be the growing, middleman business of pharmacy benefit managers (PBM). The most recent article at The Alabama Examiner addresses Tennessee's PBM reform enacted in 2021. Alabamians are working hard to save our hometown pharmacies being driven out of business! https://www.alabamaexaminer.com/post/pbm-reform-enacted-in-tennessee-why-not-alabama

The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) asserted that cross-sex hormones and surgeries were "medically necessary" so that insurance companies would pay for those procedures, allowing concerns about the treatments' affordability to dictate claims about their effectiveness, newly unsealed court documents show. WPATH's standards of care, which guide clinical practice in the United States, were updated in 2022 to include language about the medical necessity of hormones and surgeries because, as one WPATH official wrote in an email, the group was frustrated with America's "obtuse and unhealthy system of healthcare 'coverage.'" Most private insurance plans and state Medicaid policies...

Securing an appointment to see a doctor in the United States is exacerbated by soaring health care demand and fewer doctors. Many specializations are increasingly affected by this trend, but primary care and emergency medicine are among the hardest hit.The average wait time to see a doctor has increased since 2017 and continued to rise after the demand spike brought on by COVID-19. A survey conducted by AMN Healthcare in 2022 of 15 large metro markets revealed the average time to see a physician was 26 days—an 8 percent increase from 2017 and a 24 percent spike since 2004.Staff constraints...