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Rockefeller Center Christmas tree heads to NYC

admin - Latest News - November 6, 2025
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The 2025 Rockefeller Center Christmas tree is now on its way to New York City for the holiday season, ahead of the Dec. 3 tree lighting ceremony.



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October 26, 2025
Oct. 26, 2025, 5:00 AM EDTBy Berkeley Lovelace Jr.With the cost of health insurance set to rise, some Americans are asking a surprising question: Is it actually cheaper to get medical care without it?The short answer: Sometimes. But not often. And it may require a little — or a lot — of homework. Some hospitals and clinics offer self-pay or cash only discounts for patients who pay without insurance, skipping the paperwork and administrative fees that come with having coverage. Hospitals are required by federal law to make their discounted cash prices publicly available online. An allergy test or an X-ray, for example, may be a few hundred dollars cheaper this way, especially for people with high deductible plans. Nonprofit hospitals must provide charity care, which is free or discounted, to people who can’t afford it, even for those with insurance.But paying outside of health insurance means that cost doesn’t count toward your deductible or out-of-pocket limit — and if you end up needing more medical visits than expected, you could wind up worse off financially.“You have to be really careful,” said Stacie Dusetzina, a health policy professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. “The price that you pay with cash, even if they give you some sort of advertised discount, can be more than what you might actually pay through health insurance overall.”The question of whether to opt out of insurance and pay in cash is surfacing as many Americans are expected to face higher premiums next year. Enhanced subsidies, which kept Affordable Care Act premiums lower for many middle-class people, are set to expire at the end of the year without action from Congress. Premiums for people who get their health insurance through their jobs or outside the ACA are also expected to rise next year. Some ACA enrollees are debating whether to drop their coverage entirely — a decision that experts warn could leave them exposed to major medical bills if an unexpected emergency hits. “If you like Russian roulette, then you’ll like to approach health care this way,” said Michele Johnson, executive director of the Tennessee Justice Center, a law firm and nonprofit advocacy group that helps people dispute medical bills. Johnson said “part of the fallacy is that as American consumers, we’re all about, ‘How do I bargain the best deal?’”“Health care is not this way,” she said. “If you’re healthy, you’re basically pushing all the chips out onto the table in hopes that you basically will mostly be healthy.”Losing benefitsInsurance, for all its frustrations, can provide crucial protections: caps on out-of-pocket costs, access to negotiated rates and free preventive care, such as cancer screenings, annual physicals and routine vaccinations.For non-emergency care, a doctor or hospital may require the patient who isn’t using insurance to pay the entire cost upfront or see a different provider, said Erin Duffy, director of research training at the USC Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics.“It does seem risky,” Duffy said. “If you were thinking that you could keep going to the primary care doctor that you’d go to when you were insured, you might find that there’s different financial obstacles.”For those who are healthy, paying in cash can be a smart move for predictable, lower cost-services — such as an X-ray or CT scan, Dusetzina said.“This comes up all the time in the prescription drug world,” Dusetzina said. “People will often fill generic drugs out of pocket because it happens for them to be cheaper to do that than paying with health insurance in some cases.”But patients wouldn’t have access to their insurer’s negotiated rate — the amount an insurance company agrees to pay for a medical service, Dusetzina said. Even if people haven’t reached their deductibles, they still get the negotiated rate, which might be cheaper than paying cash. And whatever they pay wouldn’t go toward their deductible or out-of-pocket limit. “What has historically happened is, if you went to a medical site and you wanted to pay in cash, the price that they start with is often twice as high or more than what the health insurance price would be,” she said. “So, you do lose the benefit of having a negotiated rate going without health insurance.”A person’s savings can disappear fast if something unexpected happens, Johnson said. Emergency room visits, hospital stays or surgeries — even at discounted rates — can cost tens of thousands of dollars. Uninsured patients are billed the full amount. It’s generally not possible to sign up for health coverage after an emergency has already happened, she said. There’s also a narrow period to enroll; in most states, ACA enrollment is Nov. 1 through Jan. 15. Open enrollment for people who get health insurance through their jobs is generally around the same time.“That’s the only time you can sign up until the next year, so essentially, you’re left holding the bag, not just for emergency visits, but for all the follow-up care,” she said. Johnson said that before people even think about negotiating care with a doctor or provider, they must first check if they have a federally qualified health center nearby. The health clinics receive federal grants to provide low-cost care to underserved populations, including the underinsured and the uninsured. “If you need primary care, you can often get primary care at a federally qualified health center,” she said. If specialty care is needed, doctors may negotiate, but they often require people to pay the full amount upfront, Johnson said. If you want to get an idea of how much you could pay, websites like Turquoise Health show the average cash price hospitals may charge for certain medical procedures. If you do get a lower rate from a doctor, the process might not end there, Johnson said. Depending on how complicated the medical procedure is, you may need to get an agreement with the entire health care team involved.“Even if you have a doctor who says, ‘I will do this for you,’ then somehow you have to get an anesthesiologist to do it, and you have to get labs to do it, and you have to get nurses doing it as well,” she said.Duffy said to call the billing office and “ask really specific questions about when you would have to pay, what are the full range of options for both assistance and payment plans that could be helpful to someone who’s uninsured or lower income or just facing a bill you might not be able to pay all at once.”For those in need of emergency care or hospital care, Duffy noted, there is a federal law — the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act — which requires Medicare-participating hospitals to provide care to anyone who comes to the emergency department, regardless of their ability to pay. After that, the person may be able to negotiate with the hospital or provider, or get a payment plan. None of these strategies are particularly useful for people who are not healthy and are likely to use a high amount of health care, said Lawrence Gostin, director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University.“The self-pay option will be most attractive to the healthy and well-off patient, who may forgo adequate health insurance,” he said.Berkeley Lovelace Jr.Berkeley Lovelace Jr. is a health and medical reporter for NBC News. He covers the Food and Drug Administration, with a special focus on Covid vaccines, prescription drug pricing and health care. He previously covered the biotech and pharmaceutical industry with CNBC.
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Oct. 9, 2025, 5:00 AM EDTBy Dareh GregorianPresident Donald Trump’s efforts to deploy National Guard troops in states that don’t want them will be tested in two different courts Thursday.Lawyers for Chicago and Illinois will go before a federal judge to try to block troops from being deployed in the country’s third most populous city, while attorneys for Portland and Oregon will urge a federal appeals court to leave in place a restraining order against troop deployments there.The hearings — in Chicago and San Francisco — are set to begin at noon ET in courthouses about 2,000 miles apart.“We’re looking for the courts to do the right thing,” Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, a Democrat, told reporters Wednesday.Trump defended his actions in both states. “Everything we’re doing is very lawful. What they’re doing is not lawful,” he said at the White House later Wednesday.Illinois sued Monday seeking to block the administration from deploying federalized National Guard troops on the streets of Chicago, contending it’s illegal, unconstitutional and unnecessary.Trump ordered the deployment over the weekend. U.S. Northern Command said that 500 National Guard members have been mobilized — 300 from Illinois and 200 from Texas — and that some of the troops from Texas were on duty “in the greater Chicago area” as of Wednesday night.“These forces will protect U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other U.S. Government personnel who are performing federal functions, including the enforcement of federal law, and to protect federal property,” Northern Command said in a statement.The lawsuit argues that there’s no emergency in Chicago and that the administration has been trying to provoke unrest by increasing the presence of federal law agents who are using “unprecedented, brute force tactics for civil immigration enforcement.”Those tactics include shooting “chemical munitions at groups that included media and legal observers” at an ICE facility outside Chicago and staging a dramatically produced raid at an apartment building in which agents rappelled down from Black Hawk helicopters.“The community’s horror at these tactics and their significant consequences have resulted in entirely foreseeable protests,” the suit said.“The deployment of federalized National Guard, including from another state, infringes on Illinois’s sovereignty and right to self-governance” and “will cause only more unrest,” it added.The White House has maintained that Trump is trying to keep American cities and federal personnel safe. Trump said this week that if the courts wind up derailing his efforts to use the National Guard, he could invoke the Insurrection Act, which would empower him to use the U.S. military domestically.Trump floats invoking Insurrection Act amid showdown with Democratic-led cities12:07″The Trump administration is committed to restoring law and order in American cities that are plagued by violence due to Democrat mismanagement. And President Trump will not stand by while violent rioters attack federal law enforcement officers,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said in a statement Wednesday.The administration is expected to make similar arguments to a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit of Appeals in San Francisco, which it’s asking to pause a federal judge’s order in Oregon over the weekend blocking the state’s National Guard from being federalized and deployed.The “extraordinary” order by U.S. District Judge Karen Immergut “improperly impinges on the Commander in Chief’s supervision of military operations, countermands a military directive to officers in the field, and endangers federal personnel and property,” Justice Department attorneys contended in their court filing.They also noted that the 9th Circuit blocked a similar restraining order this year involving National Guard troops in Los Angeles and held then that the president’s judgment about whether troops are needed should get “a great level of deference.”White House expects it will win lawsuit challenging deployment of National Guard to Portland12:06Immergut, a Trump appointee, said in her order that the Portland case is different from the California one, in part because it appears Trump was acting in bad faith with his exaggerated claims of violence in the city, including that it was “war ravaged” with “ICE Facilities under siege from attack by Antifa” and “crazy people” who “try to burn down buildings, including federal buildings” every night.While there had been some violent protests in June, demonstrations “were not significantly violent or disruptive in the days — or even weeks — leading up to the President’s directive on September 27,” Immergut wrote, describing the protests as mostly “small and uneventful.””On September 26, the eve of the President’s directive, law enforcement ‘observed approximately 8-15 people at any given time out front of ICE. Mostly sitting in lawn chairs and walking around. Energy was low, minimal activity,’” her order said.Dareh GregorianDareh Gregorian is a politics reporter for NBC News.
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