Like John Kerry, who famously flip-flopped on his support of the Iraq war, Barack Obama was against the individual mandate for health insurance before he was for it. In this brief video clip from his appearance on the Ellen DeGeneres show during the 2008 Democratic primary, then candidate Obama is clear in his opposition to forcing people to buy health insurance. He lamely uses the analogy that "forcing everyone to buy health insurance won't solve the problem of (31 million) uninsured Americans any more than forcing everyone to buy a house will solve homelessness".
Lucky for him there weren't any serious journalists around to call him on his inane analogy. Then again, they never called him out on any of his myriad and outrageous flubs including the “57” states one – his referring to “57” states comprising the United States.
At a time when America and the world need a strong leader, we are stuck with an insincere, arrogant, contemptuous, inept and feckless President who does not know himself where he stands on the important issues of the day unless they are in the socialist manifesto.
One thing that you can count on with him is not counting on the veracity of his words, statements and promises.
Obama to DeGeneres on Why He Opposed Individual Mandate: Forcing Uninsured to Buy Insurance Is Like Forcing Homeless to Buy Homes
Eric Scheiner February 01, 2011
President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden react to cheers as they arrive in the East Room of the White House in Washington, Tuesday, March 23, 2010, for the signing ceremony for the health care bill. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
(CNSNews.com) - Long before his administration went into federal court to fight 27 states that are now challenging the constitutionality of the federal government forcing people to buy health insurance, then-presidential candidate Barack Obama told Ellen DeGeneres that—unlike his opponent Hillary Clinton—he opposed forcing the uninsured to buy health insurance, saying that it would be like forcing the homeless to buy homes.
“Both of us want to provide health care to all Americans. There’s a slight difference, and her plan is a good one. But, she mandates that everybody buy health care. She’d have the government force every individual to buy insurance and I don’t have such a mandate because I don’t think the problem is that people don’t want health insurance, it’s that they can’t afford it,” Obama said in a Feb. 28, 2008 appearance on Ellen DeGeneres' television show. “So, I focus more on lowering costs. This is a modest difference. But, it’s one that she’s tried to elevate, arguing that because I don’t force people to buy health care that I’m not insuring everybody. Well, if things were that easy, I could mandate everybody to buy a house, and that would solve the problem of homelessness. It doesn’t."
In a ruling issued yesterday holding that the insurance mandate in Obamacare is unconstitutional, U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson pointed to a similar statement that Obama had made in a Feb. 4, 2008 interview with CNN. “Indeed,” wrote Vinson, “I note that in 2008, then-Senator Obama supported a health care reform proposal that did not include an individual mandate because he was at that time strongly opposed to the idea, stating that ‘if a mandate was the solution, we can try that to solve homelessness by mandating everybody to buy a house.’”
Judge Vinson was the second federal judge to rule that the federal government does not have the constitutional power to force individuals to buy health insurance. Last month, U.S. District Judge Henry Hudson also ruled that the mandate was unconstitutional. Vinson was ruling in a suit brought against the federal government by Florida and 25 other states. Hudson was ruling in a suit brought against the federal government by the state of Virginia.
Hopefully, US District Judge Roger Vinson’s verdict that Obamacare is unconstitutional will begin a juggernaut to repeal the entire legislation which is dangerous, fatally flawed in myriad ways, unsustainably costly, and freedom and rights restricting and which will invest in the government overwhelming power and control over us, destroy the world’s premier medical system and legally provide certain politically connected or “correct” groups greater rights than others. Such is a system that needs to be nuked in its nascency.
As many rational experts and the average American are asking (of Obama and Congressional Democrats): “If Obamacare is so great and will provide excellent health care at a lower cost and you can keep your same doctor, why are there so many exemptions?”
Of course, we all know the answer. Obamacare is a BIG LIE. Intentionally!
It was never about affordability. Or access and availability. Or quality.
And evidently with all the waivers to politically connected or favored groups - it was never about equality and equal protection before the law.
This was ALL about government control, socialist policies and wealth redistribution.
It must be repealed by whatever means possibly!
Where's Our Waiver?
Investor’s Business Daily 01/28/2011
ObamaCare: The granting of 500 more exemptions to unions, companies and even states begs the question — why is "affordable health care for all Americans" neither affordable nor for everybody?
The Obama administration has become famous for its crony capitalism, in which companies like General Electric were rewarded while energy companies, for example, were cast into the outer darkness. Now we have what might be called crony health care, with the favored escaping the full consequences of ObamaCare while the rest of us deal with the rising costs and reduced service.
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi once told us we'd have to pass ObamaCare to see what was in it. Now it turns out we have to wait for its implementation to see who is in it. The issuance of more than 500 additional waivers to its draconian mandates by Health and Human Services makes the case for repeal even stronger.
It is a system where everyone is equal, but some are more equal than others. We were told everyone had to be in it, everyone had to be forced to buy government-approved insurance for ObamaCare to work.
As Emily Litella used to say on "Saturday Night Live": "Never mind."
Unions, including the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), are particularly favored in this charade. Unions represent 6.9% of the private work force, yet 40% of the workers covered by these waivers are union members.
There are no fewer than 182 union benefit funds, one-fourth of all waivers, now exempted. And of the only 14.6 million union employees in the U.S., 860,000 are already exempted from ObamaCare's mandated coverage requirements.
The SEIU — whose former head Andy Stern was once the leading visitor to the White House, ahead of Cabinet members and heads of state — had three of its locals exempted from ObamaCare mandates in the first batch of waivers, which reached 222 total: Local 25 SEIU in Chicago, with 31,000 enrollees; Local 1199 SEIU Greater New York Benefit Fund, with 4,544 enrollees; and SEIU Local 1 Cleveland Welfare Fund, with 520 enrollees.
In the latest round of waivers, the SEIU, which lobbied mightily to force everyone else into ObamaCare, added four more locals to the waiver list, which stands at 729. There are now seven SEIU locals that have waivers, covering a total of 45,000 workers.
Other unions and labor groups have also benefited.
One of the largest waivers, for 351,000 people, went to the United Federation of Teachers Welfare Fund, a New York union that covers teachers. The United Agricultural Benefit Trust, a California-based cooperative that provides such low-cost minimal coverage to farmworkers, was allowed to exempt 17,347 workers.
As columnist Michelle Malkin reports, the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW), which trumpeted ObamaCare as "an achievement that will rank among the highest in our national experience," has secured waivers for 238 of its affiliates. Hypocrisy as a union label.
The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), which said that with ObamaCare "finally, affordable and comprehensive health care coverage will be available for millions of working Americans," saw eight of its affiliates get waivers.
It seems ObamaCare is neither affordable nor comprehensive.
The exemption list even includes 4 states — Massachusetts, New Jersey, Ohio and Tennessee — that collectively cover 2.1 million workers. As we've noted, corporations such as McDonald's are also on the waiver list, saying ObamaCare makes their plans unworkable and unaffordable.
ObamaCare is in effect repealing itself, waiver by waiver. If it's so great, the Senate should vote on its repeal without fear.
Defunding should commence, as should House hearings exposing this fraudulent power grab. By the way, these new waivers come a week after Republicans announced plans to investigate the earlier waivers granted to groups for health care reform provisions.
Question: If the provisions these entities are exempt from are a hardship, then isn't the entire piece of legislation?
In the following article, Peter Ferrara lucidly and thoroughly dissects Judge Vinson’s ruling on Obamacare which was deemed to be unconstitutional and then conjectures on its future prospects and potential political actions that may need to take place. He reviews the painstaking research including historical precedents and considerations and the flawless logic in arriving at what appears to be a conclusion and ruling that will be extremely difficult to be overturned by the Supreme Court justices if intellectual integrity is employed.
Judge Vinson proclaimed in his verdict that:
It would be a radical departure from existing case law to hold that Congress can regulate inactivity under the Commerce Clause. If it has the power to compel an otherwise passive individual into a commercial transaction with a third party merely by asserting…that compelling the actual transaction is itself commercial and economic in nature, and substantially affects interstate commerce…it is not hyperbolizing to suggest that Congress could do almost anything it wanted.
The real coup de grace for Obamacare in Judge Vinson’s ruling which ironically touches upon the original Tea Party was his prescient statement:
It is difficult to imagine that a nation which began, at least in part, as the result of opposition to a British mandate giving the East India Company a monopoly and imposing a nominal tax on all tea sold in America would have set out to create a government with the power to force people to buy tea in the first place.
This is an outstanding assessment of the ruling and dim future prospect for Obamacare is a must read.
The Legal Future of Obamacare
Peter Ferrara 2/2/2011
As of this moment Obamacare is officially not the law of the land. As Federal Judge Roger Vinson ruled on Monday in Florida, "[T]here is a long standing presumption that officials of the Executive Branch will adhere to the law as declared by the court. As a result, the declaratory judgment is the functional equivalent of an injunction." That law as declared by the Federal District Court in Florida is now that Obamacare is unconstitutional.
This, of course, is the second federal court ruling that Obamacare is unconstitutional, following the ruling of Judge Henry Hudson in the Northern District of Virginia on December 13. I predicted in this space at the time that Judge Vinson would rule the same. Now he has. I filed amicus curiae briefs in both cases on behalf of the American Civil Rights Union arguing for these results. Those briefs drew on my work in The Obamacare Disaster: An Appraisal of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, published by the Heartland Institute.
Recall former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi laughing off Tea Party objections that Obamacare was unconstitutional with the reply, "Are you serious? Are you serious?" Now she knows just how serious we were.
Limits to Federal Power
Judge Vinson's ruling, as Judge Hudson's before him, represents a return to the original Constitution of limited enumerated powers delegated by the people to the federal government. Vinson opens his decision quoting James Madison in the Federalist Papers explaining, "The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite," noting further that "the Tenth Amendment reaffirmed that relationship."
Vinson goes on to explain that the reason for that is to "ensure protection of our fundamental liberties" and "reduce the risk of tyranny and abuse." He goes on to quote the ultimate explanation again from James Madison in The Federalist Papers:
If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.
The enumerated power claimed by Congress for Obamacare was the Commerce Clause, which grants Congress the power "To regulate Commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian Tribes." Trade among the states was mentioned so Congress would have the power to eliminate the protectionist trade restrictions and barriers that had been erected among the states against trade with each other. Eliminating those protectionist trade barriers is a fundamental reason for the long term, world leading prosperity of America. This is the original reason for the Commerce Clause, not to allow abominations like Obamacare.
But this was dramatically changed during the New Deal to allow Congress to affirmatively regulate interstate commerce based on the language of the Commerce Clause, and neither Judge Vinson nor Judge Hudson challenged that change. But more recent Supreme Court decisions have reaffirmed that there are still limits to Congress's power to regulate under the Commerce Clause. Both Judge Vinson and Judge Hudson have now ruled that the individual mandate in Obamacare exceeds those limits.
Obamacare's individual mandate requires all individuals without employer-provided health insurance to buy insurance with all the politically correct and expensive coverage the government dictates they must buy. But as Judge Vinson noted, " (essentially for life) just for being alive and residing in the United States." Every prior regulation upheld as constitutional under the Commerce Clause involved some activity that could be construed as participation in interstate commerce. But failure to buy health insurance involves no such activity, and no participation in interstate commerce at all.
As a result, Judge Vinson concluded:
It would be a radical departure from existing case law to hold that Congress can regulate inactivity under the Commerce Clause. If it has the power to compel an otherwise passive individual into a commercial transaction with a third party merely by asserting…that compelling the actual transaction is itself commercial and economic in nature, and substantially affects interstate commerce…it is not hyperbolizing to suggest that Congress could do almost anything it wanted.
Then in words that will be memorialized on future Tea Party walls, Vinson wrote:
It is difficult to imagine that a nation which began, at least in part, as the result of opposition to a British mandate giving the East India Company a monopoly and imposing a nominal tax on all tea sold in America would have set out to create a government with the power to force people to buy tea in the first place.
Judge Vinson consequently ruled, "If Congress can penalize a passive individual for failing to engage in commerce, the enumeration of powers in the Constitution would have been in vain for it would be difficult to perceive any limitation on federal power."
They Can't Believe He Ate the Whole Thing
Once the individual mandate was declared unconstitutional, it was inevitable that the whole Obamacare law would be struck down, as Judge Vinson also ruled. The legislation included no severability clause as in most every bill, which provides if one provision is struck down, the rest survives. That was not an oversight.
Without the individual mandate, the rest of Obamacare is transparently unworkable, as President Obama and the Democrats themselves said during the jihad for its enactment. That is because the bill also includes what is known as "guaranteed issue" and "community rating." Under those provisions, an insurance company must insure whoever applies, and charge them no more than anyone else, no matter how sick or costly they are when they first apply.
This is like fire insurance regulation requiring the insurer to accept whoever calls for coverage, and to charge them no more than anyone else, even if their house is already on fire when they first call! In health insurance as in fire insurance, this would naturally cause premiums to skyrocket. But it's worse than that.
The skyrocketing premiums cause younger and healthier individuals to drop their coverage. That forces insurers to raise premiums even more because the remaining pool is even sicker and costlier on average. The younger and healthier than flee even more,knowing they can automatically get coverage later if they become sick! In fire insurance terms, this leaves the insurer with a "risk pool" of all burnt down houses, which is quite costly to cover. The result is a financial death spiral both for the insurers and anyone still trying to pay premiums.
The individual mandate was intended to be the antidote to this death spiral. If everyone must buy the insurance in any event, premiums would still rise, but no one could drop out in response. The system could then still function, albeit at higher insurance rates, exactly contrary to what was promised. But without the individual mandate, the whole system inevitably collapses as described above.
This is why, as Judge Vinson wrote, "the defendants concede that the individual mandate is absolutely necessary for the Act's insurance market reforms to work as intended. In fact, they refer to it as an essential part of the Act at least fourteen times in their motion to dismiss." Where there is no severability clause, the legal standard that determines whether the whole law must be struck down is whether what is left can still function independently of the part that was struck down, and whether Congress would have intended for the law to continue in that manner. The remaining dysfunctional Obamacare without the individual mandate does not fit this legal standard.
As a result, Judge Vinson rightly concluded:
[T]he record seems to strongly indicate that Congress would not have passed the Act in its present form if it had not included the individual mandate. This is because the individual mandate was indisputably essential to what Congress was ultimately seeking to accomplish….The Act, like a defectively designed watch, needs to be redesigned and reconstructed by the watchmaker.
The Supremes in the Final Act
Just as I predicted that Vinson would follow Hudson in making this ruling, I predict as well that Justices Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, and Alito will now follow Vinson and Hudson in also finding the individual mandate unconstitutional, and in throwing the whole Obamacare Act out on the same grounds as above.
The swing fifth vote is as usual up to Justice Anthony Kennedy. I believe what will be decisive in winning his vote as well is to demonstrate there are other alternative means to achieving the goals of Obamacare that would be constitutional, so we would not be asking Kennedy to rule that universal health care for all must be unconstitutional.
Just two basic reforms would provide a universal health care safety net that would ensure that no one need ever suffer without essential health care. First would be to block-grant Medicaid back to the states, with each state then to replace it with Medicaid vouchers for the purchase of private health insurance. Each state would decide how much to provide at each income level in their state to ensure that no one would lack basic health insurance because they were too poor.
This would benefit the poor enormously because the current Medicaid program so badly underpays doctors and hospitals that the poor often cannot find doctors and hospitals that will treat them under Medicare. With these Medicaid vouchers, the poor would enjoy the same health care as the middle class, because they would enjoy the same health insurance as the middle class.
The second reform is state uninsurable risk pools for those who nevertheless still do not buy health insurance, and then become too sick and costly to buy it, like the homeowner who fails to buy fire insurance before his house catches on fire. These uninsurables would get coverage from the risk pool, paying premiums based on their ability to pay. The state would subsidize the pool for the remaining costs. A majority of the states already operate such uninsurable risk pools, and they have proved quite workable.
Everyone would then have the means of obtaining essential coverage and care, without any individual or employer mandate. Indeed, unlike Obamacare, this safety net covers everyone, and so achieves the valid social goal far better.
These reforms would not be costly because less than one fourth of the uninsured fail to get health coverage because they are too poor to do so, and only a relatively small number of people find themselves without insurance and then too sick to get it. If we do this in the context of block-granting Medicaid back to the states, the net result could well be less overall government spending rather than more. The only reason President Obama and the Democrats would not even consider this approach is that it does not involve the government takeover of health care, which was the real goal all along, so the wise government could run health care in the interests of progressive "social justice" (which sometimes means denying people health care).
The only option left for President Obama is to decide when he gets the final death notice for Obamacare, before the 2012 election or after. If he agrees to an expedited appeal to the Supreme Court, he will likely have to run for reelection having wasted his first term putting the entire country through a meaningless exercise, which only served to discredit the Democrat party. If he decides to slog through the Circuit Courts, he will likely suffer further adverse rulings before Election Day, with legal momentum building against him, reinforcing the likelihood that the Reagan-appointed Kennedy would go with the conservatives.
We can see the impact of that legal momentum in Vinson's ruling. Hudson declined to strike down the entire statute, even though that inevitable result was obvious then, undoubtedly because he felt it was brave enough to find the individual mandate unconstitutional. But Vinson was emboldened by his ruling as a bolstering precedent to go the whole nine yards.
But it would be wise to deny Obama even this choice, because which way Kennedy would go can never be certain. That is why Senate Republicans should still force a vote on the House repeal, which is even more likely to win assent now. Obamacare will decline even further in the polls as the public increasingly recognizes its unconstitutionality, and even fewer Senate Democrats will be willing to fall on their political swords for an increasingly doomed cause.
President Obama would then have the choice of killing his own Obamacare baby himself, and then running on taking the credit for it.
Peter Ferrara is director of entitlement and budget policy at the Institute for Policy Innovation, a policy advisor to the Heartland Institute, a senior fellow at the Social Security Institute, and general counsel of the American Civil Rights Union. He served in the White House Office of Policy Development under President Reagan, and as Associate Deputy Attorney General of the United States under the first President Bush. He is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School. He is author of The Obamacare Disaster, from the Heartland Institute, and President Obama's Tax Piracy.
In a very strong and unambiguous decision, a U.S. District judge in Florida ruled that the individual mandate of Obamacare requiring people to buy health insurance violates the Commerce Clause of the Constitution. Judge Roger Vinson further declared that "Because the individual mandate is unconstitutional and not severable, the entire act must be declared void."
This is very positive news for all Americans who are strongly against the federal government’s legislated takeover of the health care system. As expected, the Dept. of Justice is appealing this verdict to the 11th Circuit of Appeals.
Ultimately as we all know, the final decision on this issue will be determined by the Supreme Court.
Judge Rules Health Care Law Is Unconstitutional
January 31, 2011 FoxNews.com
A U.S. district judge on Monday threw out the nation's health care law, declaring it unconstitutional because it violates the Commerce Clause and surely reviving a feud among competing philosophies about the role of government.
Judge Roger Vinson, in Pensacola, Fla., ruled that as a result of the unconstitutionality of the "individual mandate" that requires people to buy insurance, the entire law must be declared void.
"I must reluctantly conclude that Congress exceeded the bounds of its authority in passing the act with the individual mandate. That is not to say, of course, that Congress is without power to address the problems and inequities in our health care system. The health care market is more than one-sixth of the national economy, and without doubt Congress has the power to reform and regulate this market. That has not been disputed in this case. The principal dispute has been about how Congress chose to exercise that power here," Vinson wrote.
"While the individual mandate was clearly 'necessary and essential' to the act as drafted, it is not 'necessary and essential' to health care reform in general," he continued. "Because the individual mandate is unconstitutional and not severable, the entire act must be declared void."
Department of Justice spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler said the department plans to appeal Vinson's ruling to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.
“We strongly disagree with the court’s ruling today and continue to believe – as other federal courts have found – that the Affordable Care Act is constitutional," she said. "There is clear and well-established legal precedent that Congress acted within its constitutional authority in passing this law and we are confident that we will ultimately prevail on appeal.
"We are analyzing this opinion to determine what steps, if any -- including seeking a stay -- are necessary while the appeal is pending to continue our progress toward ensuring that Americans do not lose out on the important protections this law provides, that the millions of children and adults who depend on Medicaid programs receive the care the law requires, and that the millions of seniors on Medicare receive the benefits they need," she added.
The case is undoubtedly headed to the Supreme Court. But for now, opponents of President Obama's signature domestic legislation exalted while supporters denounced the decision.
"I applaud the ruling today by Judge Vinson," said Florida Gov. Rick Scott, who, prior to getting elected in November, helped lead the charge against the law. "In making his ruling, the judge has confirmed what many of us knew from the start -- ObamaCare is an unprecedented and unconstitutional infringement on the liberty of the American people. ... Patients should have more control over health care decisions than a federal government that is spending money faster than it can be printed."
"Judge Vinson's decision is radical judicial activism run amok, and it will undoubtedly be reversed on appeal. The decision flies in the face of three other decisions, contradicts decades of legal precedent, and could jeopardize families' health care security," said Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA. "If this decision were allowed to stand, it would have devastating consequences for America's families."
Vinson's decision, while surprising, was not unforeseen. In October, the judge dismissed four of the six counts in the suit led by then-Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum and joined by 25 other states. But he allowed two counts, including one challenging the law's controversial requirement that Americans buy health insurance, to proceed. Arguments were heard in December.
In his earlier ruling, Vinson said that a government report called the requirement to buy insurance legally unprecedented and worth examining in court.
"The individual mandate applies across the board. People have no choice and there is no way to avoid it. Those who fall under the individual mandate either comply with it, or they are penalized. It is not based on an activity that they make the choice to undertake. Rather, it is based solely on citizenship and on being alive," he wrote.
Nearly two dozen suits have been filed in federal courts, but Monday's ruling is the biggest judicial decision to come down the pike since Congress last March passed the bill aimed at covering 30 million uninsured Americans whether they want insurance or not.
In other cases, a federal district judge in Richmond, Va., ruled the individual mandate is unconstitutional but left standing other parts of the law. In Michigan, the argument concerning the "individual mandate" -- the central tenet that requires Americans to start buying health insurance in 2014 or pay a penalty -- was thrown out by another federal judge.
"That judge, under his mindset, said basically if someone thought that I were overweight, if they rule this way, the federal government would be able to mandate that I go down to the Gold's Gym and fill out an application and contract with Gold's Gym to lose weight and lower my cholesterol," said South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson, whose state is among the parties filing the multi-state suit. "That is the kind of logic that we're going to right now where you're actually telling people that they have to engage in an activity and that is simply too broad a policy for the federal government."
Last week, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a repeal of the 10-year, $1 trillion plan that critics say will cost closer to $2.6 trillion. But the repeal bill will likely die in the Senate, meaning Vinson's ruling is the newest grounds on which supporters and opponents proceed.
Defenders of the law say that Americans need to be covered from ruthless insurance companies that either refuse to insure children with illnesses and adults with pre-existing conditions or charge exorbitant amounts for individual coverage. The law aims to provide a federal umbrella under which Americans can purchase and keep insurance regardless of their health, career changes or ability to pay.
But Vinson said that is not the U.S. government's job.
"Regardless of how laudable its attempts may have been to accomplish these goals in passing the act, Congress must operate within the bounds established by the Constitution. Again, this case is not about whether the act is wise or unwise legislation. It is about the constitutional role of the federal government," he wrote.
Supporters of the law also note that Congressional Budget Office figures that show if repealed, government deficits will climb by $230 billion over the next 10 years.
Critics counter with a "junk in, junk out" description of the CBO's estimates, claiming the numbers used to reach the conclusions are bogus and based on best-case scenarios that don't realize additional spending and unlikely savings, particularly as the law, in the first decade, collects taxes for 10 years though it only pays for six years of coverage and relies on money to be collected for a separate health program -- Medicare.
In his State of the Union address, Obama said he was willing to open his mind to changes in the law if they made dollars and sense and didn't prevent patients with pre-existing conditions or other barriers to insurance companies from gaining coverage.
He pointed to the near-universally hated 1099 provision that orders businesses to report to the Internal Revenue Service all purchases exceeding $600 as the first provision to be scrapped.
Obama Chief of Staff Bill Daley repeated the president's position on Sunday, adding that the law was intended to help employers as much as patients.
"The president has said he's open to changes to this. He is not open to re-fighting the entire fight of health care," Daley told CBS' "Face the Nation."
"I absolutely believe, having been in business and hearing from business people, the importance of a need for the reform of health care. It was the business community that was really saying to the politicians, this is costing us too much, it's too much of a wet blanket on the economy," he said.
The following is a video of Rep. John Lewis (D- GA) being asked questions regarding if Americans should be required by the government to buy health care insurance. You may want to view it a few times to appreciate the inanity and vacuity of his responses.
You would think that it would be impossible for our Representatives to be this stupid, uninformed, uneducated about basics of the Constitution and unable to make a rational argument about such an important issue as health care – but you just witnessed one example. Unfortunately, there are many others out there who are like sheep or parrots – just repeating what their leaders tell them and not having the intellectual capabilities to formulate conclusions based on their own rational thought.
They are ideological zombies and do not truly deserve to be representing a constituency. However, the irony is that they reflect and are an example of the people who vote them in.
This explains why some of the poorest legislation by the Democrats easily gets passed which ultimately costs the average American in increased taxes, lost rights and freedoms.
For the tens of millions of Americans who are vehemently opposed to Obamacare, its mandates and federal government intrusion in their health care, there is great news. U.S. District Court Judge Henry Hudson issued a ruling on intrinsic issues of Obamacare yesterday. His verdict was that the requirement that a person purchase health insurance "exceeds the constitutional boundaries of congressional power" meaning that it is unconstitutional.
On the question as to whether this issue could abrogate that entire legislation, he did not commit except to state that though there was not a severability clause in it, he did not have enough information to adjudicate this.
It is now on to the Supreme Court for this particular challenge of Obamacare. There are many other lawsuits waiting in the wings.
Federal Judge Declares ObamaCare's Mandate Unconstitutional
Philip Klein on 12.13.10
Dealing a blow to the Obama administration, a federal Judge on Monday ruled that the requirement that individuals purchase health insurance -- a central component of the national health care law -- "exceeds the constitutional boundaries of congressional power."
In a 42-page ruling (PDF), U.S. District Court Judge Henry Hudson, an appointee of George W. Bush, said that the Commerce Clause of the constitution did not give the federal government the authority to force an individual to purchase something. He also rejected the Obama administration's argument that the mandate to purchase "minimum essential coverage" was justified by Congressional taxing power. At the same time, Hudson declined to overturn the entire law, severing the mandate from the rest of the legislation.
The decision arose from a lawsuit brought by Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, one of the two main legal challenges to ObamaCare. The other one is led by Florida and involves 19 additional states.
"Neither the Supreme Court nor any federal circuit court of appeals has extended Commerce Clause powers to compel an individual to involuntarily enter the stream of commerce by purchasing a commodity in the private market," Hudson wrote. "In doing so, enactment of the Minimum Essential Coverage Provision exceeds the Commerce Clause powers vested in Congress under Article I."
The judge went on to say that, "Because an individual's personal decision to purchase -- or decline to purchase -- health insurance from a private provider is beyond the historical reach of the Commerce Clause, the Necessary and Proper Clause does not provide a safe sanctuary...The Minimum Essential Coverage Provision is neither within the letter nor the spirit of the Constitution. Therefore, the Necessary and Proper Clause may not be employed to implement this affirmative duty to engage in private commerce."
The Obama administration had also advanced a secondary argument that the mandate could be justified under the Congress's power to levy and collect taxes. Yet Hudson said this argument didn't hold up, because the revenue collection element is incidental to the mandate -- it's a penalty and its primary purpose is as a regulatory enforcement mechanism. Also, the legislation itself cited the Commerce Clause as its constitutional justification.
Hudson did rule against Virginia on two other counts, though. As enacted, the law did not include what's known as a "severability clause," which specifies that if one part of the law is struck down, the rest of the law stands. Virginia had argued that it should be struck down entirely if the mandate is considered unconstitutional, but Hudson declined to do so, saying the Court didn't have sufficient information to determine "what, if any, portion of the bill would not be able to survive independently."
Hudson also declined to grant Virginia's request for an injunction against the mandate, because it has not yet gone into effect.
The judge acknowledged that "the final word will undoubtedly reside with a higher court."
It should be noted that in two other lower profile cases, liberal judges have upheld the health care law. So ultimately, it's likely that this will end up having to be decided by the Supreme Court, with Anthony Kennedy, as always, casting the deciding vote.
The ravaging effects of Obamacare are already being felt even though its implementation is just in its earliest of stages. We doubt most people, even some of those vehemently opposed to the legislation, could have imagined its massive impact and costs to Americans so early in the transition. Millions of people have either lost their health insurance, can’t obtain it because insurance companies can no longer offer them or the rates have skyrocketed up to 40% or more.
In order to minimize the deleterious impact of this forced government mandate, exemptions are being granted to certain companies or groups including the teacher’s union. So much for equality and fairness. It is also a blatant grab for votes.
Obamacare should have never happened and it was rammed down the throats or essentially up our figurative rectums – ENTIRELY AGAINST OUR WILL AND BY CORRUPT AND DESPICABLE MEANS INCLUDING OVERT BRIBES, EXEMPTIONS AND THREATS.
OBAMACARE MUST BE REPEALED IN ITS ENTIRETY ASAP!
Bleak Prognosis
Investor’s Business Daily 10/22/2010
Health Care: The more we know about ObamaCare, the more we find out it wasn't designed to cut costs but to eventually eliminate private insurance coverage and create a government-run system.
Provisions of the Democrats' health care overhaul started to become law only a month ago, yet the list of companies dropping medical benefits for their employers is piling up.
Mega-firms such as AT&T, Caterpillar, John Deere and Verizon are among those that are either considering ending coverage for their employees or have already chosen to do so.
It's not just the big companies eliminating benefits, either. Smaller employers are doing the same. Larry M. Elkin, president of Palisades Hudson Financial Group, wrote Thursday in the Business Insider: "For 15 years, I have taken pride in paying the full cost of health insurance for every full-time Palisades Hudson employee who wanted it. This month marks the last time I will do that."
Elkin said that every one of his employees has the option of staying on the company plan. But those who choose that route "will have to pay the entire cost — ranging from $574 to $683 per month — themselves, through payroll deductions."
And where will those who don't opt for staying on the company plan go? Maybe they end up leaning on the government along with the 46 million or so other uninsured Americans the Democrats are trying to cover.
Elkin is not acting out of spite because he doesn't like the Democrats. He's acting rationally, as any good businessman should.
He knew in March, before the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was passed, that it "is likely to make health coverage anything but affordable for those who actually pay the bills" and that he would have to make changes for his 20 employees.
While Elkin is one of a few willing to publicly discuss how Obama-Care is affecting his business, others are following a bitter path similar to the one he feels he is forced to take. He cites a survey by the National Business Group on Health that found that roughly 63% of businesses plan to make their workers pay a higher portion of their health care insurance costs next year.
Again, how many of these currently insured workers will, rather than pay the premiums out of their pockets, find themselves relying on government for their coverage?
As the debate over ObamaCare raged, Americans were assured by the president himself that those of us who like our insurance plans would be able to keep them. But workers will not only lose their employers' plans due to their employers' increasing costs under the law, they will also be losing coverage because carriers are dropping some of the policy options they offer.
WellPoint, Cigna, CoventryOne, Humana, Blue Cross and Blue Shield, Aetna and Golden Rule have, for instance, announced that they will no longer sell child-only policies under the Democrats' health care regime.
In some cases — the Principal Group and its 840,000 customers is one example — carriers are dropping out of the health insurance market entirely.
Meanwhile, McDonald's and 29 other companies told Washington that ObamaCare was going to force them to drop insurance coverage for some workers. Had those companies not been granted federal waivers from the requirement that they raise the minimum annual benefits of their low-cost health plans, roughly 1 million Americans would have been added to the rolls of the uninsured.
Don't think it can't get worse, because under the Democrats' ill-thought-out plan, it will. Large pieces of ObamaCare that will make the system painfully expensive and increase federal intrusion still haven't become law.
The next Congress needs to get focused fast on stopping the march toward costly, substandard care.
The appearance of the Tea Parties is a powerful statement of the parallels between our political situations today and those during the pre-Revolutionary times under British rule. We now have a triumvirate of Obama, Pelosi and Reid as compared to just King George III. Unfortunately, we have almost come full circle, largely as a result of our autocratic elitist government under unstoppable Democratic domination.
A similar comparison was employed by Virginia’s attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli, when he appeared in federal court this week arguing against the constitutionality of Obamacare which mandates that all citizens purchase health insurance. In fact, he noted that Obama WAS WORSE than King George III.
Given our historical perspective and the responses of these two heads of state to their “subjects”, we find his argument difficult to refute.
Virginia attorney general compares Obama to King George III
Chris Moody - The Daily Caller 10/18/2010
Virginia’s fiery attorney general Ken Cuccinelli, who argued against the constitutionality of the health care law in federal court this week, has a new line: President Obama is worse than King George III, the English king in power when Americans declared independence in 1776.
Cuccinelli said Monday that at no other time in American history had a government forced citizens to purchase a product and gotten away with it, even the British King that sparked the American Revolution.
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act passed in April contains a provision that requires citizens to buy health insurance. Virginia’s lawsuit argues that the mandate is beyond the powers of the federal government, as defined in the Constitution. (A Massachusetts state measure, championed by former governor and Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, requires everyone in the state to have insurance.)
In 1774, the American colonists signed onto a document that notified King George III that Americans would boycott British goods until the so-called “Intolerable Acts” were lifted. Speaking like a history professor, Cuccinelli told the story of how American colonists boycotted British products in response to the Acts more than 200 years ago.
“The King’s own lawyer, his solicitor general, advised him that the boycott was legal under British law and that Americans could not be forced to buy British goods,” Cuccinelli said. “Yet in 2010 we have a Congress and a president that have enacted a law that compels Americans for the first time in history under the guise of regulating commerce, that they must buy a private product even when the King of England and the parliament that we rebelled against acknowledged that they should not have the authority to compel us to do that when we were their subjects.”
The Obama administration has countered that Congress has the power to mandate health insurance under the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution. The battle over the mandate is expected to reach the U.S. Supreme Court.
We have already begun to feel the pernicious effects of the Obamacare legislation in many ways. Because of the regulations and mandates, many insurance plans are no longer being offered resulting in hundreds of thousands (or more) of people losing their coverage. Others, in order to remain viable, have had to precipitously increase rates 20% or more (see 47% below). This results in either very expensive or unaffordable coverage, neither which is a desired outcome.
These and many other reasons further illustrates the urgency to overturn the Obamacare legislation and divorce the federal government from controlling the system.
Anthem Approved For Health Insurance Rate Hikes As High As 47 Percent
Matthew Sturdevant October 14, 2010
The state's largest insurer has been approved to raise health premium rates by 41 percent to 47 percent for some of its policies sold to individual buyers, in the largest price hikes yet seen in Connecticut since the adoption of national health care reform.
For all of its individual market plans, Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield has received approval to raise rates by at least 19 percent -- including a range of 30 percent to 44 percent for the brand of plans in the individual market that was most popular in 2009, Century Preferred.
The reason for the increases is the new federal health reform mandates, according to Anthem and the state Department of Insurance, which is defending its approval against charges by Attorney General Richard Blumenthal. Those reforms took effect Sept. 23.
In all, the Anthem individual plans were in use by 55,536 people in the state as of April 2009, the latest figures available, according to Insurance Department documents. The rate requests were approved without change last month by the Insurance Department.
The rate hikes "deeply disappointed" Blumenthal, who wrote an Oct. 6 letter to Insurance Commissioner Thomas Sullivan saying the increases were approved without detailed scrutiny or consideration of whether they are "excessive."
Blumenthal did not give a breakdown of plans and prices in that letter, but documents obtained by The Courant from his department show price increases for a single male, age 40 in the range of $1,200 per year for Century Preferred plans.
"Connecticut law requires that proposed insurance rates 'shall not be excessive.'" Blumenthal wrote in the letter. "In order to determine whether rates are excessive, the Insurance Department must review of all aspects of the insurance policy, including medical trends since the last rate increase, expenses and profits, how much of the expenses are administrative, and the impact on potential policyholders. As explained below, the Insurance Department failed to review any of these factors."
The letter takes aim at proposed rates approved in September for Anthem and Aetna. Blumenthal asks Sullivan to reconsider the rates. Sullivan has responded by saying the rates include "very rich benefits" required by federal law.
"There is not one person in the state of Connecticut who will see an increase in their current premiums based on what the department approved for Anthem and Aetna," Sullivan said last week in response to Blumenthal's letter. "The rates that were filed and approved reflect the current cost to deliver care and the impact of more comprehensive benefit designs required under the federal healthcare reform law. If the attorney general wants to complain to someone, he should be complaining to Congress.
Anthem would not say how many people are in each plan.
It is not clear how many people are paying, or will pay, these new rates because federal reform allows insurers to grandfather certain plans that existed before reform was passed in March. What it means for Anthem customers is that anyone who enrolled before March 24 will have the option of staying in their current plan, which would increase next year based on rising costs but not because the plan will have added benefits mandated by federal law. Anyone who bought an Anthem plan on March 24 or later will pay the new rates.
In terms of higher rates, Anthem spokeswoman Sarah Yeager attributed the rising price to robust new benefits which the plans hadn't offered before federal reform.
"Our [Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act] compliant individual products include expanded benefits such as elimination of lifetime dollar maximums, no cost share for preventive coverage, and extension of dependent coverage to age 26. With this enhanced coverage, pricing levels have also been adjusted to make sure that the cost of claims incurred is offset by the premiums collected, and that we anticipate the cost of future, expected claims. Low cost low benefit plans experienced a higher rate adjustment because with the health care reform provisions the plans now offer richer benefits. Other plans that already offered rich benefits did not experience as much of an adjustment."
The recent inception of Obamacare has immediately claimed its first victims and proved that what it was touted as was a gargantuan lie just as its opponents had vehemently claimed. Providers of health care insurance have closed their doors as a direct consequence of the mandates. Others have dropped specific plans for the same reasons.
The end result already is more people losing their insurance or even the options of obtaining insurance. Furthermore, the cost of available insurance has risen and will rise for most as a direct result of Obamacare’s regulations.
So summing it up:
1. we will have less private insurance available for Americans to obtain
2. the cost of insurance will rise significantly because of the mandates of Obamacare and independent of other factors. This rise will be far greater than if absolutely nothing were done at all!
Obama and the Congressional Democrats knew that these were the intended and inevitable results of their legislation but lied to the American people in order to pass the extremely unpopular bill.
In November, they will have to deal with the wrath of very angry Americans! Let's all make sure of this.
Reform's Victims
Investor’s Business Daily 09/22/2010
ObamaCare: The first provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act take effect Thursday, and casualties are already piling up. This week's include children who'll have to go without health insurance.
The earliest victim of ObamaCare was nHealth, a Virginia-based insurer that specializes in health savings accounts. It announced in June that "considerable uncertainties" created by the new law would force it to close its doors by year-end. The customers and 50 employees of the once-promising startup will have their lives turned inside out by this decision.
Now, starting Thursday, any health insurance company offering child-only plans has to accept kids — anyone under 19 — with pre-existing conditions. This mandate has the potential to bankrupt insurers, and big carriers WellPoint, Cigna and CoventryOne, Humana, Blue Cross and Blue Shield, Aetna, and Golden Rule have reacted by announcing they'll no longer sell new child-only policies.
Some will stop writing the policies at the national level while others will leave markets only in certain states. But it won't stop there. Kansas Insurance Commissioner Sandy Praeger told the Hill newspaper that she guarantees "it's happening probably in every state."
Not every insurer will quit the market. But those staying will operate in a less-competitive environment, which will hurt consumers.
If parents wait until their kids are seriously ill before buying coverage, as many will, insurers will have no choice but to raise rates on child-only policies to offset the high costs of benefits they'll be paying out. If that option is denied by federal regulators, "then they could be forced to raise rates for adults in the individual market as well," according to Heritage Foundation analyst Kathryn Nix.
The White House says it's unhappy. Press Secretary Robert Gibbs complained that insurers are making "decisions on the backs of children and families that need their help," as if they are charities with unlimited funds.
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, meanwhile, is treating insurers as criminal enterprises. She's warned there will be "zero tolerance" for those that pass on "misinformation" about ObamaCare and blame it for their "unjustified rate increases." Carriers she deems in violation of her directives "may be excluded from health insurance exchanges," the heavily regulated and mandated insurance networks coming in 2014.
Wasn't ObamaCare going to cut costs and expand coverage? Instead, costs will be higher and, while some of the uninsured will finally get coverage, many of the insured will lose theirs. Maybe the first victim of the Democrats' health overhaul was the truth.
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