Healthcare Reform - The Dirty Words No One Wants To Say Guarantee Failure

I've been watching with interest the back and forth over healthcare reform. My good friend Bookworm has a great article on the subject you should read.

But having taken a look at this, it does seem to me that the Republicans, as usual, are trying to win by avoiding being cast in the media as mean nasty villains robbing people of something. And after all, if you can spend other people's money and look good...

Although of course, they won't look good no matter what they do to the Democrat's trained seal media. You'd think they would have gotten a clue by now!

Far better to concentrate on real policy and do it right, no? And let the results be the judge.

Insurance is what I call a 'projection' industry, where fortune tellers known as actuaries crunch numbers and determine the rates on policies and on investments known as insurance contracts as far in advance as possible. Forced instantaneous hope n' change like ObamaCare hits insurance companies with a sucker punch and costs them a lot of money - which of course, like any other business they pass on to their customers.

What's going on in DC now is ridiculous. If the GOP puts together some kind of bogus ObamaCare lite entitlement and President Trump signs it, it will be the first campaign promise he's broken. I'm pretty sure cooler heads will prevail and there will be significant changes made to what we have now.

This is exactly why I said in an earlier article, that the first thing that needed to be done by President Trump, together with Speaker Paul Ryan and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was to have have immediately announced the repeal of ObamaCare, especially the individual mandate penalty and named a date in the near future - say, November 10th, 2017 or whatever - when it will no longer be in effect.

Aside from assuring the American people they weren't being screwed again, it would give congress a clearly established a deadline to thrash out the new legislation and it would have allowed insurance companies some badly needed lead in time to plan for ObamaCare's demise.

And a demise, it must be. ObamaCare is so flawed, so thrown together without common sense that trying to build something viable using its parts is a fool's errand.It was garbage to begin with, a tax scam rather than anything to do with healthcare.

But what next? Where should we go with healthcare? Incredibly, there are two dirty words that nobody is mentioning. And there's a really good reason why...

Those dirty words? T O R T... R E F O R M! Say it again, with feeling.:  TO R T... R E F O R M!

Keep this in mind.. when someone is chattering away in wonkspeak about healthcare, mandates, health savings accounts and the like, unless they're mentioning those two dirty words they're simply blowing smoke up your nether regions.

Ask any health professional about what their biggest fear is. I've asked quite a few, and the answer is almost always predatory lawsuits. Have you ever gotten one of those official looking letters -actually calling them advertisements is more appropriate - asking you to sign on to a large class action suit against an HMO or hospital? Sure you have. The result of this trolling is almost always a fortune for the lawyers in fees and a pittance for the rubes who signed up as part of the 'class' if they mange to win and get a judgement. Even if they lose, their target spends big dollars in legal fees, or rather their malpractice insurance company does. After which the insurance company jacks up their premiums.

Picture yourself as a young American doctor. You're already carrying six figures in student loan debt. And on top of that, depending on whether you're a GP or a specialist and depending on where you're practicing the usual rates for malpractice insurance run from just under $30,000 per year to six figures in the pricier areas.

Aside from the ever rising cost of malpractice insurance, this fear of predatory lawyers also pads the price of healthcare by causing repetitive paperwork and staff work and many unnecessary and repetitive activities, even on routine medical procedures.

No doctor or institution should be allowed to get away with malpractice, and the medical profession actually does a fairly decent job of weeding put bad actors. But unless the current barrage of lawsuits is brought under control and some reasonable guidelines established, the cost of medical care is going to continue to increase. There are simply far too many lawyers, and far too many unnecessary lawsuits targeting the medical profession and healthcare institutions.

So why is no one mentioning this? So simple! Ask yourself this...what did most of the members of congress do for a living before they became congressmen? What do many of them do for a living when they leave? Why, they're lawyers of course. And even while they're in congress, a number of them receive an income from law firms they have a partnership interest in. As lawyers, let's just say that many of them are reluctant to cut off a steady stream of income for the profession if not for themselves. And as we all know, law firms also contribute a lot of money to legislators who see things their way. That's why a lot of what Senator Rand Paul has to say on healthcare sounds so sensible. He's a medical doctor,not a lawyer. We'll come back to this point later, but keep it in mind.

Another ongoing problem I haven't heard mentioned in this debate is illegal migrants. Their effect on the cost of healthcare is a lot more insidious. In California and some other states with large illegal migrant populations, many of them are on Medic-Aid, because no one checks too closely about insignificant details like citizenship.In fact, there are actual privacy laws in California that prohibit and cross checking, so the system is almost set up for fraud. Fake social security numbers or EIN's are also used quite a bit.

Another common occurrence is the abuse of ER facilities. If an illegal migrant working as a day laborer hurts himself on a construction site, he'll go to the nearest hospital emergency room for treatment. Since legally and humanely he needs to be treated, he is. And when it comes to payment, a quick discussion between the migrant and the hospital staff makes it very clear that this one is going to be a freebie. So the hospital eats it. King-Drew Medical Center in South Los Angeles was bankrupted by this type of patient, and I doubt they're the only ones who were, or who at least suffered major losses financially.

Tort reform and dealing with our huge illegal migrant problem are essential to stopping the spiraling cost of healthcare and repairing the damage ObamaCare caused. So is actual competition across state lines. And actual freedom of choice, dammit!

Keep these simple concepts in the above paragraph in mind.

Apparently a number of Americans like the idea of keeping young adults of 26 and under on their healthcare policies if they're still lucky enough to be able to have one. And they like the idea being able to get insurance with preconditions without paying for them. It's become exactly what Rand Paul said it is, a new entitlement.

Believe it or not, there is one healthcare system I know about that is government mandated, but also embraces all the of the concepts I've mentioned for real reform. After all, if we're going to have ObamaCare Lite courtesy of Paul Ryan, why not?

Israel never really planned government run mandatory healthcare, but they were more or less forced into it by circumstances. After 1948, they had a large segment of their population who were 'graduates' of the concentration camps as well as almost a million Jewish refugees who arrived there penniless after being ethnically cleansed from the Arab world. So a nationwide healthcare system was cobbled together. And it works quite well. Why?

• Israel has a very small illegal migrant problem. And thanks to the border walls, it's even smaller now. They don't have tons of illegal migrants bankrupting the system.

• The ideas of competition and freedom of choice are maintained. While the government oversees and finances part of the system,it doesn't micromanage it itself or insist that everyone have cookie cutter insurance. There are four different carriers (essentially, HMOs), all of whom compete with each other for members and have different plusses,minuses and 'specialties,' by which I mean a reputation for excelling in particular kinds of care or having better rates for certain extras or different copays and levels of coverage. All Israeli citizens get the basic plan the government subsidizes.If you want extras in certain areas, you buy them from your insurance carrier, so you have the ability to shop. On the flip side, you're not paying for something that's of no use for you, like maternal care for an elderly couple past childbearing age. Preconditions aren't an issue because everyone has to have insurance. The National Health Insurance Law guarantees all Israeli citizens access to one of the four carriers, and the right to transfer between the carriers once per year.

• Tort reform is not a problem since not only does Israel lack the litigious climate lawyers have fostered here in America (at least, so far) but lawyers also aren't coming out of the woodwork there as they are in America. And at present, lawyers don't constitute any kind of majority in Israel's Knesset. The ratio of doctors to lawyers in Israel is about the opposite of what it is here.And the level of care, even private care is so high quality and reasonably priced compared to the EU and America that medical tourism is common. Med school is also cheaper, and Israel offers special incentives for medical professionals who want to become olim (Jewish migrants to israel under the Law of the Return).

Does it work? In a survey of 48 countries in 2013, Israel's healthcare system was ranked fourth in the world in terms of efficiency, and in 2014 it ranked seventh out of 51. In 2015, Israel was ranked sixth-healthiest country in the world by Bloomberg rankings and eighth in terms of life expectancy.

So it can be done. But major tort reform,getting rid of a substantial number of illegal migrants and fostering competition and freedom of choice for consumers is what it takes. That, and creating a lot more doctors, medical researchers and personnel as well as a lot less lawyers.

Far easier said then done, but doable.

Getting Rid Of ObamaCare The Common Sense Way

ObamaCare has been a fiscal disaster as well as a healthcare disaster. The lies and misrepresentations of the Obama Administration and the Democrats to shove it through are common knowledge by now, and so is failure of most of the health exchanges. Most of the people who signed up for ObamaCare were people on MedicAid who were getting health care at no cost anyway, while many people who had functional plans saw their premiums skyrocket, their coverage diminished and their co-pays increase to the point where their coverage was essentially meaningless, especially at the Bronze level. Many workers, especially in small businesses actually saw their hours cut below full time simply because complying with ObamaCare and it's arcane rules and requirements was too expensive and/or too time consuming. Many doctors in private practice refused to accept it for the same reasons. A fair amount of ObamaCare's victims simply chose to pay the mandated penalty instead of the high premiums and hope they never got sick.

 

ObamaCare was simply one of the worst scams ever foisted on the American people, and even many of its original proponents now admit that the flimflam about it being a money saver and deficit reducer were 'overstated.'

Repealing ObamaCare was a campaign promise of President Trump's as well as many Republicans now in Congress. Yet it's been delayed.

The reasons are pretty obvious. First of all, there are a couple of provisions many people like, especially if they work in government, which had the staff and other people's money to tailor their plans so that there was compliance with only a modest increase in co-pays and premiums, most of which ere partially paid for by their employer, or rather, the taxpayers. Particularly popular were the provisions allowing people to keep their children on their plans until age 26 and not allowing insurers to deny people with pre-existing conditions.

Second, insurance is a business based on future projections. Rates are figured on the basis of risk and probable future cost in advance, and a change now would create chaos in the industry. There's also the factor that a lot of the people on ObamaCare who aren't paying anything for coverage anyway like the status quo. And they vote.

That's why you're seeing the dithering going on in congress over getting rid of this costly travesty. A lot of republicans are now talking about 'fixing ' ObamaCare rather than repeal, or not doing anything until a legitimate replacement is created.

Both ideas are seriously flawed. Here's why, and how to get rid of ObamaCare in a commonsense way.

Obamacare was poorly designed and badly constructed from the very beginning. Trying to repair it would be like prettying up a house with shoddy basic construction and materials, a lousy foundation and a bad interior design. Not only that, but right now, ObamaCare is a colossal failure owned by President Obama and the Democrat party. Tinkering with it would allow them to saddle the Trump Administration and the Republican congress with that failure...'it was working fine until you fiddled with it.'

The other idea, of doing nothing until a replacement is constructed is going to take a great deal of time. Meanwhile, the American people are getting justifiably restless, especially since they remember how the Republicans in Congress did nothing about this for 8 years. In the meantime,not only is ObamaCare hemorrhaging money, but because of its tax provisions, not repealing ObamaCare delaying the tax cuts and tax reform badly needed to get the economy rolling again.

There's actually a fairly easy solution to this problem.

President Trump, together with Speaker Paul Ryan and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell should immediately announce the repeal of ObamaCare, especially the individual mandate penalty and name a date in the near future when it will no longer be in effect. This would have a number of benefits.

It would allow insurance companies and health providers lead in time to figure cost and actuarial projections for the coming year and tool up, especially if they were given advance notice of the basics of the new plan. They didn't get that when ObamaCare was unloaded on them, and it cost millions...which of course was transferred to the insured in the form of higher premiums.

It would reassure the American people that congress wasn't going to drop the ball again. a mention in the announcement that the new plan would include an assigned risk provision for pre-existing conditions and retain the provision allowing parents to keep children under 26 on their plans would also be helpful.

It would provide congress and staff members constructing the new plan with that essential prod known as a deadline. With President Trump pushing them along, I can almost guarantee it would be finished on time.

The plan itself? If we're going to have universal health care, I recommend President Trump and his advisors look at the way Israel does this, since it's one of the few government mandated healthcare programs that actually works.

In Israel, health insurance is mandatory and there are five healthcare insurance providers who compete with each other for clients, which effects the size of their government subsidies. Not all five are available in every part of the country, but you are usually sure of having at least three to choose from. In addition, every insurance program is boutique, meaning you only pay for what your particular needs require...a retired couple in their sixties, for instance, would probably not be paying for maternity care or a pediatric care. And since healthcare insurance is mandatory, the issues of pre-existing conditions and adult children being retained on their parents plan don't really exist.

One reason this works so well in Israel is that the litigious climate here in America doesn't really exist there yet. The ratio of doctors and medical personnel to lawyers is the opposite of what we have here in the U.S. which also has the effect of keeping medical care affordable. Israel also doesn't have the illegal migration problem America does. As a result,Israel does quite a nice business in medical tourism, with Europeans fed up with the long wait to have procedures performed flying to Israel to take advantage of the state of the art care at lower prices and the reduced wait time.

I'd recommend that any new national health plan America adopts include these factors...competition between providers, boutique plan and serious tort reform to keep the lawyers at arms length. And perhaps some government provisions to cut down on waste and abuse. Addressing the high cost of medical education so we can produce more doctors and medical personnel wouldn't be a bad idea either.

'Constitution? What Constitution?' SCOTUS Saves ObamaCare

 

As I expected, The US Supreme Court today ruled to allow nationwide subsidies on ObamaCare even though they are clearly illegal according to the law as written. The Court's long awaited decision in King v. Burwell was 6-3 for Burwell, ruling that the federal subsidies can still be paid to states that elected not to establish an exchange, a clear violation of the Tenth Amendment as well as the explicit wording of the law.

Voting with Justices Ginsberg, Sontamayor and Breyer were Justices Kennedy and Chief Justice John Roberts, whom wrote the majority opinion. While his opinion is a model of illogic and doublespeak, he at least had the honesty to admit that the Court's majority ignored the actual wording of the law itself as well as the Constitution:

“In this instance,” he wrote, “the context and structure of the act compel us to depart from what would otherwise be the most natural reading of the pertinent statutory phrase.”

This was challenging, he said, because there were “more than a few examples of inartful drafting that “does not reflect the type of care and deliberation that one might expect of such significant legislation.”

Or to translate this, the law itself is so poorly written, nonsensical and contradictory that the Supreme Court, in its wisdom had to actually rewrite it in order to continue to foist it on the American people.

Justice Roberts is frankly admitting that in this case, politics trumps not only what the law says but the Constitution. This is a classic case of what Lawyers refer to as a Stare Decisis 'because we said so' ruling. The actual wording of the law is what Roberts and his cohorts think it should be rather than what it actually is.

Justice Scalia had the right if it, as he frequently does. He read his dissent from the bench, a rare sign of profound disagreement.

In his dissent, Scalia said that we should start calling ObamaCare, “SCOTUSCare.” At the end of his dissent, Scalia wrote, “[t]he somersaults of statutory interpretation they have performed (“penalty” means tax, “further [Medicaid] payments to the State” means only incremental Medicaid payments to the State, “established by the State” means not established by the State) will be cited by litigants endlessly, to the confusion of honest jurisprudence. And the cases will publish forever the discouraging truth that the Supreme Court of the United States favors some laws over others, and is prepared to do whatever it takes to uphold and assist its favorites.”

Or as Senator Ted Cruz said, if these justices want to write law rather then interpret it, "They should run for Congress."

He's exactly right. This is the second time the Supreme Court has rewritten this law, not to mention the times this president has unilaterally (and illegally, I might add) done so.

 

The current ruling went right to the heart of what ObamaCare is all about - reducing benefits, increasing co-pays and raising premiums sky high on the middle class to subsidize all those new migrants the president is bringing in...with, of course, exemptions for the well connected. That includes every member of the Supreme Court, their employees and their families.

Those of the middle class whom can't pay will be fined by the IRS..and those who can't afford the co-pays after paying the high premiums to avoid the fine will simply go without care.

 

This is so far away from the Constitution our Founders bequeathed us or even the normal standards of jurisprudence as to be ludicrous. When judges write law on the fly to suit themselves and their political agenda, then there is no justice and no law.

There are several things to take away from this that are simply self-evident truths.

The Left now noisily celebrating this should understand that this creates a precedent that can be used against them in the future in ways they won't like. Blatant disregard for justice and the law eventually comes home to roost for those whom champion it.

Second, this ruling doesn't change the basic nature of ObamaCare. It merely preserves it as a poorly written law that makes no fiscal or common sense whatsoever. Half of the exchanges are already bankrupt or headed that way, because most of those who signed up are people who are taking advantage of full subsidies and pay no premiums anyway. There's a limit to how far the fiction will stretch until it cracks.

As Europe is now finding out, you can have an immigration society or a lavish welfare state, just not both.Many of the migrants this president is bringing in are going to turn out to be net tax consumers rather than tax payers by a huge margin. States like California are already seeing this at work. Far from helping to cure the deficit, ObamaCare is now estimated to increase the long-term federal deficit by $6.2 trillion, according to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report.

As President Obama continues his amnesty by executive order, expect this figure to increase markedly.

Congress, of course, could still use the power of the purse to defund ObamaCare. Under the present leadership, I rate the chances of that as roughly the shy side of zero.

Why this is true is unimportant right now, although as I've speculated on these pages the unprecedented amount of spying on American citizens, the enormous amount of data collected and President Obama's past use of such weapons and tactics against his political opponents might be an answer. Apparently I'm not the only one thinking that way.

None of this matters, really. We can be outraged, justifiably so, but as I pointed out yesterday, what really is important right now is answering Tolstoy's question: what then must we do?

I've said before that America's destiny is either to reaffirm the republic our forefathers bequeathed to us or to become Rome. The powers that be have apparently decided they're fine with Rome as long as their perks and bottom line are taken care of. Unless we're prepared to go along with that as a population of pauperized serfs supporting their rule and whatever they decree, we are going to have to band together to institute massive political change using what left of our republic and our rights as citizens..before we lose those as well.

Think this over:

What principles do you stand for, and what are you not willing to compromise on?

What are you prepared to do to change things?


Stay tuned.

Classic -Obamacare Architect Is 'Sorry' That He Was Caught, Not that He Lied

This is a classic portrait of the how the Left looks at things.

ObamaCare architect Dr. Jonathan Gruber was recently outed for remarks he made on the making of Obamacare...namely that it was deliberately worded to deceive people, and that without what he called a 'lack of transparency' the bill wouldn't have passed. He also added that Obamacare passed due to the "stupidity of the American voter."

Thise comments went viral, so here is Dr. Gruber on MSNBC (of course!) with Ronan Farrow to 'apologize':

RONAN FARROW: First of all, you haven't publicly commented on this so far. Do you stand by the comments in that video?

JONATHAN GRUBER: The comments on that video were made at an academic conference. I was speaking off the cuff and I basically spoke inappropriately and I regret having made those comments.

FARROW: But your point that you were making underneath the choice of words was actually quite nuanced. You were saying essentially, correct me if I am wrong, that due to political pressures, the language of Obamacare had to be somewhat opaque, somewhat lacking in transparency, is that correct?

GRUBER: This is something that you've seen actually going back into the Clinton and Bush presidencies which is that public policy that involves spending is typically less political palatable than policy that involves doing things for the tax code. It would have made more sense to do Obamacare the way we did in Massachusetts, which would be to just give people money to offset the cost of their health insurance.

That was politically infeasible and instead it was done through the tax code and that's the only point I was making.

Even with Farrow throwing him a softball, it's easy to translate this horse manure, because Dr, Gruber isn't nearly as clever as he thinks he is...and many of the rest of us aren't as stupid as he thinks we are.So let's translate:

"Hey, I was basking in the admiration of my fellow Lefties in academia,and none of this was supposed to leak out. I was pretty honest about stuff because I figured I was among, you know, people down for the struggle, I felt like doing a little chest thumping abour how I put one over on the slobs in flyover country and I never figured this would get out. Now, I'm sorry I shot my mouth off and I wish I hadn't."

"You see, Ronan - and of course, I'm also addressing the hundred or so people you have watching right now - progressive fascists like us always have to lie, connive and use ambiguous language to fool the peons for the greater good. And by the way, giggle, it really was a tax bill after all! It's a lot easier to shove this stuff through that way since most ordinary people don't understand the Tax Code anyway.Heck, even I don't understand it, not really. But neither did Congress. And, I mean,it's not like we gave 'em time to actually read it anyway. "

That really is how the Left operates. They make horrendous messes and then leave others to clean up after them.

Millions of people lost their health insurance, saw their premiums escalate to the point where they literally can't afford health insurance anymore or are paying obscene amounts for a lot less coverage than they used to have at far more affordable rates. People have lost their jobs, or have had their hours cut to part time all because of the mess people like Gruber put together at the behest of their Lord and Master in the White House.

And he can't even muster the decency to says he's sorry for what he did...or for the deliberate and malicious deception he used to do it.

He's only sorry that it accidentally was exposed.

Federal Appeals Court Deals Major Blow To ObamaCare; Most Subsidies Illegal

 

The DC Circuit Court of Appeals ruled today on a landmark case, Halbig vs. Burwell that would deal a huge blow to ObamaCare

The three judge panel, based on what they called a close reading of the law ruled that most of the ObamaCare subsidies are illegal.The 2-1 ruling said the subsidies can only be given to people who bought insurance in an Obamacare exchange run by an individual state or the District of Columbia—and not on the federally run exchange HealthCare.gov.


"Section 36B plainly makes subsidies available in the Exchanges established by states," wrote Senior Circuit Judge Raymond Randolph in his majority opinion, where he was joined by Judge Thomas Griffith.

"We reach this conclusion, frankly, with reluctance. At least until states that wish to can set up their own Exchanges, our ruling will likely have significant consequences both for millions of individuals receiving tax credits through federal Exchanges and for health insurance markets more broadly."

Both Judge Randolph and Judge Griffith were appointed by President George HW Bush and President George W. Bush, respectively. The dissenting jurist,Judge Harry Edwards is a Carter appointee and an African-American, and his dissent was mainly based on a political stance, that this was "an attempt to gut ObamaCare."

You may draw your own conclusions.

The reality is that, as the law was written, people who enroll in Obamacare through the federal exchange aren’t eligible for subsidies. The text of the law only provides subsidies for people enrolled through “an Exchange established by the State,” according to the text of the Affordable Care Act. Only 16 states decided to establish the exchanges.

In Halbig vs. Burwell, the fed's argument was that the IRS issued a regulation expanding the number of enrollees who qualify for the subsidies. The plaintiff's argument was that the IRS does not have the authority to make that change. And if we're going by the law, it doesn't, because that amounts to legislation.

The IRS has no independent power to tax, borrow and spend. Only Congress can do that.It can only deviate from law in the case of obvious typos or ambiguous language, or in the case of something simply not making sense. Unfortunately for proponents of ObamaCare, the language in Section 36B is explicit, has a clear meaning and cannot be said to contain any typos, since the exact same language was written into numerous drafts of the law, including the final one sent to Se4nate Majority leader Harry Reid before the vote. The plaintiffs were able to clearly establish that, which is why the panel ruled as it did.

I guess the Dems really should have read the bill to see what was in it before jamming it down our throats.

 

The effect of this ruling, if it's upheld, would be to substantially cripple ObamaCare,perhaps terminally. ObamaCare, thus far, has mainly been attractive to those people who are interested in free stuff someone else is paying for. ObamaCare as free stuff mainly relies on the subsidies, and without them, it goes under without a massive federal bailout. Twenty seven states decided not to set up ObamaCare exchanges, and another nine states opted out.

A whopping 87% of ObamaCare's 'customers' are getting the subsidies. More than half of them signed up via the federal exchange. If the subsidies aren't available for them, they would be able to opt out, circumventing the law that requires them to get insurance or pay a tax penalty. The same applies to a great many other people the Obama Administration was relying on to pay for those subsidies through the IRS penalties.

And if ObamaCare goes down? Well, we can just write off the literally billions of dollars it cost to put together the dysfunctional website, the costs of the Justice Department defending this legal abortion,  the costs to market it and try to sell it, the lost productivity and man hours in both the private and public sector, and any other monies already paid out. All because this president and his party were so arrogant, so intent on getting their own way, so anxious to get this through no matter what the American people wanted that they were willing to ignore the law and circumvent the normal reconciliation process with the senate that is supposed to iron out errors like this because of Scott Brown's surprise election in Massachusetts.

There is not one member of congress who went along with this costly charade worthy of re-election. They knew how wrong it was, but they did it anyway.


 


Don't pop the champagne corks yet. The Obama Department of Justice is sure to appeal this, and the Supremes can either abrogate the ruling, agree with the lower court or simply refuse to hear the case, so that the lower court's ruling stands. Or they can appeal to the DC Court for an en banc hearing, requiring the full court to hear an appeal. Given some of the legal detritus the Regime has been able to pack the DC Circuit with, they might just prevail, in which case it is the plaintiffs whom would have to appeal to the Supreme Court.

Stay tuned...

A Sheep In Wolf's Clothing: The Supreme Court Runs And Hides

 

The Roberts Supreme Court issued two decisions today that are essentially sheep in wolf's clothing. That is, they are intended to look like originalist decisions that support the Constitution, but they are so hedged and nuanced as to be almost meaningless.

One of the cases, Burwell v. Hobby Lobby is fairly well known. The issue here was whether the Obama Administration could require a corporation or other institution ( such as a Catholic University) to include abortificants and other contraceptive items required by ObamaCare in violation of its religious principles.

The other was Harris v. Quinn, where the matter in question was whether home health care workers, many of whom take care of disabled relatives are required to kick in an 'agency fee' for negotiating pay and benefits to public employee unions even if the workers involved are not members of the union and do not want to join or support the union.

Let's look at Harris vs. Quinn first, which was PR'ed as a 'death blow' to public employee unions. Nothing could be further from the truth. What the Court did here was to rule so narrowly that it avoided the essential issue.

Pamela Harris gets paid to take care of her developmentally disabled son in Illinois, which made a deal with the SEIU as the union of choice to collect those 'fees'. She challenged the state's right to designate a union of public employees as their sole representative.

In a 1977 ruling, Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, the Court ruled that public employee Unions could collect such fees but not use them for political activities, although pro-labor politicians made sure that there was little or no oversight to give it any teeth.

The argument for Ms. Harris was a simple First Amendment one - whether the compulsory fees violated her right of free speech, since the State of Illinois was in essence forcing her to support an organization, the SEIU, whose politics she disagreed with.

That was the essential issue, and anyone who understands the Constitution knows that compelling someone to support politics they disagree with - say, spending $40 million dollars to get Barack Obama elected president-as a condition of employment violates their First Amendment rights.

Yet so ingrained is the Ponzi scheme by which the Democratic party funds itself through forced contributions from public employee union paychecks paid for by the public and then 'negotiates' pay and benefits with the very people that put them in office that she actually lost in a couple of th elower courts and had to appeal.

 

The Court sidestepped that by ruling that only home care workers were exempted and noting in the decision that prior rulings legalizing this enforced levy from workers and from taxpayers could continue. The obvious question no one's asking is that if Ms. Harris' rights were deemed violated, aren't the rights of a janitor or a clerk's who likewise has to kick in to support the union's political agenda? This was a chance for a sweeping ruling that would have defended the First Amendment the Court deliberately avoided. Since it was 5-4, I suspect Chief Justice John Robert's hand in this.

At best, this may be a precedent to take down public employee unions like the SEIU and AFSCME and end their racket at a later date.

Burwell v. Hobby Lobby was an even bigger example of deliberately avoiding the defense of a clear constitutional principle.

The Court never even bothered to go near the main argument, the fact that by requiring Hobby Lobby to provide abortificants and contraceptives as part of the ObamaCare mandate the free practice clause of the First Amendment was being urinated on. Instead, they again narrowed down their ruling to the point that it was meaningless. First, they limited the things Hobby Lobby need not pay for to three specific abortificants, most notably the morning after pill. Upon ''certifying that it opposes contraceptive coverage', the insurance company involved is required to provide these items 'for free', which of course means that Hobby Lobby will still be paying for them because they will be figured into the premium the insurance company charges them!

What we're talking about is an average cost for these items of around $9 a month over the counter -  without any insurance offset.

What everyone seems to want to avoid is that contraception, like sex itself,  is a choice. In fact, that's really what both these decisions were about. Who chooses? Is it government or the individual? And does the government have the right to force such basic choices on people? Who you have to pay off as a condition of employment? What you have to provide as an employer beyond the obvious realms of a safe working environment and an agreed upon rate of pay no matter what your principles? Would the Court have ruled, for instance, that Muslims are to be required to handle pork and alcohol if that's part of their job requirement? Isn't that the same principle, the free practice of religion guaranteed in the First Amendment? Obviously not anymore.  Welcome to Obama's America.

 

The Roberts Court is going to be remembered for its cowardice and willingness to punt rather than the exercise of what is supposedly its job, to interpret and rule on the Constitution.

And the fact that this was yet another 5-4 decision doesn't bode well for our liberties.Not at all.

Rep. Joe Wilson Had It Right When He Yelled Out 'You Lie' To Obama

Remember the firestorm that ensued when Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) yelled out "You lie" during a speech President Obama was giving to a joint session of congress on ObamaCare in 2009?

He was castigated by members of both parties, the ObamaMedia literally went insane and he was made to apologize, saying,

This evening I let my emotions get the best of me when listening to the President's remarks regarding the coverage of illegal immigrants in the health care bill. While I disagree with the President's statement, my comments were inappropriate and regrettable. I extend sincere apologies to the President for this lack of civility.

Now, people remember that, but what everyone forgets is what prompted the outburst. President Obama had just said, "There are also those who claim that our reform effort will insure illegal immigrants. This, too, is false – the reforms I'm proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally."

The usual suspects backed him up on that too. Factcheck.org, for instance said at the time that “Obama was correct when he said his plan wouldn’t insure illegal immigrants; the House bill expressly forbids giving subsidies to those who are in the country illegally.”

Actually, it doesn't. Not only doesn't ObamaCare bar non-citizens from buying their own health insurance coverage through the health insurance exchange, but prior to the president's speech, Democrats twice rejected amendments to the bill requiring documentation of legal status in the United States in order to receive ObamaCare benefits, something President Obama knew full well.

Flash forward to the present.

The Spanish-language version of the Covered California exchange says: “Fear not if you are undocumented and want to enroll your family in health insurance.” Nowhere on the site does it mention that illegal aliens aren't eligible for benefits or prohibited by law from enrolling in ObamaCare.

That language is present on every ObamaCare site across the country I checked...in Spanish and 11 other languages.

And that's no accident. President Obama even admitted it on March 6, 2014 in a town hall meeting with Spanish language Telemundo and Univision. He openly stated that Obamacare will make no effort to determine whether anyone who applies is actually a citizen or legal resident and sign up data will not be used for enforcing immigration laws. "None of the information that is provided in order for you to obtain health insurance is in any way transferred to immigration services. So that's something we've been very clear about."

Interestingly, he blamed congress for any deportations that have occurred, saying he has already stretched his "administrative capacity very far" by taking immigration actions using "prosecutorial discretion," a fancy way of saying that the Administration isn't prosecuting illegal aliens in deportation hearings or making much of an effort to find and deport the over 500,000 illegal aliens who already have outstanding deportation orders filed against them.

What this amounts to is that illegal aliens are definitely applying for ObamaCare, especially since most of them qualify for the subsidies, at least as far as any income they're reporting goes, since many both work under the table and collect aid like welfare benefits and food stamps. Certainly it would be interesting to see exactly how many of the enrollees the president is thumping his chest about just happen to be in the country illegally.

So we now know Rep. Joe Wilson had it exactly right. The President was lying through his teeth, and he knew it even as Rep. Wilson called him out on it. The meme has already shifted from 'no non-citizens will be eligible for ObamaCare' to 'why shouldn't undocumented workers be covered?'

Illegal aliens will receive taxpayer funded ObamaCare benefits the same way they already receive Section 8 housing, food stamps, welfare, and tax refunds for earned income credit and for children who may or may not exist. They simply apply, and the system processes them with a deliberate 'don't ask, don't tell' policy.

No one's checking, not really. And if course, if you object to being robbed blind to pay for it and to being lied to to facilitate the theft and the con, you're simply ra-aaa-a-cist.

It's Scapegoat Time In ObamaLand - Sebelius 'Resigns'

It's official. The foul Kommissar in charge of dismantling America's health system and imposing ObamaCare is 'resigning' effective immediately and President Obama is going to nominate Sylvia Mathews Burwell, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, to replace her.

But wait a minute. Here we were being told ObamaCare was going so well! Of course, if you believe that, you deserve to.

Just the numerous changes the president illegally made to the law to keep it from imploding ought to tell you all is not well when it comes to ObamaCare. Politicians don't change something that's working, or kick the person in charge out on the streets. I'm being generous when I estimate that those '7 million sign ups' President Obama was thumping his chest about the other day probably equals something like 3 million actual customers, and most of those are medicaid patients 'buying' free care anyway. Meanwhile, something like five million Americans have lost their coverage entirely.And just wait until after the midterms, when the real carnage kicks in as the waivers end.

Sylvia Mathews Burwell is a loyal clintonista and Democrat functionary, and unlike Sibelius she's apparently bright enough not to lie so obviously in public. Her ability to conjure numbers out of thin air regardless of reality (based on what the Obama OMB has projected in the last year or so) should be a useful talent as well.

As for Sebelius, she deserves a special reward for her part in this. I'm certain she'll receive it, in this world or the next.

Peddle your bicycle back to Kansas, creep. But given how unpopular ObamaCare is in the Sunflower State and across the nation, you might be better off staying in DC.

 

How Polls Work - And How Pew Got The Answer They Wanted On ObamaCare

 

The Pew Trust recently came out with a poll that the Obama media eagerly seized on - that the majority of Americans want congress to tweak the law to make it work rather than repealing it.

Ace reveals how Pew managed this nice little piece of propaganda:

Well, imagine how you, personally, would inquire into the preferred course of action of Obamacare supporters. You might give them the options of "Work to improve it anyway," or "Stay out of the way of it/Let it collapse under its own weight," and so forth.

Here are the options -- two of them -- that Pew gave respondents to choose from:

What do you think elected officials who oppose the health care law should do now that the law has started to take effect? Should they [X] or should they [Y]?

Do what they can to make the law work as well as possible

Do what they can to make the law fail

Emphasis added.

In other words, people weren't given a 'repeal' option. Their choices were limited to tweaking this failed bit of socialist mayhem or sabotaging it.

Most people would still choose a less aggressive, underhanded-sounding response, like "Let it collapse under its own weight."

But Pew refuses respondents that choice, insisting that people either declare their desire to "make Obamacare work the best we can, by Golly!" or declare themselves hostage-taking terrorists of the sort often decried by one Harry Reid.

Why, you'd almost think that major institutions of the media are entirely captured by the political left or something.

It would be even more interesting to see whether Pew used another common tactic - vastly oversampling Democrats, or picking respondents from largely Democrat dominated urban areas.

Since Pew is self-funded, their polls normally are fairly legitimate,but obviously someone got to somebody here - almost certainly in response to a direct request from the White House.

Welcome to the world of 'polling'.

Obama Spends $17M Per Month Of Our Money Advertising ObamaCare

 

According to Pravda-On-The Hudson, the Obama Administration is spending $17M per monthof your tax dollars advertising for ObamaCare:

From January until the end of March, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which runs the HealthCare.gov site and administers the Affordable Care Act, will have spent $52 million on paid media, officials said. Conservative opponents of the law have concentrated their spending on ads focusing on Democratic candidates and sowing doubts about the viability of the law.

The idea is to get young, uninsured Americans to sign up for President Obama's signature program - high, unaffordable pricing, minimal coverage, high deductibles,numerous glitches and abominable security for personal data. Not surprisingly, they're avoiding it like the plague.

The president's new tactic reveals exactly how stupid he thinks we all are:

Russian troops were rolling through Crimea when Denis R. McDonough, the White House chief of staff and a foreign policy expert, was deployed on a mission to do media outreach. But the focus of Mr. McDonough’s calls to local talk radio stations was not geopolitical tensions in Eastern Europe, it was health care.

Mr. McDonough chatted with Andy Baskin and Jeff Phelps, hosts of a popular sports talk radio program on WKRK-FM (92.3) in Cleveland, about the coming N.F.L. draft, basketball at the White House and his days playing college football in Minnesota. Mr. McDonough then pitched a new website featuring games, videos and superstar athletes explaining the benefits of health insurance: a sports-themed portal to HealthCare.gov.

“We’ve all seen it happen,” said Mr. McDonough, promoting the portal, GamePlan4Me, to the hosts of “Baskin & Phelps” and their mostly young, mostly male audience. “Somebody’s playing hoops, and they blow out a knee or something. And then all of a sudden, if you don’t have health care, you’re going to bankrupt yourself.”

Actually, with the standard deductible for Bronze coverage being between a hefty $5,000 to to $6,350 for a single adult, the average person is going to go bankrupt with that kind of injury whether he or she buys ObamaCare or not. As a matter of fact, given the stiff premiums, you might go bankrupt even if you avoid a major injury.

But again, this president thinks everyone's stupid but him and that you'll be distracted by games and celebrity endorsements.

The only people whom win in this con game are people who qualify for MedicAid, AKA free stuff. Which of course, was always what this was about - government control and a huge transfer of wealth from the Middle class  to the entitlement class.

The fact that the president, congress and the rest of the Ruling Class are trying to force you to buy into this cynical fraud when they  aren't willing to take advantage of this 'wonderful program' themselves ought to clue you in to how horrible it really is.

ObamaCare Strikes Again! Colorado Exchange Director Indicted for Fraud, Theft

Christa Ann McClure, the director of the failed ObamaCare health exchange Connect for Health Colorado was placed on administrative leave when the state discovered she'd been indicted for stealing from a non-profit housing agency in Billings, Montana.

According to the Denver Post, she failed to notify Connect for Health Colorado about the pending accusations against her when she applied for the $130,000 job as director:

She was indicted Jan. 16 and notified her current Denver employer, the state-sponsored health exchange, on Monday, a few days after the story broke in Montana media, Connect for Health spokesman Ben Davis said in a telephone interview.

Connect for Health performed a criminal background check and checked references before hiring McClure in March, Davis said.

"She was completely clean," he said. Her position as executive director of Housing Montana of Billings, he said, made her well-qualified for her post as Connect for Health's director of partner engagement — she was liaison with state and federal partners, such as Medicaid officials. The job pays $130,000 a year.


I guess they didn't check references and vet her all that closely, eh? I wonder if she used to be associated with ACORN? Sounds like it:

McClure was released pending trial, now scheduled for June. Each of the counts in the indictment against her carry potential penalties of five, 10 or 20 years in prison and a fine of $250,000.

The 12-page indictment alleges that, while serving as executive director of the federally funded Housing Montana, McClure, between 2008 and 2010, paid herself "significant sums" for consulting services, although she was already on the payroll as a full-time employee.

She also made payments to her family and used federal money for personal travel, to pay family bills and to buy consulting services, the indictment alleges.

She also is accused of charging homeowners for a $750 warranty that did not exist, converting a laptop for personal use, inflating the hours she was to be compensated and writing herself a $21,000 check to which she was not entitled.


If the 'background checks' on top level executives for ObamaCare are this loose, can you just imagine what they're like for the navigators and other employees...who have access to all your personal data?

Law? What Law? Another Illegal Change To ObamaCare

President Obama pulled another lawless stunt today, this time again with ObamaCare. Last year,the president postponed the individual mandate. This year, in spite of the happy talk coming from his loyal acolytes, the abject failure and the unpopularity of ObamaCare is becoming more and more evident, to the point where it was actually threatening to hurt Democrat prospects in the midterms.

So the president simply punted again.

According to the law passed by Congress and signed by the president, businesses with 50 or more full-time employees are required to provide them with health insurance as of January 1, 2014. Today however, the Treasury Department announced that employers with fewer than 100 workers won’t have to provide health insurance for them until 2016.

In fact, the president has made 13 major changes to ObamaCare in the past year, all of them blatantly illegal. And if that wasn't bad enough, the changes were made not just to correct glitches in what may be the worst written law in our history, but for partisan political purposes.

Remember when those of us warning about ObamaCare and what it was likely to do were told smugly to shut up because 'it's settled law'?

Apparently it is until this president decides it isn't, something that contradicts directly his constitutional responsibility as head of the executive branch. And he continues to get away with it, event though the partisan media admits it's strictly for his own political expediency, to “limit election-year damage” as the AP put it.

There's an interesting sidelight here. Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner abruptly retreated yesterday from the positive noises he was making up until now about a House amnesty bill, claiming that he didn't trust the president to carry out the enforcement parts of any law on immigration. Democrat Senator Chuck Schumer promptly took up the game just this morning, suggesting that congress pass an amnesty law now that would only tale effect once President Obama was out of office.

By coming out today with yet another illegal ObamaCare delay, President Obama couldn't have underlined the very good reasons for that lack of trust any better if he had tried.

This may very well put a a halt to the Republican establishment's efforts to push through amnesty for now, and certainly no one in the GOP is likely to insist that the president follow the law on ObamaCare to the letter. But this is very much a two edged sword, and I don't think the timing was coincidental.

By coming out with this so soon after Boehner's remarks about not trusting the president to enforce border security,President Obama was sending a very obvious message.

He could care less about working with congress on this or most other issues. After the midterms, look for him to institute amnesty of some kind by executive order.

World's Most Famous Hacker calls ObamaCare Site's Complete Lack of Security "Shameful"

 

You might want to read this before you try to enroll in ObamaCare.

Kevin Mitnick used to be the world's most-wanted cyber criminal. Nowadays, He's one of the most sought after web security experts in the world, and it was in that capacity he issued a report at the request of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee on the ObamaCare website:

Mitnick's letter, submitted to panel Chairman Lamar Smith, R-Texas, and ranking member Eddie Bernice Johnson, D-Texas, held comments from several leading security experts.

"It's shameful the team that built the Healthcare.gov site implemented minimal, if any, security best practices to mitigate the significant risk of a system compromise." ...

Mitnick concluded that, "After reading the documents provided by David Kennedy that detailed numerous security vulnerabilities associated with the Healthcare.gov Website, it's clear that the management team did not consider security as a priority."

His comments were backed up by testimony by Kennedy, who is CEO and founder of TrustedSec LLC and a self-described "white hat hacker," meaning someone who hacks in order to fix security flaws and not commit cybercrime. In November, Kennedy and other experts testified before the same panel about security issues on Healthcare.gov.

Kennedy testified that most of the flaws they identified at the time still exist on the site, and said "indeed, it's getting worse," telling the panel that he and other experts have seen little improvement in the past two months.

"Nothing has really changed since our November 19 testimony," Kennedy said.

Not to mention that the ObamaCare 'navigators', mostly recruited from ACORN and similar fraud factories are not even required to go through a criminal background check and have full access to your most intimate personal and financial data. It's an identity thief's paradise.

Other experts who looked at Kennedy's results were even more explicit in how dangerous the site is:

“The site is fundamentally flawed in ways that make it dangerous to people who use it,” said Kevin Johnson, one of the experts who reviewed Kennedy’s findings.

Johnson said that one of the most troubling issues was that a hacker could upload malicious code to the site, then attack other HealthCare.gov users.

“You can take control of their computers,” said Johnson, chief executive of a firm known as Secure Ideas and a teacher at the non-profit SANS Institute, the world’s biggest organization that trains and certifies cyber security professionals.

Remember, all these experts are doing is a passive investigation - just looking at the code. None of them have been allowed to perform active analysis, an actual attempt to hack the site under supervision in order to fully expose its security flaws. That's something that would in itself be criminal without the regime signing off on it. An needless to say, the Obama Administration is reluctant, to put it mildly, to allow anything like that.

The publicity would be unfortunate, no?

Hilarious! Jimmie Kimmel Savages ObamaCare

And young ObamaBots,ignorantly supporting something that is clearly not in their best interest...here's the transcript:

JIMMY KIMMEL, HOST: The rollout of the Affordable Care Act continues to be terrible. First, there was technical problems with the Healthcare.gov website. Now comes news that not enough young and healthy Americans are signing up for coverage, which is crucial for the success of the program. The way insurance works is you need all the young healthy people to pay for insurance and not use it until they get old and unhealthy. And so far, only a quarter of the 2.2 million people who signed up are between 18 to 34, 24 percent.

The White House was hoping for closer to 38 percent. Why they would hope that, I don't know. They expect young people to buy insurance at the same time the PlayStation 4 comes out? You know, if you want young people to sign up, maybe you shouldn’t have made the law so that you can stay on your parents’ plan until you turn 26. What kid is going to say, “You know, no thanks, mom and dad, I've got the premiums covered actually?”

The deadline to sign up is March 31. In my experience, if you want to get young people to do something, all you have to do is tell them specifically not to do something. Right? Or give ten free lives in Candy Crush to the first two million subscribers.

But just to make sure the younger people do sign up, the Obama administration is rolling out a new ad campaign that's targeted specifically at the young and vibrant.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ALEX: Hi. I'm Alex, and this is my wife Martha, and we're both approaching the big 6-0.

MARTHA: And we have health care issues to deal with.

ALEX: I take blood pressure medication.

MARTHA: And Levitra.

ALEX: Yes. And Martha’s got beta blockers and something for her osteoporosis. And it’s not cheap.

MARTHA: But fortunately we don't have to pay for it.

ALEX: No, you do.

MARTHA: That’s right. You young people are paying for our drugs and our doctors.

ALEX: Not to mention our Social Security and our Medicare when we retire to Boca. And you know why?

MARTHA: Because you don't vote.

ALEX: And we do.

MARTHA: That’s right. Hope you enjoy that Burning Guy festival.

ALEX: Come on, Martha, let's go find that Levitra.

MARTHA: Oh, Alex!

ANNOUNCER: The Affordable Care Act. Next time, maybe pick up a newspaper.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KIMMEL: A newspaper FYI is like an iPad made of trees.

KIMMEL: In case you aren’t disgusted enough with government waste, a watchdog agency that monitors government spending has just revealed that penis pumps between the years 2006 and 2011 cost the U.S. Medicare program how much? $172 million. I didn't even know penis pumps were a real thing. I thought it was like x-ray specs or something. But apparently they are. They're one of the available treatments for erectile dysfunction. Medicare paid for almost half a million of them.

Wow, imagine how the countries that we owe money to feel about that. “They're over there blowing it on penis pumps.” I don't want to be reactionary. I know a lot of these programs sound dumber than they actually are when you analyze them, but it does seem like a waste. Although some Americans seem to be pretty happy about it.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ALEX (IN BED WITH MARTHA): Hi. Alex and Martha again.

MARTHA: We just wanted to say thank you for the penis pump.

ALEX: Yeah. I can't believe you got this for me. You guys are the greatest. Now back to your unpaid internships.

MARTHA: You're bad.

ALEX: Let me show you how bad. (Alex and Martha then slip under the covers.)

ANNOUNCER: The Affordable Care Act. Yup, you’re paying for that too.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KIMMEL: Thanks Alex and Martha.



Priceless!

(H/T, Newsbusters)

The New ObamaCare Taxes And Fees Coming In2014

 

Come the New Year, our Dear Leader has a number of taxes and fees hidden deep in the ObamaCare law and the accompanying HHS regulations scheduled to affect your insurance premiums and income-tax bills.

Here are just a few of the things our president has planned for you:

The new taxes and fees have a 2 percent levy on every health plan, whether you have a waiver or not or whether you're one of the lucky ones with employer provided healthcare. That's expected to net about $8 billion for ObamaCare in 2014 and increase to $14.3 billion by 2018.

Then there’s also a $2 fee per policy that goes into a new medical-research trust fund called the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute.

Your insurer is going to pass that on to you in the form of higher premiums,deductibles and co-pays.

Then there's this beauty. Under ObamaCare, An individual taxpayer earning more than $200,000 and a married couple earning more than $250,000 will get hit for an added 0.9 percent Medicare surtax on top of the existing 1.45 percent Medicare payroll tax. They’ll also pay an extra 3.8 percent Medicare tax on unearned income, such as investment dividends, rental income and capital gains. That term 'unearned income' is a real insult, since this money was already taxed once as income before it was invested. What we're talking about here is double taxation.

But wait, there's more. There's no threshold on these taxes for inflation. This means that unless there's a fix of some kind or ObamaCare's repealed, more and more people will be subject to these taxes as inflation boosts incomes.

Starting in 2014, your employer (and, of course, that means you since it will be passed onin one form or another) will begin paying a fresh new $63 annual ObamaCare fee, to cover the extra cost of insuring other people’s pre-existing conditions.The money will go into a fund administered by the Health and Human Services Department and is supposed to be used to cushion health insurance companies from the costs of covering uninsured people with medical problems. Under the law, insurers will be forbidden from turning away the sick as of Jan. 1, 2014.

Since the president has now torpedoed the individual mandate, expect both the amount of people waiting until they get sick to apply for insurance as well as the amount of this fee to skyrocket.

Things as diverse as your kid's braces, hip and knee replacements and even veterinary bills are going to be affected by a brand spankin' new 2.3 percent excise tax on medical devices. Lefties don;t realize that businesses don't pay taxes and fees, they simply build them into the prices they charge consumers.

Of course, when it comes to prostheses and hip and knee replacements, you may not be able to get them at any price if you're not deemed worthy by the The Independent Payment Advisory Boards, AKA Death Panels.

The threshold for Medical Itemized Deductions gets raised from 7.5% to 10% of AGI. Currently, those of you who paid high medical expenses not reimbursed by your insurance are allowed a deduction if those expenses exceed 7.5 percent of your adjusted gross income (AGI). The new provision imposes a threshold of 10 percent of AGI.

And by the way, the HHS regulations allow Secretary Sebelius to raise most of these fees and taxes 'at the secretary's discretion.'

The results of ObamaCare are going to be pretty self evident unless it's totally repealed fairly quickly.We're already seeing the signs.

Healthcare is going to be rationed extensively, especially on the middle class who don't qualify for subsidies.Do not be surprised if, ultimately,it is used as a political weapon against th eregimes's perceived 'enemies' just as the IRS was.

The 28 hour work week will slowly become the standard work week (four 7 hour days), as people settle into more government dependency and lower expectations and income for themselves and their children. In fact, birth rates will lower, especially among people with the middle class idea of actually being able to support their own offspring before having them.I've already seen examples in my own life of married couples who simply decided they couldn't afford to have children and maintain even a lower middle class lifestyle. Often, it amounted to a series of postponements that ended when the woman involved simply became too old for childbirth.

Businesses will be increasingly more difficult to start, and a lot less people will have the ambition or be able to raise the capital to do so.That will affect both employment and income.  Most small businesses get their start up money not from bank loans, but from an individual's savings or personal credit line. Less income means less business startups.

Expect a Soviet-style 'black market'  economy based on barter, off th ebooks employment and under the table cash sales to develop as well.

Working two or more jobs to pay the bills will become extremely common for many people with families to support or any ambitions for themselves or their children. Others will happily fall into what amounts to a permanent dependent class. The massive increases in people on what amounts to permanent disability and in food stamp payouts are indicators of what will become a growing trend. After all, if it's a choice between becoming the payer or the payee, the screwed or the beneficiary, a lot of people are gong to opt for that second option.

Unless it's repealed, ObamaCare is going to transform our national character into something very different. We can still turn things around, but the hour gets late.

The ObamaCare Xmas Present Obama Plans - Single Payer And A Taxpayer Bailout

Unfortunately, here's a nasty lump of coal for your stocking, courtesy of President Obama and his Democrats.For al the talk about ObamaCare crashing and burning on its own, did you really think our Dear Leader and his friends were going to let that happen just because it's dysfunctional and the American people are finally on to what a plundering of the nation's wealth it is?

Regular readers of these pages will know that I have always said that ObamaCare was merely intended as a gateway to force single payer, government run healthcare on the nation, like it or not. Harry Reid and others have admitted as much. As Dr. Charles Krauthammer explains above, the pathway to single payer was baked into this destructive piece of tyranny from the start, with provisions for a massive, mandated taxpayer bailout if not enough people sign up for the exchanges...exactly what's happening now.

Insurance companies will become government-controlled lackeys, you and your family will be shaken down to pay ultra high rates for rationed, inferior health care and yet another one of those quasi-independent occupations that used to provide Americans with a middle class living will disappear as insurance agents are replaced by ObamaCare navigators.

The president and his team will try to shove this through by executive order if need be, citing massive damage to the insurance industry unless they bail it out. They will, of course, not mention that this is damage they willfully caused.Or that simply revoking ObamaCare would allow the industry to rebuild over time.

One possible prevention is a bill passed in congress that prevents a bailout of the insurance companies in exchange for raising the debt ceiling...if the Republicans unite behind it, a big if. Marco Rubio is pushing for just such a bill right now in the Senate, and provided Boehner and the House go along there might be enough vulnerable Democrats in congress to support it as well.

As an alternative, the House could simply stand up to the president for once, do the job the Constitution mandated them to do and refuse to allocate funds for the bailout.

In any event, you need to contact your members of congress and insist on no bailout for insurance companies. Now.

Once Again, Obama Shows His Contempt For His Fellow Americans

President Barack Obama, in response to some pointed questions directed at White House Spokes person Jay Carny finally went ahead and signed up for ObamaCare. The way he did it is an indication of how much contempt he actually has for middle class Americans he wants to force on to ObamaCare.

First of all, the president already has the best health coverage your money can buy free of charge from military physicians of the White House Medical Unit.

So this is 'symbolic'. And to add insult to injury, he signed up for ObamaCare's Bronze coverage, the cheapest available and the one with the most minimal coverage, which of course he'll never use, even after his term in office is over. And did he sign up using the ridiculous website he spent close to a billion dollars of our money on? Are you kidding?

Obama also did not enroll through the troubled Healthcare.gov or the D.C. exchange’s website. Aides signed him up in person over the weekend, due to the “complicated nature of the President’s case,” the White House aide said. Some of Obama’s personal information is not readily accessible on the government databases used by the website for identity verification.

So, our president signed up for peon level coverage he will never use, exempted his family, didn't even have to struggle with the dysfunctional website and isn't going to have his personal information subject to those 'navigators' he wants the rest of us to entrust our own personal data to who lack even a criminal background check as a prerequisite to be hired.

After all the lies, the misery and lost jobs and income this president is directly responsible for, somehow he got the notion that this 'symbolic gesture' is going to look good and make us forget about that.

Simply astounding.

Crash And Burn - Obama Waives Individual Mandate On ObamaCare

I can't help laughing out loud at this, schadenfreude though it may be.

President Obama has made the 14th illegal change to 'settled law' (please, my sides!), of course without consulting congress.

Our Dear Leader has now decided to suspend the individual mandate provision of ObamaCare for a year or possibly even longer:

The Obama administration will not require the millions of Americans who received health-insurance plan cancellation notices to purchase a new policy next year.

They’re granting those consumers an exemption from the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate, a Department of Heath and Human Services spokeswoman confirmed. The mandate requires everyone to have health insurance or face a tax penalty, the greater of $95 or 1 percent of income in 2014.

The administration will also allow those consumers to sign up for catastrophic coverage. Those bare-bones plans are available to people who are under 30 or qualify for a “hardship exemption.”

But since there are now no fines to pay, why would anyone bother to buy catastrophic insurance..since they can just purchase it when they have that car accident or find out they've contracted a disease? And without the mandate (an unconstitutional tax) of course, there's no way to pay for ObamaCare anyway except more government spending, and quite possibly a tax payer bail out.So much for another lie we were told, about how ObamaCare was going to lower the deficit.Remember that one?

Let's look back at how this progressed. First, President Obama and his team as well as a number of Democrat members of congress lied to the entire nation knowingly about how people who were satisfied with their current healthcare would be able to keep it.

Meanwhile, the president was handing out waivers to the politically connected and to government bureaucrats at state and city levels. And when major corporations voiced discomfort over what ObamaCare was going to do to their bottom lines, the president illegally changed the law to postpone the employer mandate until after the 2014 midterms.

Then, when the lie became became apparent about Americans being able to keep their policies if they wanted to and people's policies began being canceled by the busload, we were told that by the president and his team that ObamaCare was a great bargain with great, affordable coverage. And our Dear Leader told us (in the midst of a ludicrously self-serving non-apology) that all he was doing was trying to protect us from 'bad apple insurance companies' with lousy, inadequate policies. You see, we were all just too stupid to realize how bad those policies we liked were and what an amazing boon our Dear Leader was giving us.

Congress and their staffers didn't share that opinion and screamed bloody murder, so the president allowed a change in the law again and let them have a 70% subsidy to cover their precious behinds.Oh, and President Obama? He likes his healthcare just fine thank you. And he's going to keep it. He's yet to sign up for ObamaCare, and neither has his family. That's for, you known, his inferiors.

As people realized what lousy coverage ObamaCare actually was going to offer them at as much as ten times what they were paying before, and as even more policies got canceled, President Obama changed things again, saying that he would allow those awful insurance companies to issue those rotten policies the peasants loved so much, but without changing thew law, leaving those companies open to lawsuits and litigation if he changed his mind again!

Needless to say, they weren't anxious to fall into that trap. Aside from the fact that the policies no longer existed because of the new law, and actuarial rates had already been set for 2014. So that even if the companies wanted to bring the new policies back, it would have cost them millions of dollars in administrative costs on top of the millions they had already spent tooling up for the restrictions imposed on them by ObamaCare over the last three years and exposed them to serious liability and financial loss.

Meanwhile, the big ObamaCare roll out turned out to be one of the biggest fiascoes in American History. At a cost of almost a billion dollars and with three years to put it together, the company the company this president gave a no bid contract to - with of course, an Obama donor and an old crony of the First Lady at the wheel - put together a garbage website that still lacks the capability of even allowing people to actually buy the overpriced garbage coverage ObamaCare is selling. All they can do, provided they get lucky and the site is actually up is to 'register', inputting all their personal data to a site with totally inadequate security provisions and able to be accessed by 'navigators' who aren't even given a criminal background check before they're hired. And with good reason, because a lot of them come straight from ACORN, where fraud was a game everyone could play.

So now, having destroyed millions of people's insurance coverage, created havoc in the industry, cost people their jobs and the cutting of their hours to comply with ObamaCare's insane diktats and wasted literally billions of taxpayer dollars, our Dear Leader has now decided he'll allow people to buy a bare-bones catastrophic plan instead. While destroying any incentive for them to do so even if they wanted to, because these plans aren't going to be able to be created, assessed by actuaries for risk, written up, billed correctly and made available for purchase on a website that still doesn't work in the remaining 11 days of 2013.

And as Avik Roy notes, the catastrophic plans the president is allowing are hardly better than no coverage at all.

Thanks to this president, far less people have insurance coverage today then did before he slithered into the Oval Office.

Like the coward he is, the president announced this at a rare news conference. On a Friday afternoon, of course. During which the Obama website went down . Again.

Ya Basta. Enough.

If President Obama actually worked for a living as any kind of executive for a private company or even a non-profit, he would have been fired a long time ago for sheer incompetence and possibly imprisoned for criminal fraud.If he was a realtor, a stockbroker, a doctor or a lawyer, he would have been disbarred or had his license to practice yanked ages ago. And if he were a military officer who commanded an operation with this level of ineptness and sheer dishonesty, he would have been cashiered and tossed out of the service on his rear end and possibly even do some stockade or brig time.

And this is just one of his colossal failures.

We don't put presidents in jail, and that's both logical and proper. But henceforth, I am not going to take seriously anyone whom suggests that this president shouldn't be impeached. Nor will I take seriously from now on anyone who says that impeachment isn't richly deserved and warranted, or that it would not be the best course for the country.

While the political circumstances don't allow for it just yet, they very well may soon, provided the Republican Party doesn't snatch defeat from the jaws of victory again. In fact, it would restore a considerable amount of my respect for the Democrats if they put country ahead of party and made this a bipartisan effort, unlikely though that may be.

It's high time we sent President Barack Hussein Obama packing. In fact, it's long past time we did so.

How To Flush Obamacare Talking Points The White House Designed To Ruin Your Thanksgiving

 

If any further proof were needed how lacking in common decency the Obama Administration is, be aware that thanks to the White House and Organizing for Action, some of your guests have been instructed to come to your family Thanksgiving dinner armed with talking points and told to 'get in their faces' about the ObamaCare fiasco.

I can't think of anything more contemptible, but since it might happen, the Federalist's Ben Domenech has thoughtfully provided us with some easy to use rebuttals to shut the robots up, hopefully. Here's a slice:

President Obama has done a lot of things I dislike, but ruining Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner is a bit much. And to let him be clear: that’s exactly what he’s doing. Instead of letting families argue about perfectly reasonable things to discuss over holiday dinners – such as when Mike Shanahan should be fired, which Bound 2 parody is the best, and whether Miley Cyrus should be launched into the sun for the good of humanity – the president wants to insist on inserting his priorities into family gatherings across the country. “I understand you worked hard to brine this bird, but let’s refocus on what matters: why you haven’t signed up at healthcare.gov yet. Did you hear it’s getting much better? Don’t talk about the Iron Bowl or Aunt Jenny’s wedding, let’s turn this conversation back to what really matters: avoiding a death spiral and ensuring stability in the insurance market!”

We’ve certainly come very far from an era when people of different political mind were urged to set aside their differences and come together for a meal and football and gather round the hearth in peace. Instead we’re in the era of “argue with your neighbors, get in their face”. {...}

What’s more, now that these insufferable partisans in the administration have distributed their talkers, you’re a lot more likely to hear any one of these ten statements at tomorrow’s dinner, to which I am now obligated to offer a prebuttal. And yes, Mr. President, I hate you for making me write this.


1) Healthcare.gov may suck, but state exchanges are performing really well.

No, most of them aren’t. They’re way behind, too. Exchanges such as those in Oregon, Colorado, Maryland, Vermont, Hawaii, and other states which have led the charge in implementation have fallen flat on their faces. Oregon, which had total buy-in at all levels of the state and no political opposition to speak of, has signed up exactly zero people. And while states like California, Connecticut, and Kentucky have had better success, the vast majority of signups in the state exchanges are within Medicaid, not private insurance – in part because the eligibility is easier to determine. But that has negative outcomes as well, as those with private insurance are now required to go on Medicaid – such as this woman in Washington state.

2) The website’s problem is demand and once the front-end problems are fixed, it’ll work great.

No, it’s not – in fact, the website couldn’t even handle 500 visitors without problems according to internal documents from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, released in hearings last week (the all-caps emails are the best ones). The real problem with the website at this point isn’t capacity at all: it’s the extremely delayed back-end – major portions of which apparently haven’t even been built yet – which are supposed to hand off people to the actual insurers they select, and handle the payments for plans (the point at which people are actually “enrolled”). Collecting these premiums and making sure insurers get them has always been the heaviest lift under Obamacare, and the lack of these systems is far more problematic than just the front-end frustrations of delays and glitches. It’s along the lines of having an Expedia-like site that “works” because you can select your flight, but doesn’t actually have the capability for sellers to charge you, or reserve your ticket. Which is, let’s face it, kind of key. There is no public deadline for these remaining critical fixes, and they’ve already missed their first deadline for the front-end.

3) Only a few young and healthy people will pay more – for most people, they will keep their plans or have something better.

No, actually, premiums are going up just about everywhere, and for most people. In 41 states, premiums in the individual market are going up by an average of 41%. 

Only eight states – generally those with the most heavily regulated markets – will see premium reductions ranging between 3% and 40%. But according to The Manhattan Institute’s analysis, for those who have it bad, it’s really bad: the eight worst states are seeing huge premium hikes, including Nevada (+179%), New Mexico (+142%), Arkansas (+138%), North Carolina (+136%), Vermont (+117%), Georgia (+92%), South Dakota (+77%), and Nebraska (+74%). While the young and healthy get the brunt of these increases, the older folks aren’t exempt, either – and even if their premiums don’t increase that much, it’s likely they’ll see larger deductibles and narrower networks.

4) The pre-Obamacare health insurance market was a “free market” full of “junk” insurance plans, which screwed people over and dropped their insurance when they got sick.

No, this simply isn’t true. The American health insurance system prior to Obamacare was in some senses the worst of both worlds: one torn between single payer and third party payer, where while most of the care offered was superior to the rest of the world, the chief problem was explosive growth in costs… because no one cares what something costs when someone else is paying for it (in this case, your employer or the government). No one in their right mind would describe a reality in which the government holds so much market sway, and in which consumers have near-zero price transparency, as a free market system. And as for screwing over people who got sick: it’s been illegal for insurers in the employer market to drop people who get sick since 1997 (thanks, HIPAA!). This means the problem only applies to the individual market (10% of private health insurance), where people were dropped less than 4/10ths of 1% of the time, typically after an appeals process. You really want to argue we needed to disrupt the entire marketplace to solve a problem which impacted such a small portion of the population? It would’ve been cheaper to just hand them all a check for higher-subsidized coverage… such as those offered through high risk pools, the type states like Maryland and New Hampshire are trying to keep open since their exchanges are broken. Oh, and if you’re in the employer market and feel left out by all this disruption, don’t worry – you’re next.

Much more at the link .


Maybe print out a copy for your own use, just in case.

Happy Thanksgiving, and may your turkeys be confined to the oven and the serving platter, not sitting as 'guests' at your table or in your living room.