Free Republic

Obamacare’s emphasis on cost-benefit has apparently granted permission for the medical technocrats to conjure all kinds of healthcare rationing schemes.And the Medical Establishment is apparently playing along. From, “The Cancer Death-Panel App,” by Robert Goldberg in the NY Post: The latest innovation in cancer care isn’t a medical breakthrough but an app to ration new drugs. It’ll measure care in terms of what it costs health plans, instead of what it means for patients’ lives.That it’s being developed under the auspices of the American Society for Clinical Oncology, or ASCO, the world’s leading oncology association, is a grim warning about...

Health insurance giant Anthem Blue Cross said it won't participate in California's new insurance market for small businesses. Anthem, a unit of WellPoint Inc., is California's largest insurer for small employers. This surprising move could hamper the state's ability to enroll businesses in its new exchange called Covered California that opens Jan. 1 as part of the federal healthcare law. Instead, Anthem said it will keep selling coverage to small firms outside the exchange in direct competition with the state-run market. Anthem also remains one of 13 health insurers that will offer policies to individuals in Covered California. Nonetheless, Anthem's...

(This info was developed and originally posted by chatteringclassof58. The original post was deleted. This is an edited version of the material.) Occupy Wall Street protesters have been camped out in and trashing Zuccotti Park for weeks. Zuccotti Park is a very nice private park, right in the middle of Manhattan. Zuccotti Park is owned by Brookfield Office Properties, which is part of Brookfield Asset Management, worth at least $150 billion. Brookfield Office Properties Mayor Bloomberg has said he can do nothing about the protest unless the park owners (Brookfield Properties) ask the protesters to be evicted. Brookfield issued a...

The war of words between the Obama administration and WellPoint Inc. escalated over the weekend, as WellPoint's chief executive rebuked the president for what she said was false information he gave the public about the insurer's coverage of breast-cancer patients. In his weekly radio address broadcast Saturday, Mr. Obama said his administration recently asked an insurer to stop systematically dropping coverage of women diagnosed with breast cancer. The president didn't specifically name the insurer that dropped the coverage, but WellPoint has lately been fending off accusations that it targets such women, and Chief Executive Angela Braly clearly believed the remark...

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – One after another, shortly after a diagnosis of breast cancer, each of the women learned that her health insurance had been canceled. First there was Yenny Hsu, who lived and worked in Los Angeles. Later, Robin Beaton, a registered nurse from Texas. And then, most recently, there was Patricia Relling, a successful art gallery owner and interior designer from Louisville, Kentucky. None of the women knew about the others. But besides their similar narratives, they had something else in common: Their health insurance carriers were subsidiaries of WellPoint, which has 33.7 million policyholders -- more than...

... Since 1993, Maine has required sellers of individual health-insurance policies to accept all applicants—foreshadowing a key provision of the national overhaul that will fully take effect in 2014. ... Anthem says these requirements, along with the state's high medical costs, have helped push up expenses, with 1% of individual policyholders in Maine driving 50% of claims costs. As premiums then rise, it says, they give healthy people incentives to forgo insurance in Maine, which has had no requirement that everyone be insured. "As those younger, healthier folks choose not to participate in the risk pool, the average costs per...

The U.S. Congress, like DrRich, has been distracted from the vital issue of healthcare reform in recent weeks, due to the prospect of elections of one form or another. Which is to say, both of us have been pretty much ignoring the healthcare reform issue in favor of matters that we each found to be far more critical to our own personal interests (Congresspersons: the growing likelihood of being kicked out of office; DrRich: the possibility of winning an iPod). Anyone can understand how DrRich might be distracted by such a prospect. It may be a little harder to understand...

The brawl over rate increases is a preview of ObamaCare. Democrats and their media allies have found a new insurance piñata: WellPoint and its recent health-premium price increases in California. This spat deserves more attention, because its real lesson is what will happen to health insurance costs around the country if ObamaCare passes. WellPoint's California unit, Anthem Blue Cross, recently informed nearly 700,000 individual insurance customers of premium increases of up to 39%. President Obama jumped on the announcement, claiming in a pre-Superbowl TV interview that the hikes were a "portrait of the future if we don't do something now."...

Following the White House’s lead, “Good Morning America” criticized insurance companies on Feb. 17 going so far as to insinuate they might be breaking the law by raising premiums. “Now to the outrage over skyrocketing health insurance premiums, some Americans covered by Anthem Blue Cross were recently hit by a whopping 39 percent rate increase. President Obama called out Anthem and a congressional hearing on this big rate hike is coming next week, but in the mean time regulators are trying to determine if rate hikes like this are even legal,” George Stephanopoulos said. Those rate hikes averaging around 24...

INDIANAPOLIS – Health insurer WellPoint blames the Great Recession and rising medical costs for its planned 39 percent rate increase for some California customers. To President Barack Obama, however, it's Exhibit A in his campaign to revive the health care overhaul. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, who received the company's explanation in a letter Thursday, said "it remains difficult to understand" how premium increases of that size by can be justified when WellPoint Inc. reported a $2.7 billion profit in the last quarter of 2009.

Washington is captivated by the Senate melodrama over the so-called public option, salivating at the ring of Harry Reid's political bell (see below). But the most important health-care questions continue to be about the policy substance—particularly those that Democrats don't want asked. Foremost among them is: How will ObamaCare affect insurance premiums in the private health-care markets? Despite indignant Democratic denials, the near-certainty is that their plan will cause costs to rise across the board. The latest data on this score come from a series of state-level studies from the insurance company WellPoint Inc. At the request of Congressional delegations...

“I need a crash cart, stat!” The political prospects for major U.S. healthcare reform have taken a decided turn for the worse in recent days (at least from the point of view of many Democrats). And you don’t need to be some totally plugged-in Washington insider to understand that. Just take a look-see at the stock market performance of industry players such as Aetna, Cigna, UnitedHealth Group, and WellPoint. Shares have been trending higher of late. What’s been slowly dawning on Wall Street is that the legislative process in Washington is unlikely to produce a national public health insurance option...

pla•gia•rism -[pley-juh-riz-uh m, -jee-uh-riz-] –noun - the unauthorized use or close imitation of the language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as one's own original work. Three years ago, I received an email for articles for a risk management trade magazine, a profession to which I am proud to belong. I deleted it. It got me thinking, though – why not send in an article and see what would happen. So I wrote a humorous little piece on how invisible risk managers seem to be in the business world and how no one (not even my...

"...No Member, officer, or employee shall knowingly use his official position to introduce or aid the progress or passage of legislation, a principal purpose of which is to further only his pecuniary interest, only the pecuniary interest of his immediate family, or only the pecuniary interest of a limited class of persons or enterprises, when he, or his immediate family, or enterprises controlled by them, are members of the affected class."-Standing Rules of the Senate - Rule XXXVII (4) Conflict of Interest "...As I travel across Indiana, one of the biggest concerns raised by my fellow Hoosiers is the rising...

There's a joke circulating on the Internet that goes something like this: And God populated the earth with green and yellow vegetables of all kinds, so Man and Woman would live long, healthy lives. And Satan created McDonald's. And McDonald's brought forth the 99-cent double cheeseburger. And Satan said to Man, "You want fries with that?" And Man said, "Super-size them." And Man gained pounds. And God created yogurt, healthful and pure. And Satan froze the yogurt and created chocolate fudge and sprinkle toppings. And woman gained pounds. And God brought forth running shoes, and Man resolved to lose those...