Free Republic

A British hospital has admitted that it mistakenly performed six amputations in three years, a small fraction of an ‘accidental’ amputation epidemic occurring at UK hospitals with as many as 105 over three years. York and Scarborough Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust acknowledged the mistakes — the highest number of incidents in any UK hospital — resulting from medical negligence. The Yorkshire hospital revealed that four of the accidental amputations occurred in 2020, while the remaining two happened in 2021. However, the Yorkshire hospital is not the only hospital operating under Britain’s socialized healthcare system to have ‘accidentally’ cut off...

“Would you consider an ATM machine to be functional if it created a lifelike experience but no money comes out, no deposits get credited, no transfers actually work?” asked Jonah Goldberg of National Review. The Obama administration “has erected a Potemkin village online — a facade that temporarily conceals the lack of architecture behind it,” said Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin. Perhaps Mr. Obama imagines he can talk his way out of anything. But his isn’t a “messaging” problem. Obamacare has done too much harm to too many people for reality to be spun or ignored.

<p>Neither health care or insurance are enumerated powers for the central government to be involved in or control. Period. They are clearly reserved to the states and the people by the constitution. Doesn't matter how poor people are or how sick. The federal government has no constitutional power to intervene.</p>

More and more leftists are becoming unhinged and revealing their brutal inner totalitarian. The latest is a fundraiser at the University of California, San Francisco, one of the nation's top medical schools. An official at that medical school took to Twitter to propose that the those who are "nonbelievers" in Obamacare be denied medical care.

Casting an eye toward upcoming fiscal fights, President Barack Obama warned Republicans Friday against trying to defund his signature health care law as he vowed to protect spending on education, scientific research and America's infrastructure. Taking questions from college students in central New York, Obama decried the Republican approach as "penny-wise and pound-foolish," predicting the U.S. will fall further and further behind other nations in decades to come unless it prioritizes creating opportunities for young people. "When Congress gets back to Washington, this is going to be a major debate," Obama said during a town hall at Binghamton University. He...

Thanks to the delayed employer mandate in ObamaCare, we are now sixteen months away from enforcement of those statutes, even though they go into effect in four months. Are employers taking a break from ObamaCare prep? Not hardly. Today we have three new stories about how the perverse incentives of the ACA will impact workers, starting with UPS, which has just announced that it will stop offering health-care coverage to spouses — and explicitly cites ObamaCare as the reason (via Jim Geraghty and Jeryl Bier): United Parcel Service Inc. plans to remove thousands of spouses from its medical plan because...

Like the car salesman in National Lampoon’s Vacation (played by Eugene Levy) said: “You think you hate it now, but wait ’til you drive it!” The same applies to the Affordable Healthcare Act (aka, Obamacare). levycar Now UPS has announced that it is cutting 15,000 spouses from healthcare coverage. This is effectively another way that Obamacare raises the cost of healthcare. This, of course, is outrageous, the government telling companies what they can and cannot do for healthcare coverage. Why will you hate Obamacare once you drive it? 1. Forced forced home inspections by gov’t agents: Under Obamacare, government agents...

Barack Obama wanted to fundamentally change America. He is. The Obamacare law is already destroying full-time jobs in America. Democrats rammed through a law that will destroy at least 2 percent of all full-time jobs in America. We are already seeing jobs disappear. Even Reuters can’t hide the truth any longer: U.S. businesses are hiring at a robust rate. The only problem is that three out of four of the nearly 1 million hires this year are part-time and many of the jobs are low-paid. Faltering economic growth at home and abroad and concern that President Barack Obama’s signature health...

The latest casualty of Obamacare may be a low-cost New Jersey health-care policy. Though President Obama promised “if you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan, period,” that will not be the case for approximately 106,000 New Jersey residents whose plans will disappear under the law.Known as the “basic and essential,” or B&E, health-care plans, the policy costs as little as a couple hundred dollars per month and is the choice of 71 percent of New Jersey residents on the individual insurance market. It provides minimum coverage for things such as doctor’s visits...

Like the car salesman in National Lampoon’s Vacation (played by Eugene Levy) said: “You think you hate it now, but wait ’til you drive it!” The same applies to the Affordable Healthcare Act (aka, Obamacare). levycar Why will you hate Obamacare once you drive it? 1. Forced forced home inspections by gov’t agents: Under Obamacare, government agents can engage in “home health visits” for those in certain “high-risk” categories. Those categories include: • Families where mom is not yet 21; • Families where someone is a tobacco user; • Families where children have low student achievement, developmental delays, or disabilities,...

(CBS News) LOS ANGELES - In about seven weeks, Americans can start buying health insurance on the new exchanges that will be part of the Affordable Care Act. Thursday, the Obama administration announced $67 million in awards to more than 100 organizations that will help people understand their options. The key to the success of what the president himself calls "Obamacare" is getting young folks to sign up. Jordan Zavaleta is what the health care industry calls a "young invincible." He's 26 and has no health insurance, largely because it's expensive to buy on his own and he rarely gets...

>Speaking “on the condition of anonymity,” a Republican lawmaker told one Capitol Hill newspaper last week that conservatives pushing to stop the implementation of Obamacare had “no plan B.” Before diving into the substance of the criticism, let’s spend a minute on how that criticism was delivered. Folks in Washington love speaking “on the condition of anonymity.” In a meandering profile of NBC News’s Luke Russert, a reporter for the liberal New Republic wrote, “Fellow reporters related the meanest anecdotes they could think of—‘but not for attribution, OK?’” For one reason or another, these reporters have decided criticizing Russert wasn’t...

Health reform is now causing job turmoil across the country in three key groups that the White House has depended on for support—local government, school workers and unions. School districts in states like Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Utah, Nebraska, and Indiana are dropping to part-time status school workers such as teacher aides, administrators, secretaries, bus drivers, gym teachers, coaches and cafeteria workers. Cities or counties in states like California, Indiana, Kansas, Texas, Michigan and Iowa are dropping to part-time status government workers such as librarians, secretaries, administrators, parks and recreation officials and public works officials. This growing trend comes as three...

IRS employees have a prominent role in Obamacare, but their union wants no part of the law. National Treasury Employees Union officials are urging members to write their congressional representatives in opposition to receiving coverage through President Obama’s health care law. The union leaders are providing members with a form letter to send to the congressmen that says “I am very concerned about legislation that has been introduced by Congressman Dave Camp to push federal employees out of the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program and into the insurance exchanges established under the Affordable Care Act.”

Applying our labor supply estimates directly to this population, we predict a decline in employment of between 530,000 and 940,000 in response to this group of individuals being made newly eligible for free or heavily subsidized health insurance. This would represent a decline in the aggregate employment rate of between 0.3 and 0.6 percentage points from this single component of the ACA. The researchers arrive at these numbers by examining the labor market impact of Tennessee’s 2005 decision to discontinue its expansion of TennCare, the state’s Medicaid system. They found that the TennCare disenrollment caused “a large and immediate labor...

Britain's National Health Service (NHS) turns 65 years old this week. Despite its much heralded presence in Britain’s health care, the problems of the NHS are severe, notorious, and increasingly scandalous in the most fundamental attributes of any health care system: access and quality. Waits for care are shocking in the NHS, frequently exposed by British media reports, and long proven by facts, yet they go virtually unreported in the U.S. For instance, in 2010, about one-third of England’s NHS patients deemed ill enough by their GP waited more than one additional month for a specialist appointment. In 2008-2009, the...

The vast majority of Americans, 81%, say they are aware of the 2010 Affordable Care Act's (ACA's) requirement that most Americans must carry health insurance or pay a fine. Americans who are currently uninsured -- those most directly affected by this requirement -- are much less likely to be aware of the provision, with 56% saying they know about it and 43% saying they are unaware. The results are based on a June 20-24 Gallup poll, which asked a series of questions on the ACA, the comprehensive healthcare reform bill signed into law by President Obama in 2010. Many of...

The Affordable Care Act is So Unaffordable, Members of Congress and Their Aides are Quitting Because They Can't Afford It! BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, this is truly outrageous. There's a headline in The Politico today: "Obamacare? We Were Just Leaving..." And when I saw the headline, I thought it was gonna be an article about how Democrats are afraid of losing their seats because of all the skyrocketing costs of health premiums and all the other negatives associated with Obamacare. But that's not what this story is about. What this story's about is congressmen worried about themselves. In...

The cheapest Obamacare health insurance plan will cost a family $20,000 per year. Americans will be forced to purchase the plan or face the Obama IRS. CNS News reported: In a final regulation issued Wednesday, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) assumed that under Obamacare the cheapest health insurance plan available in 2016 for a family will cost $20,000 for the year. Under Obamacare, Americans will be required to buy health insurance or pay a penalty to the IRS. The IRS’s assumption that the cheapest plan for a family will cost $20,000 per year is found in examples the IRS gives...

After I graduated college and before I landed my first real-deal job that included insurance benefits, I took out my own independent health insurance plan that covered all of the bases a young and healthy person like myself might need. It cost me about ninety dollars a month, and seeing as how I didn’t have any regular health care needs, it was pretty much just catastrophe insurance in case I happened to break my leg or get into a car accident or catch malaria or some other relatively unlikely scenario. I felt secure about the situation, knowing that I would...