Free Republic

Each visit to the U.K. brings new horror stories about the National Health Service (NHS). Last month, Sir Bruce Keogh, medical director of the NHS, issued a forensic report, commissioned by the government, which found that 14 underperforming hospitals in England had substandard care, contributing to the needless deaths of nearly 13,000 people since 2005. Earlier this year, it was reported that a single hospital in Staffordshire recorded 1,400 "excess" deaths. Following the July report, letters from patients and relatives of those who died flooded in to newspapers, Sky News and the BBC. Many confirmed poor treatment, if in fact...

The Affordable Care Act originally passed the House in 2009 with 220 votes, all but one of them Democrats. Recently 251 members of the House, including 22 Democrats, voted to postpone for one year implementation of the heart of the act -- the individual mandate to purchase health insurance. If this were any other issue, liberal commentators might see a governing majority emerging in favor of delaying Obamacare. In the last couple of years, House Republicans have voted over and over to repeal the president's health care plan. It got to be routine. Not long ago, however, the Obamacare battle...

The Obama administration and its various apologists in the media have long since elevated excuse making to something of an art form. This is, after all, an administration that once blamed high unemployment rates on ATM machines. Even by those standards, however, the excuses surrounding the administration’s decision to delay implementation of Obamacare’s employer mandate rise to imaginative new heights. Among them:It really wasn’t important anyway. Obamacare supporters were quick to suggest that the employer mandate was such a minor part of the law that delaying it was all but meaningless. White House spokesman Jay Carney explained it this way:...

The alleged motivation behind the deceitfully named “Affordable Care Act” is that there are millions of medically uninsured in the US. Of course the appropriate solution would be to address that need without crashing healthcare for the rest of the population. But somehow that approach was overlooked. What if there was a concept by which we could treat those millions, providing them with better care, shorter wait times, less bureaucracy and an improved doctor/patient relationship, all while reducing Medicaid spending by $1 billion or more per state per year? Not only is this possible, but the type of facility which...