posted August 12, 2011 08:21 PM            

If you understood your personal freedoms, you'd understand that the liberty of every person around the world is limited by the laws they live under. That's not a Socialist thing. If Conservatives pushed through an Amendment to the Constitution making gay marriage illegal, gay people would HAVE TO settle for civil unions. It would impede on their sense of freedom as well, but that's what laws do. One person's liberty is another person's restriction. It's the nature of any law put upon us.

posted August 13, 2011 09:23 AM            

Spoken like the true judicial activist this demoscat appointed federal judge really is.

The majority got it right. The Commerce Clause was never intended to compel citizens to engage in commerce, never intended to compel citizens to purchase products or services they don't want to purchase and fine them for non-compliance.

What's funny is that leftists, including O'Bomber and his Socialist comrades in congress, as well as your loony judge, would be howling, screeching and shrieking in unison if,....a Republican president and Republican congress passed a law that every adult must purchase a firearm and used the the first stanza of the 2nd Amendment to justify the new law.

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State.........."

So, I didn't forget the "good bit" at all. This Loony Tunes moron judge let the cat out of the bag that the power of the Commerce Clause has been expanded over the years by big government activist judges into something the Constitution never contemplated.

For now, O'BomberCare is dead. The individual mandate to purchase health insurance IS the funding mechanism in O'BomberCare. Do you think the Republican House of Representatives is going to find a new source of funding for O'BomberCare?

In the Senate, Republicans would filibuster any attempt by O'Bomber/Reid/Pelosi to legislate a new funding source for O'BomberCare.

The only chance O'BomberCare will survive is the US Supreme Court and I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for the Supremes to uphold O'BomberCare...if I were you.

posted August 13, 2011 12:32 PM            

quote:

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The 2-1 ruling contrasts with an earlier ruling from the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati. Three courts have now ruled against the law, while three others have ruled for it. Its fate will likely be decided in the U.S. Supreme Court.

---

------------------
Submit to Love without thinking, as the sun rose this morning recklessly, extinguishing our star-candled minds.

posted August 13, 2011 01:35 PM            

while i detest the mandate in the healthcare act it only makes sense that if EVERYONE IS ENTITLED to free medical care if needed, then EVERYONE IS OBLIGED to pay into the systme as a whole.

and the reason i detest it is not because it is unfair, which is obviously untrue, but that it is really just a way of forcing us all to contribute to insurance companies' profits, of which they seem to have plenty already.

once again i ask, why do you not object to paying through the nose for your insurance/doctor's visits, etc as a result of ronald reagan's EDICT, BECAUSE FREE care is available to those who don't have the means, yet you object to paying a good deal LESS to cover this expense JUST BECAUSE the government suggested it?

posted August 17, 2011 05:17 PM            

quote:

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3 for 3 against (so far)...
It`s unconstitutional, all the way down the road to the Supreme Cours

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That's not technically true according to your article, Juni.

Three courts have now ruled against the law, while three others have ruled for it.

Three against. Three for.

posted August 21, 2011 01:39 PM            

When Congress was pushing through President Barack Obama's plan to nationalize health care decision-making, legislators gave little thought to the Constitution. After all, the denizens of Capitol Hill had grown accustomed to passing whatever laws they desired, with the expectation that, if necessary, compliant courts would fashion another magical legal doctrine or two to justify Congress' action. Naturally, all of the president's men and their allies dismissed the legal cases filed against Obamacare after it became law.

However, the advocates of government-controlled medicine are no longer laughing. The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals last week struck down an essential part of the legislation. This evens the score, balancing an earlier decision by the Sixth Circuit to uphold the vast expansion of federal power. In the latest case, Judge Frank Hull, a Democratic appointee, voted with Chief Judge Joel Dubina to overturn the legislation.

The substantive sections of the majority opinion in State of Florida, et al., vs. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services run roughly 150 pages, making it the longest and most detailed decision yet. As such, noted my Cato Institute colleague Ilya Shapiro, the "ruling shows that the constitutional issues raised by the healthcare reform -- and especially the individual mandate -- are complex, serious, and non-ideological."

The decision obviously will affect Americans' health care. But the more basic issue is whether there remains any limit to the reach of the federal government. The Framers viewed the national government as having important but only limited and enumerated powers. That is, Washington was an island of government authority in an ocean of individual liberty.

Over the years the courts have gutted constitutional doctrines intended to limit state power and justified almost any government action unless barred by the Bill of Rights. Indeed, the Commerce Clause, which authorizes federal regulation of commerce "among the several states," has been interpreted to largely swallow up Article 1, Section 8, which enumerates Congress's authority. The ocean became one of government power, with but a few islands of personal freedom.

However, Obamacare went further than any previous federal intrusion. In the name of regulating commerce, the law ordered people who had not entered any market to purchase a private product. If upheld, the measure would establish the principle that Americans could be forced to buy American cars to bail out the auto industry, Lehman securities to save Wall Street, and homes to revive the housing market. Whether or not the insurance mandate is good policy -- and there are lots of reasons to argue that it is not -- it effectively dismantles any meaningful limits on the national government.

The five federal District Court decisions so far have broken three-to-two in upholding Obamacare. Although in the majority, the former have been less than persuasive. Indeed, District Court Judge Gladys Kessler stated in her opinion that the government could regulate "mental activity" -- under a constitutional provision involving "commerce."

All of these rulings were appealed. The Sixth Circuit was first to deliver its opinion, with the judges split two-to-one in favor of the president's plan to treat passivity as if it was activity. Then last week the Eleventh Circuit said no.

Twenty-six states sued the federal government, challenging several aspects of the misnamed Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. (The law actually supersedes patient choice and bends the medical cost curve upward.)

One claim was that the legislation's dramatic expansion of Medicaid, which would impose additional costs on the states, was "coercive." Explained Judges Dubina and Hull: "[T]he coercion test asks whether the federal scheme removes state choice and compels the state to act because the state, in fact, has no other option."

Unfortunately, the states all have chosen to accept federal Medicaid dollars. With their hands greedily extended, they have been unable to convince any judge in any case that they could do nothing about the extra costs to be imposed. The Eleventh Circuit majority noted: "[S]tates have plenty of notice -- nearly four years from the date the bill was signed into law -- to decide whether they will continue to participate in Medicaid by adopting the expansions or not."

States might want to stay in the program without paying more, but that is not the same as being unable to pay more. Thus, observed the judges, "Medicaid-participating states have a real choice -- not just in theory but in fact -- to participate in the Act's Medicaid expansion" and "Where an entity has a real choice, there can be no coercion."

States should take this lesson to heart before again lining up for a federal handout.

The more important challenge was to the individual mandate. Under any serious interpretation of the meaning of "commerce" carried out "among" the states, not buying insurance does not qualify. The activity would have to cross state boundaries and, more important, actually be a commercial activity.

Under extraordinary political pressure the New Deal Supreme Court systematically denuded the Constitution of limits on government, substituting political preference for legal principle. In Wickard v. Filburn, the justices allowed the federal government to restrict a farmer from planting food for his family’s personal use, ruling that intra-state non-commercial activity was the same as inter-state commerce, since the former could affect the latter.

It was a profoundly dishonest opinion, ignoring the plain meaning of the phrase as well as clear intent of those who wrote and ratified the Constitution. Had the recently rebellious Americans understood that they would end up authorizing the federal government to regulate almost every human activity with this one phrase, they would have struck it from the text or refused to ratify the document.

Still, Wickard only covered almost everything. Explained Judges Dubina and Hull in Florida v. HHS: "Nonetheless, the Supreme Court has staunchly maintained that the commerce power contains outer limits which are necessary to preserve the federal-state balance in the Constitution."

Those limits may be hard to discern, but the high court eventually enunciated them in two cases. In 1995 the majority ruled in United States v. Lopez that the Commerce Clause did not allow Congress to ban possession of a gun in a school zone since there was no commerce. In United States v. Morrison, decided in 2000, the Court overturned a penalty against gender-related violence, since there was no "economic activity." In both cases the Supreme Court recognized that accepting the government's position yielded no obvious limit to government power. Said the majority in Lopez, "[W]e are hard pressed to posit any activity by an individual that Congress is without power to regulate." The justices stepped back from that jurisprudential abyss.

After a detailed review, the Eleventh Circuit noted that Congress' latest assertion of power is unprecedented: "Even in the face of a Great Depression, a World War, a Cold War, recessions, oil shocks, inflation, and unemployment, Congress never sought to require the purchase of wheat or war bonds, force a higher savings rate or greater consumption of American goods, or require every American to purchase a more fuel efficient vehicle."

Equally important, the power being claimed through Obamacare is extraordinary. The majority added:

In sum, the individual mandate is breathtaking in its expansive scope. It regulates those who have not entered the health care market at all. It regulates those who have entered the health care market, but have not entered the insurance market (and have no intention of doing so). It is overinclusive in when it regulates: it conflates those who presently consumer health care with those who will not consume health care for many years into the future. The government’s position amounts to an argument that the mere fact of an individual's existence substantially affects interstate commerce, and therefore Congress may regulate them at every point of their life. This theory affords no limiting principles in which to confine Congress's enumerated power.

The Administration makes much of the alleged uniqueness of the market and the problem of cost-shifting from the uninsured. However, the majority noted that the proffered distinctions have no constitutional relevance. Moreover, "the primary persons regulated by the individual mandate are not cost-shifters, but healthy individuals who forego purchasing insurance." This merely reaffirms the extraordinary nature of the mandate, "forcing market entry by those outside the market."

Reinforcing the Eleventh Circuit's caution in approaching the mandate was the fact that "insurance qualifies as an area of traditional state regulation." So does health care, since "a state's role in safeguarding the health of its citizens is a quintessential component of its sovereign powers." Federalism became the clincher. Stated the majority: "When this federalism factor is added to the numerous indicia of constitutional infirmity delineated above, we must conclude that the individual mandate cannot be sustained as a valid exercise of Congress’s power to regulate activities that substantially affect interstate commerce."

The administration made two other unsuccessful claims to salvage the mandate. The first was that the requirement was "a necessary and proper exercise" of the commerce power. Nice try, but no cigar, said Judges Dubina and Hull.

The majority concluded that the argument the mandate is "necessary" is undermined by PPACA's own terms, with "broad exemptions and exceptions to the individual mandate (and its penalty) that impair its scope and functionality." In short, "to the extent the uninsureds' ability to delay insurance purchases would leave a 'gaping hole' in Congress' efforts to reform the insurance market, Congress has seen fit to bore the hole itself.”

But even assuming "necessity" is not enough, the judges explained: "It would be nonsensical to suggest that, in announcing its 'larger regulatory scheme' doctrine, the Supreme Court gave Congress carte blanche to enact unconstitutional regulations so long as such enactments were part of a broader, comprehensive regulatory scheme." A law must be "proper" -- that is, within the federal government's constitutional power -- as well as "necessary."

The government's second claim was that the mandate, backed by a tax penalty, actually is a tax. In this case the majority didn’t even say nice try. Rather, noted the opinion, "all of the federal courts, which have otherwise reached sharply divergent conclusions on the constitutionality of the individual mandate, have spoken on this issue with clarion uniformity. Beginning with the district court in this case, all have found, without exception, that the individual mandate operates as a regulatory penalty, not a tax."

It could not be otherwise. Congress declared the penalty to be a penalty, counted on no revenue from the provision, limited IRS power to enforce the penalty, and cited the Commerce Clause as the law's constitutional basis. Moreover, the fact that the Obama administration claimed the mandate was essential to its regulatory scheme demonstrated that the penalty was, in fact, a penalty enacted to back the mandate. The majority opined: "The individual mandate as written cannot be supported by the tax power."

Although the appellate court gutted Obamacare by voiding the insurance mandate, the judges did not kill the legislation. They reversed the trial court on the issue of "severability" -- that is, whether the mandate can be separated from the rest of the bill. The District Court said no, since the mandate was integral to the legislation.

The Eleventh Circuit came out differently, however. The courts favor severability when possible, even when legislators fail, as in this case, to include a clause supporting severability. Thus, ruled the majority, the rest of the law stands since "the lion's share of the Act has nothing to do with private insurance, much less the mandate that individuals buy insurance."

The dissent, too, is long -- over 80 pages. Judge Stanley Marcus called for a "pragmatic" decision reflecting "the undeniable fact that Congress' commerce power has grown exponentially over the past two centuries." Yet even he admitted that "the individual mandate is a novel exercise of Congress' Commerce Clause power" and that "it is surely true that there is no Supreme Court decision squarely on point dictating the result that the individual mandate is within the commerce power of Congress."

More tellingly, Judge Marcus dismissed "the parade of horribles said to follow ineluctably from upholding the individual mandate," since the supposedly "powerful limits" from Lopez and Morrison would remain. However, if these "powerful limits" do not prevent Congress from treating market inaction as market participation, they are "powerful" only in the opinion writer's mind. Affirming the individual mandate would effectively write the Article 1, Section 8 enumeration out of the Constitution.

Judge Marcus's more basic point is that doing the latter would be no big deal since "upholding the individual mandate would be far from a cosmic expansion of the boundaries of the Commerce Clause." In short, since the federal government can do almost everything that it wants already, why not let it do everything? The idea that the Constitution was created to protect individual liberty is of no matter, since most politicians (and most judges, including this one, obviously) today are not interested in protecting individual liberty.

The legal battle over Obamacare may look like just another esoteric court fight. However, the outcome will determine whether people retain the freedom to decide on their own medical treatment. The case also will decide whether any substantive powers remain beyond the federal government. Only if the judges affirm that the Constitution means what it says will our liberties be secure.

posted November 23, 2011 02:33 PM            

We're promoting constitutional government. We're reining in the Socialists in Congress and the Marxist Socialist Progressive O'Bomber who believe there is no limits to the power of the federal government to rule over and interfere with the lives of American citizens.

The Bell Tolls for Obamacare
By Peter Ferrara
11.23.11

The key to the Supreme Court's upcoming ruling will be clear recognition of constitutional alternatives to Obamacare.

On November 14, the Supreme Court granted the Writ of Certiorari to hear the appeal of the cases testing the constitutionality of Obamacare. The resulting decision will mark an historic watershed not only in the restoration of constitutional jurisprudence, but in fundamental, market reform of the entire entitlement state.

Historic Decision Brewing

I write serving as the General Counsel of the American Civil Rights Union (ACRU), as one of several current positions. The ACRU was started by former top Reagan aide Robert Carleson, with former Attorney General Ed Meese as Chairman of the Advisory Board, along with other former Reagan Justice Department officials, besides myself as a former Reagan White House staffer.

In my capacity for the ACRU, I wrote and filed amicus curiae briefs on behalf of the ACRU in both the district court and the circuit court in the challenge by 26 states in the 11th Circuit that resulted in an order striking down the entire Obamacare law. I also wrote and filed ACRU amicus curiae briefs in the challenge by Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli in both the district court and the circuit in the 4th Circuit. The district court found the individual mandate unconstitutional, while the circuit court ruled that Virginia had no right to bring the case (two Obama appointed judges on the three-judge panel).

I am predicting that the Supreme Court will strike down the entire Obamacare law on a 5-4 ruling. That starts with the individual mandate, which the Court will find unconstitutional because it has reiterated several times in recent cases that it will enforce some limit on the Commerce Clause as justification for federal regulation, reserving the role of police power to regulate for the general public good to the states. Virtually all the judges in all the lower court cases concluded that there was no precedent anywhere in U.S. history upholding a law requiring citizens to purchase a good or service. Not participating in interstate commerce by choosing not to buy a product or service leaves no basis for regulation to compel such participation under the Commerce Clause power to regulate interstate commerce.

The fate of that argument before the Supreme Court is indicated by the thorough opinions of District Court Judge Roger Vinson in the 11th Circuit, District Court Judge Henry Hudson in the Fourth Circuit, and the majority of the 11th Circuit panel striking down the Obamacare individual mandate. These judges are good indicators as to how similarly minded Justices Scalia, Thomas, Alito and Chief Justice Roberts will come out.

While the decision of simpatico Judge Laurence Silberman upholding the Obamacare mandate is somewhat troubling, that reflected Silberman's poorly reasoned conclusion that he was bound as a lower court judge by the Supreme Court's 1930s precedent of Wickard v. Filburn. That case did not involve a regulation compelling anyone to purchase anything, but rather a defendant who had made an affirmative decision to take action to grow and use wheat in his farm operations, with the regulation applying directly to that action. That illogical blunder is not characteristic of Silberman's usually brave and far sighted work.

The Supreme Court will strike down the entire law as Judge Vinson did because even the government is arguing that Obamacare is unworkable without the individual mandate. Obamacare requires insurers to issue insurance coverage to everyone who applies at just standard rates, regardless of how already sick and costly they are when they first apply. Without a mandate requiring everyone to buy such insurance and so contribute to its costs, the healthy will just wait until they are sick and then buy the guaranteed insurance, avoiding any contribution to the costs (imposed by others) during all their healthy years. That will leave insurers covering primarily a very sick and costly pool, requiring very high insurance rates for financial survival. Those high rates will cause even more of the healthy and lower cost workers to drop out, resulting in an admitted financial death spiral for the insurers.

What makes this predicted legal result especially likely is that the Obamacare law overconfidently excluded a traditional severability clause, which provides that if any part of a law is found unconstitutional, the rest would remain intact. The drafters in their full Obama era arrogance thought excluding the clause would leave the courts less likely to strike down the mandate, which could then legally threaten the entire law. The drafters were so certain that the law would be so wildly popular, just like other overpromised entitlements, that no court would dare do that. But with strong public majorities so virulently detesting the law, the lack of a severability clause just assures that the Court will strike down the unworkable law.

Of course, the law will not work with a mandate enforced with a weak penalty anyway. The healthy will pay the penalty, just a fraction of the costly regulatory mandate, avoiding the bulk of the costs until they are sick. That will happen with the employer mandate as well. We see this practice under the quite similar Romneycare in Massachusetts.

The Key to the Case

I believe the key to winning the fifth majority vote of Justice Kennedy is the argument that striking down Obamacare does not mean there is no constitutional way for a health care safety net to assure no one will suffer from lack of necessary medical care. That argument has been a specialty of the briefs I have filed for the ACRU based on my own direct role in health policy, going back to the first paper proposing health savings accounts which I co-authored with John Goodman almost 30 years ago.

A complete health care safety net assuring essential health care for all can be achieved with no individual mandate and no employer mandate, for just a fraction of the cost of Obamacare, actually sharply reducing government in the process. That starts with the provision already in federal law, stemming from the Kennedy-Kassebaum legislation of the 1990s, providing for guaranteed renewability. That means if you already have health insurance, you cannot be terminated because you become sick. That is what the insurance insures against after all, so such termination would actually be fraud, as state law across the country recognized before Kennedy-Kassebaum. Under this regulation, insurers also cannot discriminatorily raise rates for those who become sick while insured. This law ensures that if you have health insurance, you will be able to keep it as long as you continue to pay the premiums.

The second component of a health care safety net would involve block granting Medicaid back to the states, just as was done with the enormously successful reform of the old AFDC program in 1996. Each state would then transform their Medicaid programs into a premium support system which would provide the assistance necessary to purchase essential health insurance for those who are too poor to pay for it otherwise. Each state would decide how much assistance is necessary at each income level in their state to assure the poor could afford such essential coverage.

This would greatly benefit the poor because Medicaid today is structurally an institution serving to deny the poor essential health care just when they are the sickest and most in need of such care. That is because Medicaid does not pay the doctors and hospitals enough to assure such care. But with the above reform, the poor would enjoy the same health care as the middle class because they would have the same private insurance as the middle class, paying market rates for care.

The third component of the safety net is a high risk pool in each state for the uninsured who never get coverage and then become too sick with costly illnesses like cancer or heart disease to buy it. That is like calling an insurance company for fire insurance after your house is already on fire. The uninsured in this case would be able to get coverage as a last resort from the high risk pool, paying what they can based on their income. Taxes would subsidize the pool to keep it afloat. Because only 1-2 percent ever become actually uninsurable like this, this is the least expensive option for assuring an essential safety net.

With that everyone would be assured of a means to obtain essential health care. If you have insurance you will be able to keep it, despite President Obama's abusive, deceptive rhetoric to the contrary. If you are too poor to obtain insurance, the government provides the necessary help to buy it. If you nevertheless stay uninsured, and become too sick to buy it, you can obtain essential coverage from the high risk pool.

Such a health care safety net is entirely constitutional. Consequently, striking down Obamacare as unconstitutional does not mean condemning the needy to suffering without essential health care.

Exploding Medicaid

The Supreme Court in deciding to hear the Obamacare appeal included the question of whether Obamacare's massive expansion of Medicaid is constitutional. CBO projects that by 2021, Obamacare will explode the Medicaid program for the poor to covering 100 million Americans. Medicaid is financed jointly by the states as well as the feds, so this explosion imposes massive costs on the states. Can the federal government do that constitutionally?

The traditional answer would be if the states do not want to accept the federal assistance financing Medicaid with all the strings Obamacare attaches to that assistance, the states are free to turn down the federal Medicaid funding. But the challenge to Obamacare on these grounds argues that the federal Medicaid financing is now so enormous, and so essential to serving the poor in each state, that states as a practical matter are no longer actually free to turn it down, regardless of the strings attached.

Of course that is true. In regard to Medicaid, Obamacare treats the states as sub-departments of the federal government, like local government units in France, rather than as the sovereign governments they are under traditional American federalism. Federalism was a chief concern of ACRU founder Robert Carleson, as well as his boss Ronald Reagan. So the ACRU will take the lead in arguing this cause before the Supreme Court.

Political Consequences

The Supreme Court decision in this case will come down in the summer of 2012, just before the election. Regardless of the outcome, the decision will be a political disaster for Obama's reelection. If the Court strikes it down, that will confirm that Obama wasted his first two years in office taking America on an unconstitutional frolic, rather than addressing America's most urgent problems in an effective way.

If the Court upholds it, then voters will know the only way to get rid of it is to vote Obama and his Democrats out of office. That will be a result they will have so richly earned.

But if my predictions above are correct, the Court's decision will not only begin the long road back to the real Constitution. It will be the first step in real entitlement reform, as the Republicans likely to take over in 2012 are already coalescing around sophisticated entitlement reform with proven political viability. More on that next week.

posted February 17, 2012 11:45 AM            

Talk about stepping on your own argument!

This is better than the clown act down at the local circus!

OMB director undercuts legal case for Obamacare
Philip Klein Senior Editorial Writer

Testifying before Congress this morning, President Obama's acting budget director Jeffrey Zients directly undercut one of the administration's key legal defenses of its national health care law as it nears a hearing before the Supreme Court.

In a hearing of the House Budget Committee Rep. Scott Garrett, R-N.J., pressed Zients on whether the penalty that the health care law imposes on individuals who do not purchase health insurance constitutes a tax. Eventually, Zients said it did not.

But this directly contradicts one of the arguments the Obama administration is making before the Supreme Court in defense of the health care law, which is that the mandate is Constitutional because it's a tax and government has taxing power.

This has always been a tricky argument for the Obama administration, because admitting that the mandate is a tax means that Obama violated his pledge not to raise taxes on those earning less than $250,000. In September 2009, Obama told ABC's George Stephanapoulos that the mandate was not a tax. But by the following June, his administration was arguing in court that it was.

Now the administration is making both arguments simultaneously. Before Congress, Zients is arguing that it is not a tax. But before the Supreme Court next month, the administration will argue that it is, in fact, a tax.

"The practical operation of the minimum coverage provision is as a tax law," reads the administration's Supreme Court brief filed last month. "It is fully integrated into the tax system, will raise substantial revenue, and triggers only tax consequences for non-compliance."

posted February 20, 2012 10:58 AM            

If you're growing old standing in the long lines waiting to see one of our doctors; go to an airport.

posted February 20, 2012 05:54 PM            

quote:

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It is no more a violation than your being legally taxed.
If you understood your personal freedoms, you'd understand that the liberty of every person around the world is limited by the laws they live under. That's not a Socialist thing. If Conservatives pushed through an Amendment to the Constitution making gay marriage illegal, gay people would HAVE TO settle for civil unions. It would impede on their sense of freedom as well, but that's what laws do. One person's liberty is another person's restriction. It's the nature of any law put upon us.

You may believe that it's not moral for you to have to purchase some sort of health insurance, but the exceedingly-difficult-to-deny reality is that you're going to have to use health services at some point. Is it "controlling" to make you pay for your own service, or do you think that things should continue on as they are (with you continuing not to buy insurance until suddenly you have an emergency and suddenly our government [meaning every taxpayer] has to foot the bill for your very expensive procedure which could have been averted if you'd simply gone to the doctor every year)? There's a reason Conservatives thought up the "individual mandate".

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posted February 21, 2012 01:49 PM            

reagan MANDATED that all people must receive treatment whether able to pay or not. though most doctors before reagan quite willingly did so, i see nothing "free market" in this decree...WHO do you think is paying for the care those people receive? the rest of us, through higher costs (losses passed on), more stressed medics and the "cheap" option often relied on, drugs in place of actual care. you may not call THAT a tax, but it is, and no limits on it either!

if it is constitutional for reagan to decree that doctors and staff and hospitals work for free, it is constitutional for obama to enact shared payment across the board. this will ALSO bring costs back down.

posted February 21, 2012 02:24 PM            

https://apps.facebook.com/theguardian/politics/2012/feb/20/conservative-support-shrinks-voters-nhs?fb_source=other_multiline&fb_action_types=news.reads

i suspect, as i did at the time, that the real reason labour lost the last elections there was that GORDY BROWN HAD TO GO. unelected and seriously unliked, the deed had to be done.

now, as here in the states, people are realizing they may have jumped out of the frying pan, but into the fire. turn and turn about!

personally i think obama always expected the mandate to be challenged. he has said over and over that he expects the HR to be tweaked and tweaked again before it is really right.... but americans are apparently allergic to the word TAX, despite the services taxes pay for. so the american governors use MANDATES to cover the same costs.

posted March 01, 2012 08:17 AM            

Palin was right, O'Bomber and demoscats are liars who lied about virtually every provision of O'BomberCare to get it passed. Now, it's all coming unraveled and even demoscats are going on record with actual votes to repeal various provisions of O'BomberCare.

O'BomberCare is and always was a health care RATIONING PLAN to deny medical treatment to senior citizens who are just expected to die. What a plan. Kill off senior citizens and save the government the cost of medicare and Social Security. Dead senior citizens have no use for medicare or Social Security.

I have to wonder just how stupid these people really are. Did they expect that when medical treatment for granny or gramps was denied that their children were just going to shrug their shoulders and say...well, we appealed to the "death panel" but our appeal was denied and there's no one else to which a legal appeal can be made. Too bad granny.

Maybe they didn't believe that was really going to pi$s people off enough to come straight after them. When the denials for medical treatment for treatable illnesses and disease begin, I wouldn't want to be anywhere near anyone who voted for O'BomberCare or anyone working on the Independent Payment Advisory Board, aka the "death panel"!

Sebelius and the death spiral
Going down the Big Government drain
John Hayward
03/01/2012

On Tuesday, Congressman Peter Roskam (R-Ill.) of the House Ways & Means Committee had the chance to ask Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius about President Obama’s infamous promise that “if you like your existing health care coverage, you can keep it.” Roskam noted that certainly doesn’t seem to be the case under ObamaCare, where a rising tide of businesses have chosen not to offer medical coverage to their employees. You can’t keep a plan that no longer exists, no matter how much you might have liked it.

Sebelius replied, “Well again, Congressman, what you’re seeing… It wouldn’t have mattered if we had passed the Affordable Care Act or not. The private market is in a death spiral.”

As Daniel Halper of the Weekly Standard noted, this is objectively untrue, and while a mere 9 percent of businesses might have blown their ejector seats to escape from ObamaCare thus far, it’s going to get a lot worse.

Sebelius's testimony directly contradicts a McKinsey study released last year. "At least 30 percent of employers are likely to stop offering health insurance once provisions of the U.S. health care reform law kick in in 2014, according to a study by consultant McKinsey," Reuters reported. "McKinsey, which based its projection on a survey of more than 1,300 employers of various sizes and industries and other proprietary research, found that 30 percent of employers will 'definitely' or 'probably' stop offering coverage in the years after 2014, when new medical insurance exchanges are supposed to be up and running."

(Emphasis mine.) Well, at least we’ve got that to look forward to. We can mitigate the economic damage a bit, if we’ve got President Obama’s algae-based fuel refineries and car engines up and running by then.

Sebelius is a fine one to talk about “death spirals.” ObamaCare has been in one since the moment of its passage. Quite a few of its tentacles have rotted and fallen away. Remember the 1099 reporting requirement, designed to squeeze extra tax revenue out of the private sector by compelling small businesses to fill out oceans of tax paperwork for all of their purchases? It would have increased the number of 1099 forms filed each year by two thousand percent. It was killed with a bipartisan vote that collected a 70 percent majority in the House. There went $17 billion of ObamaCare funding!

What about the Independent Payment Advisory Board, aka the "death panel?" That's the unaccountable bureaucracy designed to keep ObamaCare's costs down by rationing medical care. A bill to abolish the IPAB just cleared the House Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee on a 17-5 vote, with two Democrats voting in favor. The subcommittee chairman, Rep. Joe Pitts (R-Penn.), described the IPAB as "the exact opposite of transparency and accountability." But how is ObamaCare supposed to function without its rationing bureaucracy? You rip out the death panel, sparks fly, and the whole damn contraption goes into a tailspin.

Or how about the CLASS Act? That was a ridiculous accounting trick, designed to make ObamaCare look less expensive by front-loading premiums for long-term care, and just sort of pretending the immense ongoing costs didn’t exist. It masked ObamaCare’s impact on the deficit by raking in five years’ worth of income before paying out any benefits… and then it would have turned into a fiscal H-bomb. The House just voted to repeal it a couple of weeks ago, 267-159, including 28 Democrats. Over in the Senate, Democrat Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad called the CLASS Act “a Ponzi scheme of the first order, the kind of thing that Bernie Madoff would have been proud of.”

Even the Administration eventually had to admit the program would be unsustainable unless absurd numbers of healthy people bought into it. “Despite our best analytical efforts, I do not see a viable path forward for CLASS implementation at this time,” said none other than Kathleen Sebelius. There went $70 billion of ObamaCare’s “cost savings!”

Speaking of Our Lady of the Death Spiral, she’s the one who was compelled to admit, under intense Congressional grilling, that ObamaCare double-counted half a trillion dollars in Medicare funding.

“There is an issue here on the budget because your own actuary has said you can’t double-count,” Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.) told Sebelius, in reference to a hefty sum that was simultaneously supposed to prop up Medicare and fund ObamaCare. “What’s the $500 billion in cuts for? Preserving Medicare or funding the health-care law?” Sebelius replied, “Both.”

In fairness to the HHS secretary, that sort of accounting trickery is fairly common in the cobwebbed halls of the Big Government haunted house. It becomes more common as the government grows. But ObamaCare is a particularly powerful mixture of exploding costs, allegedly unanticipated consequences, and unsustainable open-ended commitments. At the time of its passage, it was supposed to reduce the deficit by a few hundred billion; now the projected ten-year costs are well over a trillion dollars, according to very conservative Congressional Budget Office estimates.

And that’s just one part of the government’s trillion-dollar deficit portfolio, as we soar past $16 trillion in accumulated debt, and make a strong bid to blow past $20 trillion long before the end of this decade. Interest on that debt currently consumes nearly half of the government’s revenue from personal income taxes, and those outlays will more than triple over the next ten years, even assuming interest rates don’t explode.

When House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan recently discussed national debt projections with Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, he had to point out that according to current CBO projections, the entire U.S. economy simply “shuts down in 2027” under the weight of government debt.

Now that’s what I call a death spiral!

posted March 04, 2012 01:35 PM            

At the end of March, the Supreme Court will take up the constitutionality of Obamacare, as the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) and 26 states will be the lead plaintiffs in the historic case to overturn the president’s signature law.

To get a sense of what to expect from The Trial Of the Century, I met up NFIB’s executive director, Karen Harned over coffee. ”We’re two for two,” she boasted between sips.

Harned was referring to NFIB’s district court victory (the only time a judge has ruled the individual mandate cannot be severed from the law) — and their appeals court victory (the only time a judge appointed by a Democrat ruled the individual mandate was unconstitutional.)

It’s crowded at the Caribou Coffee on 17th and L streets in Washington, but over the din of lobbyists and caffeine fiends, I ask her to sketch out the NFIB’s arguments. “What we’ve seen in all the cases,” she explains — “the one question they cannot answer is: ‘Where does it end?’”

Hers is a slippery slope argument, but that doesn’t mean questioning the government’s ability to regulate economic “inactivity” isn’t legitimate. “You could say, ‘Well it’s good for everybody to exercise — so let’s mandate everybody to join the gym.”

I stir my coffee nervously. As if the thought of being forced to (gulp!) exercise isn’t horrifying enough already, Harned continued: “It’s good for everybody to take vitamins … It’s good for people to eat five fruits and vegetables a day! — Why don’t we make all grocers give those foods away for free — and [require] more people buy broccoli?”

At first, the broccoli reference threw me, but it’s actually pertinent. During a previous trial — when appeals court Justice Laurence Silberman asked Deputy Assistant Attorney General Beth Brinkmann if requiring Americans to buy broccoli would be unconstitutional — she answered: “No. It depends.”

So here we have the government’s lawyer admitting that — yes! — the government could mandate broccoli consumption. (This may sound shocking, but President Obama has already threatened to make us all eat our peas.) And, eating healthy would, presumably, help lower health care costs.

The other government argument the NFIB intends to eviscerate is the free rider argument — the notion that health care mandates are vital because otherwise people will just “game” the system by refusing to pay for health care coverage while simultaneously using health services.

This, of course, is a conundrum. But the government’s “solution” would also open up a can of constitutional worms.

The government hopes to argue that the health market is unique — that the slope isn’t slippery at all. But cost shifting occurs all the time, everywhere. “We all pay in fees to our credit cards for the people who don’t pay their credit card bills,” Harned says. “We all pay in our mortgage interest for the people who default on their mortgage”…

It all comes back to this: If the government can mandate the purchase of health care insurance, what can’t they mandate?