This is in essence what the Obama Administration and Congressional Democrats are conveying and stating to the American people and the States.
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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It must be repealed by whatever means possibly!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?
How about granting America a waiver?
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article/561404/201101281851/Wheres-Our-Waiver-.aspx
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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.
http://spectator.org/archives/2011/02/02/the-legal-future-of-obamacare/
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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.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/01/31/judges-ruling-health-care-lawsuit-shift-momentum-coverage-debate/
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Former Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, bluntly has stated that with full implementation of Obamacare, health care will be a government run dictatorship. He has identified 1968 new and expanded powers of the federal government in addition to 159 new federal agencies. At the top of this pyramid of power is the Secretary of Health and Human Services which at present is Kathleen Sibelius.
Do we really want a health care system that grants the federal government such immense power and control?
Of course not!
Each agency and rule further erodes our health care rights and freedoms.
Why does Obamacare require the hiring of 15,000 new IRS agents? What does this have to do with health care? Will they make our care less expensive? Will their presence make it more efficient?
You get the picture – and this is only a fraction of the abominable issues inherent in the Obamacare legislation.
This legislation needs complete repeal. Anything short of this will be a failure.
Gingrich: Country in danger of health dictatorship
Misty Williams The Atlanta Journal-Constitution January 20, 2011
States should be given more control over how to run health care programs rather than broaden the federal government’s role in a system that’s already rife with problems, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Thursday.
“Maybe we would be better off having 50 parallel experiments,” Gingrich told reporters at the Center for Health Transformation, which was unveiling its latest review on the impact of the federal health care law.
The law grants the federal government 1,968 new and expanded powers -- most of which would fall under the purview of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius -- and 159 new federal offices, according to the center founded by Gingrich.
Those controls cover a range of issues from access to drugs and insurance coverage to how care is delivered and changes to Medicare, the group said.
America is in danger of a health dictatorship, Gingrich said.
“I think it means that the next time you need a health consultation, you may want to consult with your lobbyist rather than your doctor, because the fact is your doctor is not going to be able to make a whole range of decisions,” he said.
The former speaker, who said he will decide by the end of February whether to form an exploratory committee for a presidential run, described Wednesday’s vote to repeal health care reform as more than symbolic.
He said, “It is the beginning of a dialogue and the beginning of a process which I think over time is going to be very, very powerful.”
Proposed alternatives to the current health care law should have bills dealing with malpractice reform and fraud, which is especially prevalent in the Medicaid arena, Gingrich said. If the federal government can’t run Medicaid, it’s better for the states to take the helm, he said.
He added that states should develop their own health care exchanges instead of leaving it up to the federal government. The exchanges, which go into effect in 2014, would allow small businesses and individuals to form large pools to garner better insurance prices.
Each state is unique and faces different issues, Gingrich said.
http://www.ajc.com/health/gingrich-country-in-danger-810399.html
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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.
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The Massachusetts health care model, which was touted by politicians and other “experts” to be the panacea for health care coverage, costs and care, has been an abysmal and exorbitantly costly failure. Used and cited ad nauseum as a paradigm for health care reform by Obama and Congressional Democrats, it is now placing that state in significant financial straits. Costs are skyrocketing, the number of Medicaid patients has expanded by 25% since 2006 and insurance premiums have risen significantly.
The glowing promises and predictions by the state’s politicians about their health care overhaul plan have been proven to be wild fantasies. Opponents of this government fiasco knew these would be the consequences and the program was doomed to fail long before it was implemented.
So as expected even with this knowledge, in the infinite wisdom of government, Obama and many Congressional Democrats continue to staunchly support and defend their massively larger bankrupting fiasco in the making – Obamacare.
Has Massachusetts Experience Put ObamaCare On A Path To Repeal?
Sally C. Pipes 1/12/2011
The new GOP majority plans to introduce a bill to repeal ObamaCare soon. What the Republicans are trying to prevent is what is already happening in Massachusetts, where a similar health care bill was enacted in April 2006. It is already imploding.
Unless ObamaCare is repealed, we're on a path to Massachusetts' future.
Eager politicians from former Gov. Mitt Romney to current Gov. Deval Patrick marketed Massachusetts' health care plan, like Obama's, with a series of distortions:
• The uninsured — especially young invincibles — were costing hospitals money that could be redirected to insurance premiums.
• They promised government efficiency.
• They focused on the assertion that primary care would replace emergency room use.
• They claimed both in Massachusetts and Washington, D.C., that we could build all this government health care bureaucracy and hand out these new benefits without new taxes while actually reducing long-term costs.
"Every uninsured citizen in Massachusetts will soon have affordable health insurance, and the cost of health care will be reduced," then-Republican Gov. Romney wrote in the Wall Street Journal in 2006. "And we need no new taxes, no employer mandate and no government takeover to make this happen."
Proponents of the Massachusetts plan now pretend that it never sought cost control. "The goal of the law was covering people," says MIT economist and Massachusetts plan architect Jonathan Gruber, who also consulted on ObamaCare.
"It couldn't have gone better," he told the Washington Post. And the Post's lead health-reform cheerleader, Ezra Klein, wrote, as if it's fact, that the Massachusetts law "was not designed to control costs."
The only measure by which Massachusetts can be judged a success is the number of people enrolled in Medicaid and other government-subsidized insurance plans. Of the 410,000 newly insured in Massachusetts, three in four are either paying nothing or very little for their insurance. They've also been successful in continuing to pull down massive subsidies from Washington to support the overhaul.
Spending has exploded. Medicaid, a problem in every state, is destroying Massachusetts. The health overhaul was really Medicaid expansion, and with the rolls up nearly 25% since 2006, Massachusetts is struggling to pay the bills.
The other promises turned out to be bogus as well. Despite the near-universal insurance, the state still spends $414 million on uncompensated care, an expense that Romney and his architects promised would disappear. Emergency-room use has not dropped as predicted. From 2006 to 2008, emergency room use under Mass Care increased by 9%. And private employer insurance costs, far from dropping, have continued to increase.
A 2010 study published in the Forum for Health Economics & Policy found that health insurance premiums in Massachusetts, prior to its overhaul, increased at a rate 3.7% slower than the national average. Post-overhaul, they are increasing 5.8% faster.
The individual mandate, as onerous as it is, is set at a level to encourage gaming the system. A family with an income of $55,000 in 2014 will face the choice of paying $4,428 a year for health insurance or a $550 fine. Given that insurance will be available on demand, it's rational to pay the fine until a serious illness strikes.
Indeed, there is no strong demand for insurance among the uninsured. The individual market has existed for years and is lightly subscribed. The new high-risk pools created by ObamaCare are very undersubscribed. Bureaucrats projected that 375,000 would sign up by now. The actual number is 8,000.
The lie that Massachusetts never promised to control costs is amplified by the belief that Obama's plan would do so. Other than price controls, commissions recommending best practices and a stealth HMO program for Medicare renamed Accountable Care Organizations, there's little to control costs in the near term.
This brings us back to the Bay State, where politicians, bureaucrats and health policy sages have embarked on what they bill as phase two of the health care overhaul. Now that nearly everyone is insured, the effort is to replace the decentralized reimbursement system with a global budget.
In other words, give hospitals and doctors a pool of money and tell them to make do. Change the incentive from providing the best possible care to the best care the bureaucrats can possibly afford.
"Clearly we are going to have less resources," Gary Gottlieb, CEO of Partners Health Care in Massachusetts, recently told a medical conference. "The most extraordinary ICU and the most extraordinary technology, without necessarily the evidence that it extends life ... is not going to be accessible to us."
A government-run HMO. Welcome to your future.
• Pipes is president, CEO and Taube fellow in health care studies at the Pacific Research Institute. Her latest book is "The Truth About
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article/559597/201101121838/Has-Massachusetts-Experience-Put-ObamaCare-On-A-Path-To-Repeal-.aspx
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The group Americans for Tax Reform compiled a list of the two dozen new taxes and tax increases that were imposed to obtain further funding for Obamacare. This amounts to the largest tax increase in our country’s history, an outrageous statistic that gets lost in the general discussion and opposition to the government’s destruction of the best healthcare system in the world.
We need to continue writing our Representatives, expressing our strong and resolute opposition to Obamacare and the need to have it fully repealed.
Read: Comprehensive List of Tax Hikes in Obamacare
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Representative Eric Cantor (R. - VA) is wasting no time in seeking the repeal of Obamacare. In fact, he has posted the 2 page bill whose purpose is to do exactly that.
Wow! A strong and resolute start.
Click to read the bill: Text of Rep. Eric Cantor’s Bill to repeal Obamacare
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For more than 50 years, liberals have aggressively supported major government programs, legislation and ideologies that have unsurprisingly failed to produce the results they expected or wanted though they vehemently deny such outcomes. More accurately, they have been abject failures with far reaching and long lasting impacts.
Still they persist, staunchly supported by their media lapdogs, and attack those armed with data and better alternatives. They can’t seem to acknowledge the disaster their policies have caused.
In the following editorial, Larry Elder succinctly and lucidly reviews these domestic policies which have been unequivocally disastrous. These include taxes, welfare, education, affirmative action, minimum wage hikes and Obamacare.
What Do Liberals Have To Show For 50 Years Of Horrible Policies?
Larry Elder 12/23/2010
For the past 50 years, the Democrats — and many Republicans who should know better — have been wrong about virtually every major domestic policy issue. Let's review some of them:
• Taxes. The bipartisan extension of the Bush tax cuts represents the latest triumph over the "soak the rich because trickledown doesn't work" leftists.
President Ronald Reagan sharply reduced the top marginal tax rates from 70% to 28%, doubling the Treasury's tax revenue.
President George H.W. Bush raised the income tax rate, as did his successor. But President George W. Bush lowered them to the current 35%.
President Barack Obama repeatedly called the current rate unfair, harmful to the country and a reward to those who "didn't need" the cuts and "didn't ask for" them.
If true, he and his party ditched their moral obligation to oppose the extension. But they didn't, because none of it is true.
Democratic icon John F. Kennedy, who reduced the top marginal rate from more than 90% to 70%, said, "A rising tide lifts all the boats." He was right — and most of the Democratic Party knows it.
• Welfare for the "underclass." When President Lyndon Johnson launched his "War on Poverty," the poverty rate was trending down. When he offered money and benefits to unmarried women, the rate started flat-lining. Women married the government, allowing men to abandon their moral and financial responsibilities.
The percentage of children born outside of marriage — to young, disproportionately uneducated and disproportionately brown and black women — exploded. In 1996, over the objections of many on the left, welfare was reformed. Time limits were imposed, and women no longer received additional benefits if they had more children. The welfare rolls declined. Ten years later, the New York Times wrote: "When the 1996 law was passed ... liberal advocacy groups ... predicted that it would increase child poverty, hunger and homelessness. The predictions were not fulfilled."
• Education. The federal government's increasing involvement with education — what is properly a state and local function — has been costly and ineffective at best, and counterproductive at worst. Title I, a program begun 45 years ago to close the performance gap between urban and suburban schools, burns through more than $15 billion a year, and the performance gap has widened. The feds spend $80 billion a year on K-12 education, as if money is the answer. States like Utah and Iowa spend much less money per student compared with districts like those in New York City and Washington, D.C., with much better results.
Where parents have choices — where the money follows the student rather than the other way around — the students perform better, with higher parental satisfaction. But the teachers' unions and the Democratic Party continue to resist true competition among public, private and parochial schools.
• Gun control. Violent crime occurs disproportionately in urban areas — where Democrats in charge impose the most draconian gun control laws.
Over the objection of those who warn of a "return to the Wild West," 34 states passed laws allowing citizens to carry concealed weapons. Not one state has repealed its law. Professor John Lott, author of "More Guns, Less Crime," says: "There is a strong negative relationship between the number of law-abiding citizens with permits and the crime rate: As more people obtain permits, there is a greater decline in violent crime rates. For each additional year that a concealed handgun law is in effect, the murder rate declines by 3%, rape by 2% and robberies by over 2%."
• "Affirmative action." Race-based preferences have been a disaster for college admissions. Students admitted with lesser credentials are more likely to drop out. Had their credentials matched their schools, they would have been far more likely to graduate and thus enter the job market at a more productive level.
Preferences in government hiring and contracting have led to widespread, costly and morale-draining "reverse discrimination" lawsuits. Where preferences have been put to the ballot, voters — even in liberal states like California — have voted against them.
• Minimum wage hikes. Almost all economists agree that minimum wage laws contribute to unemployment among the low-skilled — the very group the "compassionate party" claims to care about.
Economist Walter Williams, 74, in his new autobiography, "Up From the Projects," describes the many low-skilled jobs he took as a teenager. "By today's standards," he wrote, "my youthful employment opportunities might be seen as extraordinary.
That was not the case in the 1940s and 1950s. In fact, as I've reported in some of my research, teenage unemployment among blacks was slightly lower than among whites, and black teens were more active in the labor force as well. All of my classmates, friends and acquaintances who wanted to work found jobs of one sort or another."
• ObamaCare. This ghastly government-directed scheme will inevitably lead to rationing and lower-quality care — all without "bending the cost curve" down as Obama promised.
Any party can have a bad half-century. Merry Christmas.
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article/557701/201012231806/What-Do-Liberals-Have-To-Show-For-50-Years-Of-Horrible-Policies-.aspx
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