Free Republic

Congresswoman Cori Bush has been mocked for referring to mothers as 'birthing people', in her speech before Congress on Thursday. She drew condemnation from many, including Fox News' Tucker Carlson, who mocked her by saying 'mother has been banned' because the term is 'too sexist'. The representative for Missouri told the harrowing story of how she was ignored by doctors when she told them of the extreme pain she was in, early in her pregnancy with both her children.

President Joe Biden’s proposed infrastructure legislation has the political class seemingly locked in a debate about what “infrastructure” means. Biden and Democratic leaders—backed by a majority of the U.S. population—believe that “infrastructure” is more than just roads and bridges and encompasses all the structures that help modern society function. Their new bill reflects that understanding, including improvements to water pipes and the electrical grid, universal broadband access, charging stations for electric vehicles, physical upgrades to schools and universities, and—perhaps most innovatively—home care for the elderly and disabled, support for families with children, and expanded access to health care. Republican elected...

How can someone who avoided more than $500,000 in taxes to fund his luxury lifestyle demand that others ‘pay their fair share’ under massive tax hikes?In his speech to Congress last Wednesday and his multi-trillion-dollar plan for “human infrastructure” released earlier that day, President Biden proposed yet another tax increase, this one on purportedly “wealthy” individuals and families. In his address Wednesday evening, Biden used the words “fair share” on no fewer than five separate occasions to justify these proposed revenue hikes.Yet with his own taxes, Joe Biden didn’t pay his “fair share.” Upon leaving the vice presidency in early...

Several Democratic lawmakers are pushing for Justice Amy Coney Barrett to recuse herself from an upcoming case linked to a conservative group that funded an ad blitz supporting her confirmation to the Supreme Court. In a three-page letter, the lawmakers argued that Barrett was at risk of bias in favor of a litigant funded by Charles Koch, the conservative billionaire behind a group that bankrolled a high-priced ad campaign for the Trump appointee’s Senate confirmation last fall. “Statute, constitutional case law, and common sense all would seem to require your recusal,” Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and...

In the excerpt, Boehner didn't hold back when assessing his new colleagues, saying that when he tried to offer the freshmen lawmakers guidance about being in Congress, his advice "went straight through the ears of most of them, especially the ones who didn't have brains that got in the way." Boehner also assigned some blame to conservative media outlets, especially Fox News, in incentivizing flashiness and outrage over substance, which he said made it harder for him to govern his caucus effectively. By 2013, Boehner wrote, "the chaos caucus in the House had built up their own power base thanks...

We are about to witness, for the first time, the power of a fully operational Affordable Care Act (ACA). The American Rescue Plan made 3.7 million more people eligible for the ACA’s premium subsidies. The Biden administration had already opened up enrollment after taking office, and 200,000 Americans signed up in the first two weeks. Now the administration is extending enrollment until August 15, backed by millions of dollars in advertising. Insurers are expanding into new markets, and some who abandoned it long ago in the law’s fraught early years are now reentering. The individual mandate is gone, but, as...

Jackson Acquisition, a blank check company led by Jeb Bush targeting healthcare, filed on Thursday with the SEC to raise up to $300 million in an initial public offering. The Alpharetta, GA-based company plans to raise $300 million by offering 30 million units at $10. Each unit consists of one share of common stock and 1/3 of a warrant, exercisable at $11.50. At the proposed deal size, Jackson Acquisition will command a market value of $375 million. The company is led by Chairman Jeb Bush, who previously was the 43rd Governor of Florida from 1999 to 2007. He is joined...

Editor's note: This column was co-authored by Josh Archambault.It is perhaps the most well-known blunder in American health care politics in the 21st century: “If you like the plan you have, you can keep it.” Yet, just a few years after President Obama uttered those infamous words, millions of Americans found themselves forced off the very health plans they were assured that they could keep.President Biden repeated the same claim on the campaign trail, promising voters, “If you like your plan, you can keep it.” But already, it seems like he’s gearing up to repeat Obama’s mistake by breaking the...

CVS Health Corp said on Tuesday it would return to selling individual health insurance plans under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), popularly known as Obamacare, saying the market had stabilized. Large health insurers such as UnitedHealth and CVS Health’s Aetna unit exited ACA exchanges in 2017 and 2018, due to years of mounting losses, and uncertainty as Republicans took aim at former U.S. President Barack Obama’s signature law. “We’ve been studying the individual market for a while. Some of the remedies have been put in place. Clearly there’s a big market,” CVS Health’s recently-appointed Chief Executive Officer Karen Lynch said...

WASHINGTON -- Fulfilling a campaign promise, President Joe Biden plans to reopen the HealthCare.gov insurance markets for a special sign-up opportunity geared to people needing coverage in the coronavirus pandemic. Biden is expected to sign an executive order Thursday, said two people familiar with the plan, whose details were still being finalized. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the pending order ahead of a formal announcement. Although the number of uninsured Americans has grown because of job losses due to the economic hit of COVID-19, the Trump administration resisted calls to authorize a...

Big Pharma did not like Donald Trump, but they certainly like Joe Biden – especially now. In an ongoing frenzy to undo everything Trump did over the last four years, Joe Biden froze a December rule aimed at lowering prescription drug prices for insulin and epinephrine. On Thursday, Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services announced the new rule would be put on hold, along with several other Trump-era orders pending a 60 day review, The Federalist reports. Biden Chief of Staff Ron Klain directed federal agencies on Wednesday to pause orders that had been signed and published by Trump’s...

For the past year, defenders of the FBI have consistently downplayed the significance of an FBI staff lawyer falsifying evidence in the government’s investigation into Donald Trump’s relationship with Russia. They argue Kevin Clinesmith’s crime of altering a CIA document to obscure the fact that former Trump campaign aide Carter Page worked for U.S., not Russian, intelligence was a rare lapse in judgment by an overworked bureaucrat. It was not, his apologists say, part of any broader conspiracy to conceal exculpatory information from surveillance court judges, who never learned of Page’s history with the CIA before approving FBI warrants to...

Protects Catholic sisters, doctors from covering transgender surgeryBISMARCK, N.D. (ChurchMilitant.com) - On the day before self-identifying Catholic Joe Biden was inaugurated president, a federal court came down on the side of a Catholic religious order seeking to do its work in alignment with its faith. On Monday, the U.S. District Court for the District of North Dakota blocked an Obama-era requirement known as the Transgender Mandate, part of Obamacare, which forced doctors to perform gender transition procedures on patients, including children, even if the doctor believes the treatment or hormone therapy could harm the patient. The term "gender-transition procedures" in...

<p>I was born at the end of Gen X and the beginning of the Millennial Generation, and grew up in a middle class town. Life was good. Our home was modest but birthdays and Christmas were always generous, we went on yearly vacations, had 2 cars, and there was enough money for me to take dance classes and art lessons and be in Girl Scouts.</p>

Pro-lifers living in half of the United States have very few options for health care under Obamacare. A new report from the Charlotte Lozier Institute, Family Research Council and The Heritage Foundation found that 69 percent of the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, health plans in 24 states and Washington, D.C. cover elective abortions. More specifically, in seven of those states and D.C., pro-lifers have no options; all of the plans offered on the Obamacare exchange cover elective abortions, according to the report. They are: Alaska, California, D.C., Hawaii, Maine, Massachusetts, New York and Vermont. These plans are subsidized by...

Former United Nations ambassador Susan Rice, slated to become the Domestic Policy Council chief if Joe Biden assumes the White House next month, is warning that COVID-19 outbreak “is not the big one” and that a future pandemic could be worse. “In the Obama administration, as I said, we had the 2009 swine flu; we had the Ebola epidemic that could have been a global pandemic; we had the Zika virus, as you'll remember, so we were very prime to this risk. We knew that we hadn't had the big one,” Rice said during a virtual event organized by Stevenson...

Another open season has come and gone in which eligible Americans could choose from a narrow array of federally subsidized health care plans under the Affordable Care Act. Despite the ACA’s manifest gaps and failures, a recent poll from the left-leaning Kaiser Family Foundation found that a solid majority—55%—of respondents have a favorable perception of the law. That result may be due in part to a feature of the law most have heard about and support: its ban on private insurers denying coverage for preexisting conditions. The ACA is much more than that provision, however. By almost any measure, the...

WASHINGTON - A crush of sign-ups expected Tuesday on the last day of open enrollment for HealthCare.gov could help solidify the standing of “Obamacare” as an improbable survivor in the Donald Trump years. In 36 states that use HealthCare.gov,- Dec. 15 is deadline day for coverage that starts Jan. 1, while another 14 states and Washington, D.C., have later dates. Analysts and advocates who follow the annual insurance sign-ups say interest has gotten stronger with the coronavirus pandemic gripping the nation. Also, the legal cloud hanging over the Affordable Care Act seemed to start lifting last month when Supreme Court...

The Affordable Care Act—with its promise of reining in costs—was passed into law more than 10 years ago, yet today small businesses are still fighting the rising price tag of health care. One owner of a local restaurant chain here in Austin has told me that it’s precisely the flaws of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that make providing access to health care so burdensome for small business owners and their employees. With slightly more than 50 employees, he explained how he feels helpless with ACA in place. Countless times, employees have asked how to enroll in marketplace...

New York Governor and nursing home serial killer Andrew Cuomo’s recent interview by George Stephanopoulos on Disney/ABC’s Good Morning America proved an oft-repeated statement by Sean Hannity: Fox News host Sean Hannity on Wednesday night put the “leftist media” in its place, saying that if President Donald Trump “could actually cure cancer,” the “media still wouldn’t be happy.” The news that thanks to President Trump’s Operation Warp Speed, drugmaker Pfizer has a vaccine that is 90 percent effective against COVID-19 and is ready to roll thanks to $2 billion from and a distribution infrastructure built by the Trump administration, did...