Law of Economics Wreaking Havoc on Health Care Law
http://www.citizenlink.com/2010/10/law-of-economics-wreaking-havoc-on-health-care-law/
Posted by Catherine Snow
The utopian promises made by President Obama about the health care overhaul are proving –rapidly – to be everything but what was pledged.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) recently granted 30 large companies – including McDonald’s – special waivers from adhering to certain mandates in the health care law. Positioned by HHS as a step to provide “continuous coverage,” policy watchers call it a move to avoid nearly one million workers from being left without coverage – right before the election.
Philip Klein wrote today on The American Spectator:
“Yet by granting waivers to avert PR nightmares, like the news of McDonald’s dropping coverage, it also adds another disturbing element to the ObamaCare regime. Those companies with the best access and lobbyists are in the best position to be granted a waiver. Bureaucrats can choose to apply a different set of rules to different businesses, and in some cases those rules can determine whether a given business survives. Thus, the waivers themselves are another example of the arbitrary nature of government power.”
MORE CRACKS IN THE LAW
In today’s commentary, “Congress Can’t Repeal Economics,” author and FOX Business Network host John Stossel aptly pointed out that the laws of economics have “struck back.”
“Health insurers Wellpoint, Cigna, Aetna, Humana, and CoventryOne will stop writing policies for all children. Why? Because Obamacare requires that they insure already sick children for the same price as well children.
“That sounds compassionate, but—in case Obamacare fanatics haven’t noticed—sick children need more medical care. Insurance is about risk, and already sick children are 100 percent certain to be sick when their coverage begins. So if the government mandates that insurance companies cover sick children at the lower well-children price, insurers will quit the market rather than sandbag their shareholders. This is not callousness—it’s fiduciary responsibility. Insurance companies are not charities.
“So, thanks to the compassionate Congress and president, parents of sick children will be saved from expensive insurance—by being unable to obtain any insurance! That’s how government compassion works.
“In 2014, the same rule will kick in for adults. You now know what to expect.”
UTOPIA UNRAVELS
After signing health care into law on March 25, Obama went on to chastise Republicans, conservatives and Tea Party participants:
“From this day forward, all of the cynics, all the naysayers – they’re going to have to confront the reality of what this reform is and what it isn’t… this isn’t a government takeover of our health care system.
“They’ll see that if Americans like their doctor, they’ll be keeping their doctor. You like your plan? You’ll be keeping your plan. No one is taking that away from you…”
However, not every liberal agreed.
Democrat pollsters Patrick H. Caddell and Douglas E. Schoen predicted the Nov. 2 fallout:
“Bluntly put, this is the political reality: First, the battle for public opinion has been lost. Comprehensive health care has been lost. If it fails, as appears possible, Democrats will face the brunt of the electorate’s reaction. If it passes, however, Democrats will face a far greater calamitous reaction at the polls. Wishing, praying or pretending will not change these outcomes.”
FOR MORE INFORMATION
Read John Stossel’s article, “Congress Can’t Repeal Economics.”
http://reason.com/archives/2010/10/07/congress-cant-repeal-economics
Showing posts with label indvidual mandates. Show all posts
Showing posts with label indvidual mandates. Show all posts
Friday, October 8, 2010
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Obama's socialist "blueprint" exposed!
Obama's socialist "blueprint" exposed!
On Oct. 30, 2008, Barack Obama announced that upon winning
the presidency, he would immediately begin, "fundamentally transforming the United States of America."
Over the past 20 months, Obama and his accomplices in the ultraliberal 111th Congress have been hard at work pushing statist "change." But now their plan has been exposed and the tide is turning against them! See my vitally important message below. - To be forewarned is to be forearmed. This message may be one of the most important I have yet sent to you.
The events of last week, on the surface, were deflating to many pro-marriage, pro-life Americans. As you know, Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan was confirmed as 63 senators decided to ignore her far-left political activism and pattern of manipulating the legal process.
Of course, having Elena Kagan on the Supreme Court will make the battle for our culture more difficult.
The recent California same-sex marriage ruling emphasizes that point. There, an activist federal judge legislated from the bench and overturned the will of a clear majority of California voters by declaring Proposition 8 unconstitutional. That case will likely end up being heard by the Supreme Court... with Elena Kagan seated as a justice.
But the final Kagan vote does not even begin to tell what happened in the Senate during the confirmation process.
The real story is what citizens like you did to oppose her nomination... against all odds... against overwhelming bias from the liberal media... and against senators who refused to do their basic duty and actually investigate Kagan.
Many Liberty Counsel team members answered the call to flood Senate offices with faxes, hand delivered letters, and phone calls exposing Elena Kagan's radical political activism. In all, Liberty Counsel team members made an astounding 261,695 verified citizen contacts with the Senate on this issue!
Americans are pushing back at the Obama agenda.
Last Tuesday, the citizens of Missouri trumpeted a message of discontent to the Obama administration - and to the ultraliberal 111th Congress. Nearly three-quarters of voters there approved a measure that would prohibit the government from requiring their citizens to have health insurance or from penalizing them for not
having it!
According to Fox News, legislatures in Arizona, Georgia, Idaho, Louisiana and Virginia have passed similar statutes, and voters in Arizona and Oklahoma will vote on such measures as state constitutional amendments in November.
Also just days ago, a federal judge ruled against Kathleen Sebelius in her capacity as Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, denying the administration's attempt to have Virginia's lawsuit against "healthcare reform" dismissed.
In responding to the State of Virginia, the Obama administration provided important clues about how they
will defend the indefensible "mandate" contained in ObamaCare.
We believe they have chosen a very deceptive and highly vulnerable strategy. On the day ObamaCare was signed into law, Liberty Counsel filed the first private-sector lawsuit against the unconstitutional mandates contained in the "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act," better known as ObamaCare.
I believe our lawsuit is ultimately headed to the Supreme Court. We are more confident than ever that we can win this battle. Although the government has asked for an extension of time to answer our specific lawsuit, they have pretty much tipped their hand concerning their defense strategy by their response to Virginia's suit.
Obama's lawyers have begun a strange song and dance.
When the Obama/Reid/Pelosi axis of power was selling ObamaCare to the American people, they were adamant that the individual mandate to buy government approved health insurance was NOT a tax. You probably remember at least one of the President's many strong denials that healthcare "reform" would involve ANY adverse tax consequences.
But now that we have challenged the individual mandate as being unconstitutional, the administration has changed their tune by declaring that, in fact, the individual mandate IS a tax!
Why? Because the Constitution gives Congress the power to enact taxes but NOT to mandate insurance purchases! The "facts" they presented in their response to Virginia have suddenly changed to suit their latest convenience!
This is yet another Obama tactic to bypass our constitutional form of government and to FORCE an unwanted mandate upon the American people.
http://www.lc.org/
On Oct. 30, 2008, Barack Obama announced that upon winning
the presidency, he would immediately begin, "fundamentally transforming the United States of America."
Over the past 20 months, Obama and his accomplices in the ultraliberal 111th Congress have been hard at work pushing statist "change." But now their plan has been exposed and the tide is turning against them! See my vitally important message below. - To be forewarned is to be forearmed. This message may be one of the most important I have yet sent to you.
The events of last week, on the surface, were deflating to many pro-marriage, pro-life Americans. As you know, Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan was confirmed as 63 senators decided to ignore her far-left political activism and pattern of manipulating the legal process.
Of course, having Elena Kagan on the Supreme Court will make the battle for our culture more difficult.
The recent California same-sex marriage ruling emphasizes that point. There, an activist federal judge legislated from the bench and overturned the will of a clear majority of California voters by declaring Proposition 8 unconstitutional. That case will likely end up being heard by the Supreme Court... with Elena Kagan seated as a justice.
But the final Kagan vote does not even begin to tell what happened in the Senate during the confirmation process.
The real story is what citizens like you did to oppose her nomination... against all odds... against overwhelming bias from the liberal media... and against senators who refused to do their basic duty and actually investigate Kagan.
Many Liberty Counsel team members answered the call to flood Senate offices with faxes, hand delivered letters, and phone calls exposing Elena Kagan's radical political activism. In all, Liberty Counsel team members made an astounding 261,695 verified citizen contacts with the Senate on this issue!
Americans are pushing back at the Obama agenda.
Last Tuesday, the citizens of Missouri trumpeted a message of discontent to the Obama administration - and to the ultraliberal 111th Congress. Nearly three-quarters of voters there approved a measure that would prohibit the government from requiring their citizens to have health insurance or from penalizing them for not
having it!
According to Fox News, legislatures in Arizona, Georgia, Idaho, Louisiana and Virginia have passed similar statutes, and voters in Arizona and Oklahoma will vote on such measures as state constitutional amendments in November.
Also just days ago, a federal judge ruled against Kathleen Sebelius in her capacity as Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, denying the administration's attempt to have Virginia's lawsuit against "healthcare reform" dismissed.
In responding to the State of Virginia, the Obama administration provided important clues about how they
will defend the indefensible "mandate" contained in ObamaCare.
We believe they have chosen a very deceptive and highly vulnerable strategy. On the day ObamaCare was signed into law, Liberty Counsel filed the first private-sector lawsuit against the unconstitutional mandates contained in the "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act," better known as ObamaCare.
I believe our lawsuit is ultimately headed to the Supreme Court. We are more confident than ever that we can win this battle. Although the government has asked for an extension of time to answer our specific lawsuit, they have pretty much tipped their hand concerning their defense strategy by their response to Virginia's suit.
Obama's lawyers have begun a strange song and dance.
When the Obama/Reid/Pelosi axis of power was selling ObamaCare to the American people, they were adamant that the individual mandate to buy government approved health insurance was NOT a tax. You probably remember at least one of the President's many strong denials that healthcare "reform" would involve ANY adverse tax consequences.
But now that we have challenged the individual mandate as being unconstitutional, the administration has changed their tune by declaring that, in fact, the individual mandate IS a tax!
Why? Because the Constitution gives Congress the power to enact taxes but NOT to mandate insurance purchases! The "facts" they presented in their response to Virginia have suddenly changed to suit their latest convenience!
This is yet another Obama tactic to bypass our constitutional form of government and to FORCE an unwanted mandate upon the American people.
http://www.lc.org/
Monday, July 5, 2010
Thursday, July 1, 2010
Morning Bell: The Limitless Power of the Obama-Kagan Congress
This Sunday, our nation will celebrate Independence Day, which commemorates the Continental Congress’ adoption of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration preamble reads: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The fact that we as a nation came together every year to celebrate this document might lead many Americans to believe that a Supreme Court Justice should take the Declaration of Independence into account when they are interpreting the Constitution. Elena Kagan is not one of those Americans. Under questioning from Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) yesterday, Kagan admitted: “To be honest with you, I don’t have a view of what are natural rights independent of the Constitution.”
And Kagan’s disturbing indifference to the existence of natural rights is just one of the many frightening revelations her confirmation hearing has produced. On Tuesday, Sen. Coburn pressed Kagan about the limits the Constitution places on Congress’ power to control what Americans do:
Coburn: If I wanted to sponsor a bill and it said Americans, you have to eat three vegetables and three fruits every day and I got it through Congress and that’s now the law of the land, got to do it, does that violate the Commerce Clause?
Kagan: Sounds like a dumb law
Coburn: Yeah, but I got one that’s real similar to it that I think is equally dumb. I’m not going to mention which it is.
Kagan: But I think that the question of whether it’s a dumb law is different from whether the question of whether it’s constitutional and I think that courts would be wrong to strike down laws that they think are senseless just because they’re senseless.
The law Coburn was referring to, of course, was President Barack Obama’s signature legislative accomplishment: the Obamacare provision that forces all Americans to buy health insurance. But Jefferson and the other Constitution framers designed the document to protect our “unalienable Rights” by limiting the power of Congress. They designed an ingenious system of checks and balances that divides state and federal authority in the hope of preventing any one government from exerting too much control over a free people. Specifically, Article I allocates to Congress “[a]ll legislative powers herein granted,” and section 8 of Article I (referred to by Sen. Coburn above as the Commerce Clause), grants Congress the authority “[t]o regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes.” The Supreme Court has always understood that, taken together, these clauses put some legislative powers beyond Congress’ reach.
But Kagan has now testified that not only does she find the Founders’ concept of “unalienable Rights” irrelevant to Constitutional interpretation, but she also declined to say if the Constitution prevents Congress from telling Americans what to eat. Her evasive non-response to Coburn’s Commerce Clause inquiry shows that she would indeed be a rubber-stamp for almost any part of the Obama agenda that Congress enacts. So if the Obama administration convinced Congress (and this is a total hypothetical) that the survival of a single car company, let’s say Chrysler, was absolutely necessary for the survival of the nation’s economy, and Congress then passed a law forcing all Americans to buy a Chrysler car, Kagan would find such a law, while perhaps “dumb,” perfectly constitutional. Jefferson must be rolling in his grave.
The leftist members of the Senate Judiciary Committee know that the Obamacare individual mandate is extremely vulnerable to being struck down by the Supreme Court. That is why they have spent so much of the hearing trying to redefine what “judicial activism” is. As Heritage Deputy Director of the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies Robert Alt will testify today, the Court is not committing “judicial activism” every time it finds that a law violates the Constitution. Judicial activism is not a function of outcomes, but one of interpretation. Instead, it occurs when a judge applies his or her own policy preferences to uphold, or strike down, a statute or other government action which is clearly forbidden by the Constitution.
Kagan came to the committee with one of the thinnest records of any Supreme Court nominee in recent history. What little has been learned about her views so far has been highly disturbing. Nothing in her testimony has demonstrated she has either the respect for our nation’s founding documents or the independence from this White House to apply the law as it is written, and dispense justice without regard to the parties before her.
Quick Hits:
•Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) used her time questioning Elena Kagan to ask: “I keep wanting to ask you about the famous camp of Edward vs. Jacob or the vampire vs. the werewolf.”
•According to the CBO, the federal debt will represent 62% of the nation’s economy by the end of this year, the highest percentage since World War II.
•House Democrats have attached $10 billion in spending for government union jobs to the Afghanistan war funding bill.
•U.S. private employers added just 13,000 jobs in June, suggesting expectations of a big drop in the government’s upcoming nonfarm payrolls report were on target.
•A former Justice Department attorney who quit his job to protest the Obama administration’s handling of the New Black Panther Party voter intimidation case is accusing Attorney General Eric Holder of dropping the charges for racially motivated reasons.
Reprinted from: http://blog.heritage.org/2010/07/01/morning-bell-the-limitless-power-of-the-obama-kagan-congress/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Morning%2BBell
And Kagan’s disturbing indifference to the existence of natural rights is just one of the many frightening revelations her confirmation hearing has produced. On Tuesday, Sen. Coburn pressed Kagan about the limits the Constitution places on Congress’ power to control what Americans do:
Coburn: If I wanted to sponsor a bill and it said Americans, you have to eat three vegetables and three fruits every day and I got it through Congress and that’s now the law of the land, got to do it, does that violate the Commerce Clause?
Kagan: Sounds like a dumb law
Coburn: Yeah, but I got one that’s real similar to it that I think is equally dumb. I’m not going to mention which it is.
Kagan: But I think that the question of whether it’s a dumb law is different from whether the question of whether it’s constitutional and I think that courts would be wrong to strike down laws that they think are senseless just because they’re senseless.
The law Coburn was referring to, of course, was President Barack Obama’s signature legislative accomplishment: the Obamacare provision that forces all Americans to buy health insurance. But Jefferson and the other Constitution framers designed the document to protect our “unalienable Rights” by limiting the power of Congress. They designed an ingenious system of checks and balances that divides state and federal authority in the hope of preventing any one government from exerting too much control over a free people. Specifically, Article I allocates to Congress “[a]ll legislative powers herein granted,” and section 8 of Article I (referred to by Sen. Coburn above as the Commerce Clause), grants Congress the authority “[t]o regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes.” The Supreme Court has always understood that, taken together, these clauses put some legislative powers beyond Congress’ reach.
But Kagan has now testified that not only does she find the Founders’ concept of “unalienable Rights” irrelevant to Constitutional interpretation, but she also declined to say if the Constitution prevents Congress from telling Americans what to eat. Her evasive non-response to Coburn’s Commerce Clause inquiry shows that she would indeed be a rubber-stamp for almost any part of the Obama agenda that Congress enacts. So if the Obama administration convinced Congress (and this is a total hypothetical) that the survival of a single car company, let’s say Chrysler, was absolutely necessary for the survival of the nation’s economy, and Congress then passed a law forcing all Americans to buy a Chrysler car, Kagan would find such a law, while perhaps “dumb,” perfectly constitutional. Jefferson must be rolling in his grave.
The leftist members of the Senate Judiciary Committee know that the Obamacare individual mandate is extremely vulnerable to being struck down by the Supreme Court. That is why they have spent so much of the hearing trying to redefine what “judicial activism” is. As Heritage Deputy Director of the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies Robert Alt will testify today, the Court is not committing “judicial activism” every time it finds that a law violates the Constitution. Judicial activism is not a function of outcomes, but one of interpretation. Instead, it occurs when a judge applies his or her own policy preferences to uphold, or strike down, a statute or other government action which is clearly forbidden by the Constitution.
Kagan came to the committee with one of the thinnest records of any Supreme Court nominee in recent history. What little has been learned about her views so far has been highly disturbing. Nothing in her testimony has demonstrated she has either the respect for our nation’s founding documents or the independence from this White House to apply the law as it is written, and dispense justice without regard to the parties before her.
Quick Hits:
•Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) used her time questioning Elena Kagan to ask: “I keep wanting to ask you about the famous camp of Edward vs. Jacob or the vampire vs. the werewolf.”
•According to the CBO, the federal debt will represent 62% of the nation’s economy by the end of this year, the highest percentage since World War II.
•House Democrats have attached $10 billion in spending for government union jobs to the Afghanistan war funding bill.
•U.S. private employers added just 13,000 jobs in June, suggesting expectations of a big drop in the government’s upcoming nonfarm payrolls report were on target.
•A former Justice Department attorney who quit his job to protest the Obama administration’s handling of the New Black Panther Party voter intimidation case is accusing Attorney General Eric Holder of dropping the charges for racially motivated reasons.
Reprinted from: http://blog.heritage.org/2010/07/01/morning-bell-the-limitless-power-of-the-obama-kagan-congress/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Morning%2BBell
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