Last week, Jay Carney ducked a question on President Obama’s position on a bill banning elective abortions during the final four months of pregnancy. The White House issued a statement Monday saying that the president would veto the bill: The Administration strongly opposes H.R. 1797, which would unacceptably restrict women’s health and reproductive rights and [...] Continue Reading 
A new 253-page Obamacare rule issued late Friday requires state, federal and local agencies as well as health insurers to swap the protected personal health information of anybody seeking to join the new health care program that will be enforced by the Internal Revenue Service. Protected health information, or PHI, is highly protected under federal [...] Continue Reading 
Obamacare is set to provide some 16 million people with health insurance through Medicaid or the new exchanges next year. Unfortunately, their policies may not be worth much — as they may not be able to actually get care. America is suffering from a doctor shortage. An influx of millions of new patients into the [...] Continue Reading 
Fewer U.S. adults are smoking, a new government report says. Last year, about 18 percent of adults participating in a national health survey described themselves as current smokers. The nation’s smoking rate generally has been falling for decades, but had seemed to stall at around 20 to 21 percent for about seven years. In 2011, [...] Continue Reading 
The average American family of four wastes between $1,350 and $2,275 a year in food. Much of that ends up in the kitchen trash can: uneaten leftovers, milk past the expiration date and vegetables that go bad. In the U.S., all that waste adds up to 90 billion pounds of food a year, and the [...] Continue Reading 
Officials at Boston Children’s Hospital said they are recruiting subjects for the world’s first pediatric hand transplant program. The Boston Children’s Hand Transplant Program, led by principal investigator Dr. Amir Taghinia and Dr. William Harmon, is a research-based program offering bilateral hand transplants for children living without two functioning hands. The potential subjects will be [...] Continue Reading 
ObamaCare really is the gift that keeps on giving. And giving. And I do mean “gift” in the German sense of poison. Under the Affordable Care Act, premium subsidies—tax credits in ObamaCare designed to defray the cost of purchasing health insurance—will go to some seven million tax filers and flow to households earning as much [...] Continue Reading 
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who has tried to curb soda consumption, ban smoking in parks and encourage bike riding, is taking on a new cause: requiring New Yorkers to separate their food scraps for composting. Dozens of smaller cities, including San Francisco and Seattle, have adopted rules that mandate recycling of food waste from homes, [...] Continue Reading 
President Obama’s health care reform is prompting employers to hire more part-time and temporary workers to escape paying benefits under a mandate that goes into effect next year, amplifying a trend toward transient employment that took hold during the recession, according to a growing number of economic indicators. Hardest hit by the move toward cutting [...] Continue Reading 
Even as the Left celebrates Obamacare’s expansion of health coverage, a Reuters story highlighted what kind of “insurance” people will receive under the law. First, the article noted that many large, national insurers have decided not to participate in Obamacare’s exchanges: The nation’s biggest insurers have decided against joining the exchanges on a large scale, [...] Continue Reading