There was a bit of an uproar recently when the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced, then withdrew, a plan to hire your fellow citizens to pose as patients seeking appointments with thousands of medical practices, using a script of false...
Dr. Edward Jenner (1749-1823), the English country physician, deserves the largest share of the credit for widespread vaccination and eventual eradication of smallpox. He is one among those great medical giants who, almost single handedly, laid down a great foundation b…
On many levels, Medicare is a fraud and a hoax. So it is no surprise that the current debate, and the way the debate is reported, is not about whether Medicare delivers medical care at all, let alone its availability or quality. Many politicians value Medicare...
Some lower courts are ruling ObamaCare unconstitutional. The reason given is that it’s wrong to force the individual to buy a product or service, such as health insurance. These decisions are all well and good. But the question remains: If it’s wrong for...
Now that the politicians have delivered an anti-debt deal that adds an estimated $8 trillion to the current $14.5 trillion federal debt over the next 10 years, President Obama is getting ready to head off on a pro-jobs bus tour of the Midwest. With more than...
The Obama administration regards this collectivization of medical providers as a desirable outcome, not merely some “unintended consequence.”
“The White House routinely tries to intimidate its health-care critics, but the campaign against McKinsey & Co. is something else. The management consultants attempted to find out how U.S. business will respond to the government restructuring of 17.3% of the...
Americans benefit from the freest and most accessible medical care in the world. Gradually over the last fifty years, however, that care has become increasingly hampered by government controls. The last traces of free-market medicine could soon be gone–replaced...
In a recent television interview by Sean Hannity on Fox News, Mitt Romney sought to appease conservatives by explaining the premises of the medical insurance, or “healthcare” law, signed by him as Governor of Massachusetts in 2006. Hannity alludes to...
“We are facing a time when we have a group of people led by President Obama, who believes that America’s greatness lies in its government, not its people. They want to hook you. They don’t want to free you.” (former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum,...
Recently, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer received a lot of media attention when she proposed fines and other financial punishment for overweight citizens and smokers on Medicaid. Others targeted by such programs include diabetics who fail to follow instructions from...
The movement to repeal President Obama’s signature health care law rightly criticizes the accounting trickery in the legislation’s understated costs and overstated savings. In fact, when in the last two centuries has the U.S. Congress been able to reduce,...
The notion of a “right to health care” is the boldest and most fundamental claim offered in defense of Obamacare. Indeed, the law should be judged by whether it is consistent with the protection of rights. If the law cannot pass that test, the debate over...
If we eliminate the government interference that prevents valuable new drugs from reaching patients, we could save countless lives.
Challenges in court to the constitutionality of Obamacare have exposed the broader agenda of those who are committed to the permanent expansion of government power which that legislation represents. The specific legal issues are almost irrelevant because Obamacare is...
In another blow to ObamaCare, U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson has declared the new socialized medicine law null and void. Good news? Not really. As with so many decisions that come out of our courts, the government giveth — and the government taketh away even...
Happy New Year! 2011 is the first year of phased in “free” health care, thanks to ObamaCare. In this spirit, a recent Associated Press report is worth quoting: “You paid your Medicare taxes all those years and think you deserve your money’s...
Your wife is stricken with a terrible medical condition. Her insurance benefits just ran out. You need money for her treatment. You go to your next-door neighbor and tell him about your wife’s misfortune. You demand $5,000. Your neighbor is stupefied. Still, he...
Republicans in Congress no longer call ObamaCare a “job-killing” bill; instead, they’re calling it a “job-destroying” bill. It may seem like a minor quibble, but it’s much more than that. It’s a concession. It’s a...
Democrats in the Senate warned in a recent letter to Speaker John Boehner that a repeal of Obamacare would have “unintended consequences.” Incomparably worse than unintended consequences of repealing the 2,600-page health care scheme will be the...
ObamaCare could never have passed — and would never have been proposed — were it not for the evasiveness of voters combined with the evasiveness of politicians.
In case you haven’t heard, Obama’s FCC has passed new rules requiring private companies who provide Internet services to submit to control under the government. What will government’s rules be? Those are yet to be determined. But the government alone...
Politics often supersedes medical science as the determining factor behind the Food and Drug Administration’s granting or denying of approval of prescription drugs. This is the result of a long-term trend that has come sharply into focus with the FDA’s...
Federal Judge Henry E. Hudson ruled Monday in favor of Virginia’s claim that the requirement for people to purchase health care exceeds the power of Congress under the Constitution’s Commerce Clause or under the General Welfare Clause. “It is not the...
The writers of the U.S. Constitution were very much aware of the need to set firm and specific limits on the powers of government. Hundreds of years of the British Monarchy, and study of the failures of republican forms of government as far back as ancient Greece and...
President Barack Obama’s signatures on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 and the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act do not end the national debate on federal control of health care. [1] The debate merely enters a new and perhaps...
The federal government’s Web site HealthCare.gov extols the trillion-dollar Patient Protection and (anything but) Affordable Care Act as only government propaganda can. It offers boldface contradictions and evasions in defiance of one’s very sanity. Its...
Paul Hsieh, MD, is a co-founder of Freedom and Individual Rights in Medicine or FIRM, a project which promotes and educates Americans about free market health care reforms. He is also a practicing physician in the Denver, Colorado area. His writings have appeared in...
We live in an age when the secretary of the Interior and the White House press secretary proudly and publicly proclaim that they will keep their “boot on the neck” of an oil company. This new manifestation of “hope” and “change” is...
Does American history move in only one direction—toward government domination of every detail of our daily lives? Did we reach a high-water mark of government power when ObamaCare was signed into law? Or was that just the crest of a wave that will sweep away the...
Forbidding profit in medical care replaces life with death, liberty with force, and the pursuit of happiness with self-sacrifice. Let’s not kill health care and our freedom at the same time.
Do we want a government-run medical system which forces doctors to choose between treating their patients in accordance with their best judgment or sacrificing their patients to keep their jobs?
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