Obamacare – Progressive government at its best: a tax question

Via-BBN

If ever there was a poster child for the corruptible nature of big government as practiced by progressives, it is the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare)

Obamacare signing ceremony|Photo Credit Wikimedia Commons

This is the first of a series on the history of Progressive’s greatest triumph -  Obamacare

Its very name, whichever version you choose, belies the corrupt nature of big government. Its given name is pure propaganda because it is neither affordable nor does it improve care for the majority of Americans. Even if its convoluted unsustainable subsidy system provides more affordable care to a small part of the citizenry, it does so by being unaffordable for the nation as a whole. Ironically, like much of the left’s applied ideology, it actually undermines one of the  tenants of collectivism by hurting the many for the few.

If you choose the more popular “Obamacare” nameplate, that too is a lie. Obama neither drafted the law or for that matter ran for president by endorsing its key components. In fact, during his hope and change campaign he was extremely critical of what became Obamacare’s most contentious component: the mandate.

Obama said, “A mandate means that in some fashion, everybody will be forced to buy health insurance.” Instead of going that route, his plan, he said, “emphasizes lowering costs.”

Obama held that position throughout the campaign. Elect Hillary, he said, and the government will compel you to buy health insurance. Elect me, and I’ll give you lower costs and let you keep your freedom.

One Obama TV ad drove the point home: “Hillary Clinton’s attacking, but what’s she not telling you about her health care plan? It forces everyone to buy insurance, even if you can’t afford it, and you pay a penalty if you don’t.”

How could Obama so forcefully take one position on an issue to be elected; then as president, use all of his political power to advocate for that position which just months before he had so adamantly opposed? For this president, as an arch-progressive politician, that is just how you play the game.  A lie to “progress” your agenda is all that matters; as that is what progressivism is, progressing the agenda regardless of the methods used.

Every step of the way, Obamacare was and remains a textbook example of progressivism’s lies and manipulation.  It is both fitting and ironic that Obamacare is officially entitled an “Act” and not a law. Just as King George and his parliament passed acts which imposed duties upon the reviled colonists, Obama and his congress passed an “Act” upon the American people despite persistent and continued opposition.  As opposition to Obamacare continues, it might be beneficial to recall  how progressives imposed this “Act” on Americans and how their strategies corrupted – and continues to corrupt – our constitutional form of government.

The tax that is not, then is

In 2009 the House of Representatives unanimously passed the “Service Members Home Ownership Tax Act of 2009” and sent it over to the Senate. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid  (D-NV) used this uncontroversial and totally unrelated House Bill as a vehicle  for the Senate Healthcare Bill by attaching the Finance committee’s bill to it as a 3,000 page amendment.

The ramification of this parliamentary shenanigans is still being played out in the courts. Chief Justice Roberts in his infamous ruling declared Obamacare constitutional as tax legislation rather than the regulatory legislation it was sold and passed as being under the Commerce Clause. Due to this particular deception it is still being contested in courts as a violation of the Origination Clause of the U.S. Constitution.

All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives.

Anyone who followed the debate at the time is fully aware that what we know as Obamacare came directly out of the Senate first and then went to the House. The famous “Cornhusker Kickback” the “Louisiana Purchase” and a host of other deals which Reid used to get sixty votes all occurred before Nancy Pelosi got her hands on the bill – so obviously the bill “originated” in the Senate.

In what is one of the greatest examples of public deception and parliamentary terrorism, the Democrats and Obama vehemently denied that Obamacare was a tax, both to keep Obama’s campaign promise not to raise taxes on the middle class and to keep up the charade of adhering to constitutional constraints. ....

Read entire article at BBN

The "glitch" Tax looms (Corrected)

The idea that Obama and his acolytes in the media would ask Americans to be patient while they work out the "glitches" in the "obamacare" exchange web sites overlooks one very important point. The people who are going to these exchanges to find health insurance are under penalty of law, enforced by the IRS , required to have health insurance by April 1, 2014.

So in effect people are being told that they "must" have insurance in 180, now 172 days, or they will be subject to a penalty which John Roberts calls a tax, while simultaneously not being able to purchase said insurance through the source provided to do so. Worse still  these "glitches" are stacking up the process by which people can obtain insurance creating an even larger bottle neck as we get closer to the "mandatory" deadline. Remember this by the way when they tout the number of people going to the web site, they have to.

It is possible indeed likely that come the deadline many people will have applied for or in other ways be in the "system" but not yet have insurance and thus subject to the penalty/tax.

 The last compromise offer by the GOP controlled House in the shut down battle was to delay just the individual mandate portion of Obamacare as Obama unlawfully did for the business mandate. He did this because businesses complained that they could not possibly comply to the law by the laws compliance date.  if Obama and the Democrats do not delay the individual mandate it is very likely that ,who knows how many Americans, will be in violation of the law simply because the Administration did not have its act together in order for people to comply due to "glitches" in exchange web sites.

President Obama recently  said “In the first week, first month, first three months, I would suspect that there will be glitches,”  how nice of him to say so. But these glitches are not just an indication of the Administration's incompetence, they are in effect creating an ever growing number of unintended law breakers. Lawbreakers who will be subject to pay a penalty/tax simply because the president and the Democrats have crafted an unworkable law and refuse to compromise on delaying its implementation.

But of course this is the Republicans fault.

Ignorance is bliss

(Correction) I mistakenly put mandate date of Jan 1, 2014, actual date is April 1, 2014. Ihave corrected in this post

Hannity and the Congressman

The ObamaCare fight is just beginning

Via-New York Post

By Rich Lowry

Democrats are affronted that Republicans have made ObamaCare a focus of this fall’s fiscal fights. They should get used to it.
Even if Democrats deflect efforts to defund or delay the law in coming weeks, the fight will go on. Republican opposition is for the long haul, and it should be.

Even as the exchanges for individuals to purchase insurance get up and running, Oba­ma­Care is still in play. It has a legitimacy problem. It had one before it passed, when it was kept afloat through gross special deals, and it has one still, when it is manifestly failing to live up to the president’s salesmanship on its behalf. There’s a reason that usually we don’t pass major social changes lacking popular support on party-line votes — it is a formula for conflict rather than consensus.

Having done the deed, Democrats now expect Republicans to salute smartly, accept “the law of the land” and suggest minor improvements that Democrats will, in their wisdom, decide whether or not to adopt. In other words, they recommend the acquiescence of surrender.

If this were a consistent principle rather than opportunistic advice, Democrats would have been content to leave “don’t ask, don’t tell” in place and never would have agitated to repeal the Bush tax cuts, out of deference to duly constituted policy and law.

Nearly four years after ObamaCare passed, the coalition against it has expanded, not shrunk. The unions are now excoriating the law in terms that once would have been reserved for Republican floor speeches. In his filibuster, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz repeatedly quoted a letter from Teamsters leader Jim Hoffa attacking ObamaCare as a clear and present threat to the middle class. When House Republicans voted to delay the individual mandate a few weeks ago, 35 Democrats joined them; Joe Manchin, the Democratic senator from West Virginia, announced his support for a delay just last week.

Pew Research has found disapproval of the health-care law at an all-time high in its polling. CNN’s latest survey has disapproval at 57 percent and approval at 38. Health care, a core Democratic strength for decades, is becoming a liability. A New York Times poll found that more people disapprove of President Barack Obama on health care than approve by a 54-to-40 margin. Trust for Republicans and Democrats on health care is about even, according to the Pew poll.

The problems with the health law are invariably described by the president and his allies as “glitches,” or harmless technical snafus that no one should worry about. But the law suffers from basic design flaws beyond the question of whether the Obama administration can get its software to work. It depends on young, healthy people buying insurance even as it reduces their incentive to do so; it encourages employers to dump workers off their current insurance; it suppresses full-time work, through the employer mandate; in 10 years, the law still leaves 30 million people uninsured.

None of this makes for a stable, widely accepted new dispensation in American health care. On the right, ironically enough, it is Cruz and his band of fellow defunders who are the defeatists on the law’s medium-term prospects. They argue that unless it is stopped before Jan. 1, when subsidies begin to flow through the exchanges, it will be an unalterable part of the American landscape.

But at first only about 2 percent of people will receive subsidies, which are funneled through insurers rather than given to individuals directly. The subsidies themselves shouldn’t be enough to save ObamaCare if it is failing.
The law’s fate over the longer term matters because it is almost certain to survive the immediate confrontations over the so-called continued resolution and the debt ceiling. It will be determined over the course of the next two elections, when Republicans will continue to pound away — rightly — over the sighs of annoyed impatience of the left and the media. Resistance is not futile.

Senate GOP Gamesmanship On Obamacare Defunding Is Not Honorable

By Andrew C. McCarthy

On Sunday evening, we discussed the debate on defunding Obamacare – specifically, whether Senate Republicans were being disingenuous in their claim to support defunding. While arguing that Republicans were engaged in sleight-of-hand, I conceded that the GOP’s calculation that avoiding a government shutdown outweighs defunding Obamacare is not “frivolous.” Ramesh proceeded to inflate this concession, paraphrasing me as having described this calculation as “perfectly honorable.”

That is not what I said. Non-frivolous and honorable are not synonyms, and there is nothing honorable about the ongoing political game of posing as an ardent defunding supporter while voting in a manner that guarantees Obamacare will get funded.

A quick perusal of my “non-frivolous” acknowledgment shows that Ramesh’s “perfectly honorable” interpretation is a contortion. Here’s what I said (italics added):

While I disagree with Republicans who oppose the defunding strategy, I don’t think the calculation that there may be more to lose than to gain is frivolous. I just think the people who’ve made that calculation should have been honest about it from the start. Instead, they voted to defund Obamacare until . . . it mattered.

So, acknowledging that a political calculation shrouded in dishonest posturing is non-frivolous somehow makes it “perfectly honorable”? That does not make sense to me, but it does reflect how Republican leaders rationalize their dizzying approach to Obamacare.

There is nothing honorable in the legerdemain we discussed on Sunday: The GOP’s unanimous and ostentatious support only six months ago for a defunding amendment when the vote was just a pose, followed today by the belittling of defunding legislation as “the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard” – to borrow the words of Sen. Burr, who co-sponsored the March defunding amendment – because this time the legislation is accompanied a plan to achieve the stated objective.

On that score, GOP establishment sympathizers contend that there is nothing inconsistent in supporting defunding as a goal but disfavoring the tactics by which the goal is sought. That is conveniently Solomonic. I’ll put aside some constitutional problems with the ongoing drama (to be addressed in a separate post). To get defunding enacted into law necessarily requires orchestrating a situation in which intense political pressure can be brought to bear that induces some Democrats to vote for it and President Obama to perceive it as in his interests to sign it. This is far from impossible; indeed, it’s been done before (see, e.g., extension of the Bush tax cuts). But short of the specter of a government shutdown, where was that kind of pressure possibly going to come from? If you are against the only conceivable means of achieving a goal, your vote for the goal is a pose; it is not real support.

If the GOP establishment’s position is that government shutdowns damage the potential for Republican success in the next few election cycles, and that electoral success is the only way to stop Obamacare, then the honorable move would be to vote in favor of funding Obamacare so voters know where Republicans really stand.

In light of the GOP establishment position that the defunding strategy is implausible, though, a question arises. House conservatives and the Cruz-Lee Senate contingent are pushing the “defund now” strategy because, they very convincingly argue, once Obamacare subsidies start to kick a week from now, there will be no realistic possibility of repealing Obamacare – it will be, like Medicare, permanent. The Republican establishment may not like the “defund now” strategy, but are they seriously telling us that Republicans will be in a position to repeal Obamacare four or six years from now? Really? Ted Cruz’s strategy is no sure thing, but it sounds a lot more plausible to me than the notion that Republicans, the guys who ran in 2012 as saviors of Medicare, are going to have the nerve to scrap Obamacare subsidies that are, by then, years old. I’d sooner believe they’d want credit for preserving Obamacare goodies.

Finally, there is nothing honorable about Senate GOP leaders’ current pose of vigorous support for defunding Obamacare while simultaneously announcing their intention to vote in favor of a procedural rule – “cloture,” the ending of debate – that Republicans well know will guarantee that Obamacare is fully funded.

Republican leaders are banking on the public’s understandable disinterest in the Senate’s abstruse procedural rules in order to pull off this fraud. Cloture requires 60 votes – meaning the senate’s 46 Republicans can deny Democrats the margin necessary to end debate. But Republicans say they will vote with the Democrats on this “merely procedural” step. Here’s the key: Under Senate rules, (a) the end of debate does not mean the end of amendments, and (b) those amendments only require a simple majority to pass. Thus, once debate has ended, as Republicans well know, Majority Leader Harry Reid will propose an amendment to restore the Obamacare funding that the House has stripped. Democrats will then pass that amendment.

A vote for cloture is not a merely procedural formality. In essence, a vote for cloture is a vote to fund Obamacare.

And here’s the kicker: Republicans who vote for cloture get a double dip. First, they will say (as Senator McConnell did today) that they are voting to end debate because they are anxious to vote in support of the House measure that defunded Obamacare – even though they well know their cloture vote will inexorably lead to Reid’s amendment to undo the House defunding measure. Second, when Reid proposes his certain-to-pass amendment to restore Obamacare funding, they will vote against it, a nay vote they will wear on their sleeves to show the folks back home that they opposed defunding – even though they well know their collusion with Democrats on cloture is what allowed Reid to restore Obamacare funding.

That may be someone’s idea of honorable. It is not mine.

The Path to Victory

Via-RCP

By Sen. Ted Cruz


Just a few weeks ago the Washington establishment said the Republican-led House of Representatives could never pass a funding bill that would keep the government open while defunding Obamacare. They were wrong.

All across the country Americans spoke up, asking Congress to stop this terrible law. Over 1.5 million signed the dontfundit.com petition, and thousands more sign every day. Tens of thousands of calls poured into the offices of senators and congressmen. They changed the dynamic.

As a result, on Friday, House Republicans passed a bill that fully funds government without funding Obamacare, even picking up a couple of Democrat votes.

Now, it’s the Senate’s turn.

If Senate Republicans stay strong and hold true to their previous commitments to defund Obamacare, we will force Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to make a choice: keep the government open, or shut it down in the name of funding a glitch-riddled health care takeover that is killing jobs, wages, and health care benefits all across the nation.

The next step is critical. Senate Republicans should demand a 60-vote threshold for any effort that would add Obamacare funding back into the House bill. This is the battle line: Senate Republicans must stop Reid from rejecting the House bill and adding Obamacare funding with merely 51 votes.

The House bill must be protected.

If implemented, Obamacare will change our entire health care system, impacting the lives of every single American. Securing 60 votes is not too much to ask. Our nation is bitterly divided because there is far too little consensus on major political matters. We need more unity to help heal our country. Sixty votes would help move toward that.

The Democrats may have jammed Obamacare through Congress on a strict, bare-knuckled party-line vote, but it shouldn’t be funded that way.

We know the Democratic leadership wants to fund Obamacare, and it’s certain Leader Reid will use every gimmick, obscure parliamentary trick, and sweetheart deal to do it. After all, that’s how he passed Obamacare in the first place.

Until Reid guarantees a 60-vote threshold on all amendments, a vote for cloture is a vote for Obamacare. It would amount to giving the Democrats a green light to fund Obamacare with 51 votes.

We owe it to our constituents to keep our promise to stop Obamacare. Many in Washington like to talk about “elections having consequences” but seem more intent on focusing on who has power.

It’s time to quit worrying about power and blame and simply do what’s right.

The evidence is pouring in that Obamacare isn’t working. Obamacare is hurting almost every sector of the economy. Universities, restaurants, retailers, museums, and more are all being forced to make brutal adjustments to comply with it.

Even labor unions that once championed this law are decrying how it could destroy the 40-hour workweek for millions of middle-class Americans.

More Americans are losing their insurance each day -- despite the president’s promise that if we liked it, we could keep it. Last month, UPS and the University of Virginia said they would drop health insurance for many spouses of their employees because of Obamacare, leaving thousands of husbands and wives scrambling.

Just last week the Cleveland Clinic announced massive layoffs and a $330 million budget cut because of Obamacare. Sea World is slashing hours for part-time workers. Investor’s Business Daily has tallied more than 300 companies that are cutting jobs and benefits because of the law.

Not one more American should lose their job, wages, or health care plans because of this disastrous, train wreck of a law.

If President Obama, his big corporate friends, and members of Congress and their staffs don’t have to live under Obamacare, then no other Americans should, either.

Some argue the law should be delayed. Defunding delays it for everyone, not just the ruling class in DC. In essence, defund exempts everyone from the law. Defund gives a waiver to everyone.

Whether or not Senate Republicans defeat cloture, the question will be whether Harry Reid will demand a government shutdown to force Obamacare on every American. We should not shut down the government, and I hope Reid and President Obama do not do so.

Regardless, the House should stand its ground, and if Reid kills this Continuing Resolution then the House should pass smaller CRs one at a time, starting with the military. Dare Reid to keep voting to shut down the government.

Once Senate Republicans unite, red-state Senate Democrats will be next. And that is how we win -- by continuing to mobilize the American people to hold every elected official accountable.

Americans are speaking loud and clear. They don’t want to lose their health plans and be forced into Obamacare exchanges, keep their businesses small to avoid the law’s penalties, and let bureaucrats and politicians in Washington make their health care decisions. Let’s listen.

They deserve a win. I intend to use every tool available to me to defund Obamacare, and am encouraged by the thousands of phone calls, tweets, and emails that come to my office each day.

Republicans have the momentum. Conservatives defeated the president’s gun control measures to deprive Second Amendment rights from law-abiding Americans. We pushed back on his reckless drone policy. We convinced him to seek congressional approval on military action in Syria.

Now, we’re poised to win our biggest victory for the American people yet: defunding Obamacare. All we have to do is have the will to fight.

Boehner’s Next Retreat

Via-American Spectator

By JED BABBIN

A way of political life that’s killing Republicans.

The headline writers were beset by hysteria last week at the prospect of another showdown between Congress and the White House on Obamacare, the budget ceiling, and a possible shutdown of the federal government.

The Hill published the headline, “Government shutdown looms over Obamacare.” Not to be out done, Politico proclaimed, “Fiscal Armageddon could remake Hill in 2014 elections.”

A shutdown is not out of the question. Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) is leading an effort to block any spending measure that funds Obamacare, regardless of the danger of Republicans being blamed for shutting down the government. Some 64 Republicans have signed a letter to House Speaker John Boehner asking him not to bring any funding bill to the floor that includes Obamacare.

That letter, circulated by Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC), doesn’t include a promise of the signers to vote against any such bill. Which deprives the letter of any significance. Mike Lee’s effort was praised by “moderates” such as Illinois’ Mark Kirk, who later withdrew his support. (John McCain is, of course, opposed to Lee’s move.)

That’s only one of the reasons it was really hard not to be cynical last Tuesday when Speaker Boehner said, “We’re not going to raise the debt ceiling without real cuts in spending. It’s as simple as that.” He also said that the right path for the House to follow was the so-called “Boehner rule,” which requires any debt limit hike to be offset by spending cuts in an equal amount. The problem with the “Boehner rule” is that it’s never been followed.

Incompetence or ingenious ?

Without specifically announcing it, or more importantly legislating it through congress, the Obama Administration is speeding up the nationalization of the health care system of the United States.

Oh I know that we opposed to Obamacare have said that Obamacare is the nationalization of health care, but in reality, the way it was written was a quasi take over of American health care by the federal government. With all the resistance to Obamacare during the legislative process, total control of the system was watered down mish mash of public/private health care which as is becoming ever more apparent is unworkable.

Now as the deadlines approaches for implementation of the law under the guise or reality, it does not really matter, of not being ready to implement certain key aspects of the law, the Obama Administration is delaying key aspect of the law. While everyone is focusing in on either the idea that it proves the law is unworkable or the incompetence of the administration to enact its own law, they have not yet totally grasped the net result of the two delays to two key components of the laws implementation announced last week

Putting aside for the moment that Obama probably does not have the legal authority (when has that ever stopped him) to delay implementation of the law, let's look at what these two delays will cause.

The first delay announced was to the Employer mandate.

The Obama administration will not penalize businesses that do not provide health insurance in 2014, the Treasury Department announced Tuesday. 

Instead, it will delay enforcement of a major Affordable Care Act requirement that all employers with more than 50 employees provide coverage to their workers until 2015.

This announcement came on Monday prior to the the Fourth of July while most people were not paying attention and congress is in recess. The effect of this delay can not be viewed by itself. The affects must be viewed with the understanding that the rest of the law is still in place and must be followed.

So for a year while American citizens are required by law to be insured, large employers (50 or more employees) are no longer required by law to insure them or pay a fine. For a year not only can these employers dump employees health insurance plans, they can do so without paying a fine.

People are assuming that in 2015 the companies will be subject to the delayed fines for not insuring their employees. But what if the Obama Administration under the guise of it being a burden on business and thus the economy proposes that the fines be steeply reduced or even eliminated?

Would a congress, especially a Republican controlled one vote against reducing fines or as Chief Justice Roberts has now redefined it as a tax, would they vote against reducing a tax on businesses?

 For years the critic's argument has been that this employer mandate is a terrible burden on the economy, if Obama proposes to reduce or even eliminate it what could the critics say? How could they possibly oppose it? They could not without looking like insincere hypocrites and the lobbying by the business community would insure that they would pass such a reduction.

In delaying the employer mandate Obama has given large businesses a year to "unburden" themselves from providing health insurance to their employees while those employees are reacquired by law to have health insurance. Where will large segments of the population go for insurance?

Now comes ACT 2 of the play.

Five days after the above announcement, on the Friday after the Fourth of July, while everyone is still distracted and congress is still on recess, the Obama Administration delays another key aspect of Obamacare.

The Obama administration announced Friday that it would significantly scale back the health law’s requirements that new insurance marketplaces verify consumers’ income and health insurance status.

Instead, the federal government will rely more heavily on consumers’ self-reported information until 2015, when it plans to have stronger verification systems in place.

So not only do employers get a one year "pass" on insuring their employees, Americans get a one year pass on obtaining it through the "new insurance marketplace" IE exchanges. Exchanges which most states have refused to set up and are now being set up by the Federal Government.

Not only is this new "ruling" an invitation for fraud

In fact, the exchanges are not only released from the obligation to verify whether applicants are eligible for employer coverage, they are also released from the obligation to confirm applicants’ statements regarding their household incomes before providing them with what is supposed to be an income-based benefit.

It is an invitation for Americans to jump from  their current employee based insurance into the exchanges. If people are being dropped by their employers, or see that they soon may be, and the exchanges are not requiring investigations into their status in order to get subsidies to help pay for the insurance, I suspect many Americans will jump on the chance to be covered at a discount. Many more will have no choice at all.

What the administration has done in two unlegislated : IE unlawful acts, over the Fourth of July holiday week, has both made it painless for the business community to dump their employer based insurance programs while simultaneously making it easy and painless for Americans to join the predominately Federal run "new insurance marketplace."

Even prior to this weeks announcement they had "delayed" the implementation of a required component of the law which would have helped businesses providing insurance to their employees.

Small businesses hoping to comparison shop for budget-friendly health-insurance policies will have to wait until 2015.

The Obama administration intends to push back a part of the Affordable Care Act – the Small Business Health Options Program, or SHOP – that would provide small businesses with an insurance marketplace offering numerous plan options.

Most commentators are looking at all these delays as both the incompetence of the Obama Administration to enact the law and the unworkable nature of the law itself, both of which are true. But the net affect of these unlawful delays is that it is setting up 2014 as the year that employer based insurance is destroyed and vast segments of the American population are enticed or have no other choice but to join Federally run insurance exchanges.

Most critics of Obamacare are very much in favor of health care reform. Indeed most critics of Obamacare are very much for moving away from employer provided insurance. So in a way anything that works to move our health care system away from an employer provided  insurance system is in theory acceptable to heath care reformers on both sides of the argument. In a jujitsu move Obama has somewhat neutralized critics by both benefiting businesses with the delay of the mandate and undermining employer provided insurance.

Given the progressives desire to create nationalized heath care system, these delays are turning into a perfect opportunity for them to achieve their goal. They are making the proverbial lemonaide out of the lemon that is Obamacare.

Yes we can talk obout how unworkable the law as written is but by delaying the law as written and under the guise of not burdening buisnesses and Americans with the onerous provisions of their own law,what the progressives are doing is speeding up the process to achieve their goals. And they are doing it without even having to win elections.

“I happen to be a proponent of a single payer universal health care program.” (applause) “I see no reason why the United States of America, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, spending 14 percent of its Gross National Product on health care cannot provide basic health insurance to everybody. And that’s what Jim is talking about when he says everybody in, nobody out. A single payer health care plan, a universal health care plan. And that’s what I’d like to see. But as all of you know, we may not get there immediately. Because first we have to take back the White House, we have to take back the Senate, and we have to take back the House.”

Obama speaking to the Illinois AFL-CIO, June 30, 2003.

Incompetence or ingenious ? Time will tell.

Max Baucus, Obamacare's Lead Author, Sees "Huge Train Wreck Coming"

TOON

We're All CVS Employees Now

Via-American Thinker

By Tara Servatius

CVS employees, and the rest of America, had better get used to turning over personal health information like their glucose levels and body mass index to their insurers - and to the federal government.


Starting in 2014, per the dictates of the federal government, your doctor must record your body mass index (BMI), which measures whether you are overweight, each time he or she treats you and turn it over to the government via your electronic health record, which every patient is required to have. Your BMI will then be tracked by the Health and Human Services Department, the agency rolling out ObamaCare, and a bevy of other state and federal agencies.


Shock and anger ensued this week as CVS employees learned that if they didn't turn over that information to their insurers, they'd be fined. But CVS is merely rolling out what may become one of the most controversial aspects of ObamaCare a little ahead of schedule.

The Unions vs. Obamacare

Via-The Weekly Standard

Disenchantment sets in.

Mark Hemingway


"I heard [Obama] say, ‘If you like your health plan, you can keep it,’ ” John Wilhelm, chairman of Unite Here Health, representing 260,000 union workers, recently told the Wall Street Journal. “If I’m wrong, and the president does not intend to keep his word, I would have severe second thoughts about the law.” Besides Wilhelm, some of the nation’s largest union bosses have taken to publicly criticizing the Affordable Care Act.

Of course, keeping your health care plan, like many Obama-care promises, has turned out to be demonstrably untrue. According to the Congressional Budget Office, about 7 million Americans stand to lose insurance coverage through the law by 2022. But unlike most private-sector workers expected to lose their current health coverage, union workers were a powerful Democratic constituency granted specific exemptions from Obama-care. Labor leaders are just now realizing that those protections are fleeting, and Obama-care regulations and cost increases will fall on the politically connected and unconnected alike.

The Obama administration has thus far issued waivers from Obama-care’s onerous requirements to unions representing 543,812 workers. By contrast, the administration has issued waivers for only 69,813 nonunion workers. While these waivers are a significant benefit, they accrue to a small fraction of the nation’s 14 million union workers. Further, many of the waivers have been granted on an annual basis, and no waiver has been granted for longer than two-and-a-half years. Eventually even union health plans are going to have to comply with Obama-care regulations.

Florida Gov. Rick Scott's craven retreat on Obamacare

Via-Washington Examiner

When the history of President Obama's drive for national health care is written, there will be four moments that will be seen as having cemented the law in place.

First, "conservative" Democrats Ben Nelson and Bart Stupak dropped their objections to Obamacare to get the legislation passed. Next, Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the Supreme Court's liberals in upholding its constitutionality. Then, President Obama won re-election, crushing any feasible path to full repeal.

And Thursday, Florida Gov. Rick Scott endorsed the law's expansion of Medicaid in his state.

Scott's decision is highly symbolic -- and not just because Florida is one of the largest states. A former hospital executive, Scott made a national name for himself during the health care debate by spending as much as $20 million on ads opposing Obamacare through his group, Conservatives for Patients' Rights.

Florida led the 26-state suit challenging not only the constitutionality of the law's requirement that all Americans purchase insurance, but also its provision that coerced states into expanding Medicaid eligibility. For opponents of the law, one of the few silver linings in the June 2012 Supreme Court decision was that it gave states the choice of rejecting the expansion.

Following the decision, Scott warned the law would be "devastating for patients" and "the biggest job-killer ever." He declared: "We're not going to implement Obamacare in Florida."

That was eight months ago. Now Scott says the Sunshine State will accept the federal government's deal to pay 100 percent of the expansion's cost over the next two years after all. He joins such GOP gubernatorial converts as Michigan's Rick Snyder, Ohio's John Kaisch and Arizona's Jan Brewer.

Scott, who is up for re-election in 2014, further cemented this by indicating he would not move to scale back the expansion after the two years are up: "I want to be clear that we will not simply deny new Medicaid recipients health insurance three years from now."

It is not quite a done deal yet. Florida House Speaker Will Weatherford and Attorney General Pam Bondi both announced serious reservations to Scott's decision. But even if the expansion still somehow stalls, Scott's retreat is already resonating in the national debate.

Like other governors who have also accepted this deal, Scott acts as if this is newly found money. But it isn't. It is taxpayer money, much of it from his own state's citizens. Florida would be adding about 1 million beneficiaries to one of the costliest government programs. According to Congressional Budget Office data, that could cost federal taxpayers about $58 billion over the next decade.

Ultimately, Floridians will face a higher burden, too, as the federal government draws down the subsidies. By that time, though, Scott will most likely be retired himself. Paying for this mess will be somebody else's problem

Good News: Delay Of ObamaCare's Launch More Likely

Via-IBD



Health Care: Now that ObamaCare appears unstoppable, the question is can it be delayed? Thanks to bureaucratic bumbling combined with the law's massive complexity, delay appears to be increasingly inevitable.

On Thursday, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus told HHS to cough up details on how it plans to get ObamaCare "exchanges" ready in time in dozens of states.

Baucus' demand came after the Health and Human Services official in charge of implementing the law, Gary Cohen, issued the same bland assurances he has been for months that everything is on track for Oct. 1, when the exchanges are supposed to open for business.

But no one is buying it, especially since HHS has been late with everything else and has been secretive about progress on building the massively complex exchanges with just over seven months to go.

Sen. Orrin Hatch, ranking Republican on the committee, said, "I have a hard time understanding how the administration expects to have exchanges up and running by Oct. 1, especially when we have no details on how the exchanges will work in more than half the states."

In its latest budget report, the Congressional Budget Office also expressed thinly veiled skepticism that the exchanges would be ready on time. Even Baucus is worried, telling Cohen, "It's deeds, not words."

The situation in states trying to set up exchanges on their own isn't much better. So far, HHS has approved only a handful, and Politico reported a few months ago that states have been struggling with ObamaCare's massive IT requirements. Earlier this month, the Washington Post noted they also confront the "Herculean" task of hiring "an enormous new workforce" needed to help the millions expected to use the exchanges.

Even if these exchanges were up and running perfectly, it's a virtual certainty that ObamaCare will turn out to be a nightmare of central planning, massive market distortions and huge cost overruns.

Which is why ObamaCare must be entirely scrapped.

But the result will be utter chaos if the administration tries to get it started with a bunch of half-baked exchanges run by incompetent bureaucrats.

No wonder Democrats — who stand to lose the most if this thing blows up — are growing increasingly agitated as the ObamaCare clock rapidly ticks down.

Republicans need to seize on this and start pushing to scrub the launch. ObamaCare is unworkable.

Toon

Wheels coming off

Via-NY POST

ObamaCare policies will cost more, cover far fewer than promised

By BETSY MCCAUGHEY

The central parts of ObamaCare don’t roll out until 2014, but the wheels are already falling off this clunker. The latest news from four federal agencies is that 1) insurance will be a lot less affordable than Americans were led to expect, 2) fewer people than promised will get insurance and 3) millions of people who have coverage through a job now will lose it, thanks to the president’s “reforms.” Oh, and children are the biggest victims.

The Affordable Care Act is looking less and less affordable.

Start with the IRS’s new estimate for what the cheapest family plan will cost by 2016: $20,000 a year to cover two adults and three kids. And that will only cover 60 percent of medical bills, so add hefty out-of-pocket costs, too.

The next surprise is for parents who thought their kids would be covered by an employer. Sloppy wording in the law left that unclear until last week, when the IRS ruled that kids won’t be covered.

Starting in 2014, the law will require employers with 50 or more full-time employees to offer coverage or pay a penalty. “Affordable” coverage, that is — meaning the employee can’t be told to contribute more than 9.5 percent of his salary. For example, a worker earning $40,000 a year cannot be required to pay more than $3.800.

But the law doesn’t specifically mandate family coverage — and now the administration says that won’t be required.

You can see why: If the lowest-cost family plan (again, two adults and three kids) is to run a whopping $20,000, and if the employee’s contribution is limited to $3,800, the employer’s tab would be $16,200 — adding about $7.40 an hour to the cost of that employee. Wisely, the IRS announced on Jan. 30 that employers won’t have to pay for dependents.

But the Congressional Budget Office’s much-cited prediction that ObamaCare would leave only 30 million people uninsured by 2016 was based on the assumption that kids would be covered by employers. At the very least, employers insuring their workers for the first time to avoid the penalty are unlikely to do that.

So how will the kids be covered? They won’t. The IRS shocked the law’s advocates by announcing that the insurance exchanges won’t provide subsidies for a child whose parent is covered at work.

Nor will these parents be penalized for not insuring their children — the IRS will kindly consider the kids exempt from the mandate.

Also exempt are millions of people who’ll stay uninsured because their state is wisely choosing not to loosen Medicaid eligibility.

Some background: Despite President Obama’s promises to help solve the problem of the uninsured by making private health plans more affordable, the law expands coverage mainly by forcing states to loosen their Medicaid eligibility rules. But the Supreme Court ruled that the feds can’t command states in this way.

At first, the CBO said that ruling would only prevent 4 million people from gaining coverage — but more states than it expected are refusing to go along; it could well be 8 million more without coverage.

Oh, and the CBO last week also doubled its previous estimate on how many people will lose the health coverage they now get through work, upping the figure to 8 million by 2016 and 12 million by 2019. Several top consulting firms put the figures even higher.

Yet the biggest setback is that most states are refusing to set up insurance exchanges. The exchanges are supposed to sell the government-mandated plans and hand out taxpayer-funded subsidies to most enrollees.

Here’s the glitch. The law says that in states that refuse, the federal government can set up an exchange. But the law empowers only state exchanges, not federal ones, to hand out subsidies. The Obama administration says it will disregard the law and offer subsidies in all 50 states anyway, but the case will likely go to the Supreme Court.

If the courts uphold the clear language of the law, then some 8 million people in the affected states won’t be eligible for subsidies to cover that $20,000 (or more) insurance bill. That’s another 8 million without coverage.

All in all, at least 40 million people could be uninsured in 2016, only 9 million fewer than before the law was passed.

Expect the momentum for repealing this law to grow as its flaws, perverse incentives and faulty predictions come to light.

ObamaCare ‘benefits’: The lie is exposed

Via-Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

Editorial

ObamaCare’s negative consequences — sharply higher premiums, lower payments to treatment providers, reduced access — are looming so predictably that they can’t be called “unintended.”

Physician Scott Gottlieb, an American Enterprise Institute resident fellow, writes for Forbes about a California insurance broker who sells health plans to individuals and small businesses. She’s “prepping her clients for a sticker shock” this fall when insurers will unveil how they’ll cope with ObamaCare’s full brunt.

He says they’re “hinting to her that premiums may triple” — and that double-digit hikes are likely nationwide.

Dr. Gottlieb notes that ObamaCare empowers state regulators to block such premium increases and created a federal agency to oversee rates. But the regulators are mum on what’s looming. He says that’s because it’s all part of ObamaCare’s design, which doesn’t increase efficiency or competition.

If regulators force insurers to price coverage below what it costs under ObamaCare, insurers will lose money and leave markets — hence the coming hikes. Washington’s notion of controlling costs will be cutting payments to providers until they “fall below the rates where things will be readily supplied,” he says.

That’s similar to what happened under Massachusetts’ health care “reform,” the model for ObamaCare’s architects. They’ve known of its inevitable, anything-but-unintended consequences all along. And, soon, we’ll all pay a stiff price indeed for the latest government overreach, courtesy of the Nanny State.

The time bomb in Obamacare?

Via-WAPO

By George F. Will,

A willow, not an oak. So said conservatives of Chief Justice John Roberts when he rescued the Affordable Care Act (ACA) — a.k.a. Obamacare — from being found unconstitutional.

But the manner in which he did this may have made the ACA unworkable, thereby putting it on a path to ultimate extinction.

This plausible judgment comes from professor Thomas A. Lambert of the University of Missouri Law School, writing in Regulation, a quarterly publication of the libertarian Cato Institute.

The crucial decision, he says, was four liberal justices joining Roberts’s opinion declaring that the ACA’s penalty for not complying with the mandate to purchase health insurance is actually a tax on not purchasing it. With this reasoning, the court severely limited the ability of the new health-care regime to cope with its own predictable consequences.

What was supposed to be, constitutionally, the dispositive question turned out not to be. Conservatives said that the mandate — the requirement that people engage in commerce by purchasing health insurance — exceeded Congress’s enumerated power to regulate interstate commerce. Liberals ridiculed this argument, noting that since the judicial revolution wrought during the New Deal, courts have given vast deference to Congress regarding that power. The ridicule stopped when five justices, including Roberts, agreed with the conservative argument.

This did not, however, doom the ACA because Roberts invoked what Lambert calls “a longstanding interpretive canon that calls for the court, if possible, to interpret statutes in a way that preserves their constitutionality.” Roberts did this by ruling that what Congress called a “penalty” for not obeying the mandate was really a tax on noncompliance.

This must, Lambert thinks, have momentous — and deleterious — implications for the functioning of the ACA. The problems arise from the interplay of two ACA provisions — “guaranteed issue” and “community rating.”

The former forbids insurance companies from denying coverage because of a person’s preexisting health condition. The latter, says Lambert, requires insurers to price premiums “solely on the basis of age, smoker status, and geographic area, without charging higher premiums to sick people or those susceptible to sickness.”

The point of the penalty to enforce the mandate was to prevent healthy people — particularly healthy young people — from declining to purchase insurance, or dropping their insurance, which would leave an insured pool of mostly old and infirm people. This would cause the cost of insurance premiums to soar, making it more and more sensible for the healthy to pay the ACA tax, which is much less than the price of insurance.

Roberts noted that a person earning $35,000 a year would pay a $60 monthly tax and someone earning $100,000 would pay $200. But the cost of a qualifying insurance policy is projected to be $400 a month. Clearly, it would be sensible to pay $60 or $200 rather than $400, because if one becomes ill, “guaranteed issue” assures coverage and “community rating” means that one’s illness will not result in higher insurance rates.

So, Lambert says, the ACA’s penalties are too low to prod the healthy to purchase insurance, even given ACA’s subsidies for purchasers. The ACA’s authors probably understood this perverse incentive and assumed that once Congress passed the ACA with penalties low enough to be politically palatable, Congress could increase them.

But Roberts’s decision limits Congress’s latitude by holding that the small size of the penalty is part of the reason it is, for constitutional purposes, a tax. It is not a “financial punishment” because it is not so steep that it effectively prohibits the choice of paying it. And, Roberts noted, “by statute, it can never be more.”As Lambert says, the penalty for refusing to purchase insurance counts as a tax only if it remains so small as to be largely ineffective.

Unable to increase penalties substantially, Congress, in the context of “guaranteed issue” and “community rating,” has only one way to induce healthy people to purchase insurance. This is by the hugely expensive process of increasing premium subsidies enough to make negligible the difference between the cost of insurance to purchasers and the penalty for not purchasing. Republicans will ferociously resist exacerbating the nation’s financial crisis in order to rescue the ACA.

Because the penalties are constitutionally limited by the reasoning whereby Roberts declared them taxes, he may have saved the ACA’s constitutionality by sacrificing its feasibility. So as the president begins his second term, the signature achievement of his first term looks remarkably rickety.

Is Obamacare Socialism or Fascism?

Via-American Spectator

By David Catron

The CEO of Whole Foods can’t seem to make up his mind.

As a general rule, I avoid “healthy” food whenever possible. I try to eat things with extra fat and lots of additives. This is a conscious strategy that should assure that I keel over before being left to the tender mercies of Medicare after the Obama administration has transformed it into a system that rations care based on a Byzantine formula that purports to measure how many “quality” years of life a patient has left. Moreover, if I consume enough chemical additives, I can save my family some money by arriving at the funeral home pre-embalmed.

For a brief period this week, however, I was on the verge of bestowing my custom on Whole Foods Market, despite its deplorable policy of “selling the highest quality natural and organic products available.” Why? Because it seemed that the grocery chain’s CEO, John Mackey, was that elusive creature for whom Diogenes searched so fruitlessly — an honest man. Mackey is currently promoting his new book, Conscious Capitalism, and has therefore subjected himself to a series of media interviews, including one recently broadcast on NPR.

During that interview, he was asked if his opinion of Obamacare had changed since he wrote, in the Wall Street Journal, “All countries with socialized medicine ration health care by forcing their citizens to wait in lines to receive scarce treatments.” He answered as follows: “Technically speaking, it’s more like fascism. Socialism is where the government owns the means of production. In fascism, the government doesn’t own the means of production, but they do control it — and that’s what’s happening with our health care programs and these reforms.”

One can imagine the gasps with which that “clarification” was received by the people on the set of Morning Edition. And it must have caused the Obamazombies among his Whole Foods customer base to react as if they had discovered lamb chops lurking among the bean sprouts and bottles of carrot juice. As the good folks at NPR gleefully noted in an update, “Many of you wrote in to tell us you were taken aback by Whole Foods top executive John Mackey characterizing the health law as fascism in an NPR interview, and apparently, he’s feeling a little sheepish.”


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Coming to a nation near you soon!...

60,000 patients put on death pathway without being told but minister still says controversial end-of-life plan is 'fantastic'

• Pathway involves the sick being sedated and usually denied nutrition and fluids
• Families kept in the dark when doctors withdraw lifesaving treatment
• Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt said pathway was a 'fantastic step forward'
• Anti-euthanasia group said: ‘The Pathway is designed to finish people off double quick'

Here they call it the IPAB