Free Republic

One of the tragedies of the Obama Administration is the historic political accident that it had 60 Senate Democratic votes in 2009. The ability to break a filibuster without Republican votes empowered the left to think it could pass anything, and so it steamrolled ahead with ObamaCare, which needed every one of those 60 votes to pass. Now a couple of those Senators are expressing regrets about those votes after the fact. In our pages last week, former Indiana Democrat Evan Bayh rehearsed the looming economic damage from ObamaCare's medical-device tax. He described, as some of us predicted in 2009...

Tucked inside the Supreme Court's lengthy list of orders on Monday was an indication that the fight over President Obama's health care law soon could be back before the high court. Since the court's June decision upholding the law's individual mandate to buy insurance, one of the first Obamacare plaintiffs has been fighting for a new hearing on challenges to other portions of the law. Liberty University, a Christian college in Virginia, has been fighting the employer mandate since the law was enacted, while challenging the law on other constitutional grounds. The school got as far as the 4th Circuit...

The housing market may indeed be recovering, as many experts suggest, but investors are still struggling to understand what, if any, taxes they'll owe upon selling their homes. At issue is how the new "Medicare tax" will apply to real-estate transactions. Passed in 2010 to help fund the health-care overhaul, this 3.8% surtax kicks in next year on many forms of investment income—including some interest, dividends, rents and capital gains. While its effect on home sales won't be as far-reaching as many fear, the Medicare tax could pack a punch for certain investors. It is not a sales tax. And...

A top Democrat strategist and donor who served as President Obama’s lead auto-industry adviser recently conceded that the rationing of heath services under Obamacare is “inevitable.” Steven Rattner advocated that such rationing should target elderly patients, while stating, “We need death panels.” Rattner serves on the board the New America Foundation, or NAF, a George Soros-funded think tank that was instrumental in supporting Obamacare in 2010. Soros’ son, financier Jonathan Soros, is also a member of the foundation’s board. Rattner was the so-called “car czar,” the lead auto adviser to the Treasury Department under Obama. Last month, Rattner penned an...

Due to his great appreciation of things foreign, President Obama will channel a famous German on Wednesday. It unknown whether he intends thereafter to ask German Chancellor Merkel for foreign aid. The Very Honorable I.M. Totus, the former Teleprompter of the United States who has provided much useful and occasionally even valid information about goings on at the White House, today gave me a copy of the old Edison cylinder that President Obama has been studying intensely during his debate preparation. Mr. Totus assured me that it will provide the basic thrust of the President's remarks during the Wednesday debate....

The Supreme Court ObamaCare ruling is the topic at a Federalist Society forum on October 4 at Florida International University College of Law. David Rivkin, who led the 26-state case against the US government, and Prof. Elizabeth Foley will present.

A new survey shows Mitt Romney with a commanding lead over President Barack Obama among doctors, with Obamacare helping to sway their votes. If the election were held today, 55 percent of physicians reported they would vote for Romney while just 36 percent support Obama, according to a survey released by Jackson & Coker, a division of Jackson Healthcare, the third largest health care staffing company in the United States Fifteen percent of respondents said they were switching their vote from Obama in 2008 to Romney in 2012. The top reasons cited for this change was the Affordable Care Act...

ST. LOUIS (AP) - A federal judge in St. Louis has dismissed a lawsuit challenging the contraception mandate of the federal health care law, one of nearly three dozen similar lawsuits filed across the country. The lawsuit filed on behalf of Frank O’Brien and his company, O’Brien Industrial Holdings LLC of St. Louis, challenges the constitutionality of regulations in the health care law. Among other things, O’Brien, a devout Catholic, claimed the requirement that workplace health plans cover birth control infringes on his religious beliefs. U.S. District Judge Carole Jackson, in a ruling late Friday, disagreed. “This Court rejects the proposition...

Tucked inside the Supreme Court's lengthy list of orders on Monday was an indication that the fight over President Obama's health care law soon could be back before the high court. *** On Monday, the Supreme Court noted the university's renewed request and gave the administration 30 days to respond to the request, suggesting that the justices are taking the Liberty request seriously. "I think they've got very good arguments that they're entitled to their day in court," says former senior Justice Department official Thomas Dupree Jr. As an attorney and well-respected court-watcher, Dupree thinks the government will have a...

Here is an unofficial list of potential nominees for the Supreme Court if President Barack Obama is reelected. This list was compiled from a number of legal and political sources, including government officials deeply involved in the selections of Justices Sonia Sotomayor (2009) and Elena Kagan (2010). The Obama administration, like those before, keeps an informal list of possible high court nominees to consider in the event of a sudden vacancy. But serious vetting only begins when such a vacancy occurs or is announced in advance by the retiring justice. Kamala Harris, California attorney general Born 1964. She was elected...

The readmission penalty, authorized by the 2010 health-care law, is one of the first examples of the incentives Medicare, the single largest payer of hospital services, is using to try to lower costs and improve care. Some of the hardest-hit facilities are inner-city hospitals that tend to treat sicker, poorer patients. These patients sometimes end up being readmitted because they have a harder time getting medication and follow-up doctors’ appointments, often because they lack transportation, hospital officials said. “Not only do we have the very sick patients, they also have very significant social needs,” said Kamaljit Sethi, who heads quality...

The Supreme Court opened its new Term on Monday by asking the federal government to offer its views on whether the way should be cleared for new constitutional challenges to the federal health care law — including a new protest against the individual mandate that the Court had upheld last June. The request for the government’s views came in response to a rehearing request by a religious-oriented institution, Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va. The university’s earlier petition was simply denied in June, so it asked the Court to reconsider and wipe out a lower court ruling in order to revive...

Obama Lied: Health Care DiedIn 2009, Obama addressed a joint session of Congress to lay out his program for health care. He unflinchingly told the assembled elected officials one whopper after another, amid a rising chorus of boos and loud grumbling. It got to be too much for Congressman Joe Wilson, of South Carolina, who shouted, "You lie!" to the president as the latter was speaking. Both political parties roundly condemned Wilson for his outburst. He was called a racist, of course, among other things, and he later apologized for his indiscretion. But Joe Wilson was right on the...

The headlines this weekend were all about the boos Paul Ryan elicited on Friday when he addressed the AARP, the self-styled seniors' lobby. The herd of independent media minds missed the real story, which is that the Republican Vice Presidential nominee went into the heart of the entitlement culture, told some hard truths, and even won applause for doing so. Mr. Ryan deserves credit merely for showing up at an organization that portrays itself as nonpartisan but whose leadership is dominated by long-time liberals who consistently pursue the Democratic Party's entitlement agenda. On Friday, our Kimberley Strassel reported on the...

U.S. spending on health insurance grew at an accelerated rate in 2011, breaking a two-year trend of smaller cost increases. The culprit, a new study suggests, is not Americans seeking more treatment but rather rapid growth in the price of medical care. Spending for private health insurance surged by 4.6 percent in 2011, according to a report from the Health Care Cost Institute. That growth rate is faster than the rest of the economy and higher than the previous year, which had 3.8 percent growth. Average spending on a private insurance patient rose to $4,547 in 2011, compared with $4,349...

WASHINGTON (AP) — If you or an elderly relative have been hospitalized recently and noticed extra attention when the time came to be discharged, there's more to it than good customer service. As of Monday, Medicare will start fining hospitals that have too many patients readmitted within 30 days of discharge due to complications. The penalties are part of a broader push under President Barack Obama's health care law to improve quality while also trying to save taxpayers money. About two-thirds of the hospitals serving Medicare patients, or some 2,200 facilities, will be hit with penalties averaging around $125,000 per...

A new phase of Obamacare will penalize hospitals if they re-admit Medicare patients at a rate that the government oversight panel deems excessive. Their premise,a strictly financially based one, is that this will minimize waste and fraud. In reality, it will minimize the survival rate of many seniors in the waning years of life. I'm sure that will indeed make for huge savings in overall Medicare liability. I cared for both my parents for eight years before their deaths. Their health problems, common to many seniors, required more numerous doctor visits, more medications and increasingly more numerous hospital stays as...

Dear liberty voter, It’s the day after Election Day. Mitt Romney lost. The media praise band is playing “O Hail, King Obama.” The gloating anchors and pundits relay the news with giddiness: “Conservatism lost. The tea party died. Liberalism has triumphed – permanently.” Welcome to a world where taking the life of the unborn is celebrated, traditional family values trounced and socialized health care and phones for everybody are the rallying cries. Sky high taxes, another 6 trillion in spending and an ever weakening military are the future. Bailouts, insults to business owners, an EPA out of control and $6...

We need death panels...unless we start allocating health care resources more prudently — rationing, by its proper name — the exploding cost of Medicare will swamp the federal budget. But in the pantheon of toxic issues — the famous “third rails” of American politics — none stands taller than overtly acknowledging that elderly Americans are not entitled to every conceivable medical procedure or pharmaceutical.... Take Britain, which provides universal coverage with spending at proportionately almost half of American levels. Its National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence uses a complex quality-adjusted life year system to put an explicit value (up...

<p>What ever happened to the political power of Republican anger over President Obama’s health-care reform?</p> <p>GOP candidates used anxiety over changes to the nation’s health-care system - which they derisively called “Obamacare“ - to win big in the 2010 midterm elections. Earlier this year, it was conventional wisdom that Obama could not withstand the political rage against health-care reform in a general election.</p>