Most people know that the White House and Democrats are planning to politicize the SCOTUS decision on the ACA – The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), aka Obamacare. But how do the stats below figure into the strategy?
I am and have been firmly in the unConstitutional camp.
Health-care reform on trial
Economist, Mar 31st 2012
Never the less, I continue to believe, along with most conservatives, that everybody has to pay and that we need to get everybody insured – how to do that is the problem which is why we haven’t done it yet. There are many ways other than the federal mandate to get everybody to pay and the most important of them would be a mandate implemented by states, not – never – the Feds.
One of the things I hate about the ACA and believe to be unConstitutional, big government ideology is the fact that the government is pushing around private businesses. This issue is not under SCOTUS consideration but I wish it were. If a company takes federal money then fine, the company will have to follow federal rules. But the federal government should very rarely have the authority to order an independent private company to do anything.
Yet the ACA lets the feds tell insurance companies who to insure, what to charge and worst of all, the feds are now demanding that “insurance” cover the first dollar of even optional medical services. Insurance should be for catastrophes and we should further hold down premiums with co-pays and deductibles. Holding down premiums and having co-pays helps to hold down the spiraling cost of medical services.
SCOTUS is considering a second Constitutional issue beyond the ACA mandate and that is the Medicaid component. For decades, the feds have been saying to states that they will help cover part of the cost of expanding medical services to the needy.
[I hate it when we send tax dollars to the feds so they can send them back to us to spend; you know that’s stupid. To make matters worse, when we send our money to the feds and then take it back from them, the money comes with strings attached. Why don’t we just keep our money and solve our own problems?]
ACA mandates yet another range of substantial expansions to Medicaid and as usual, the feds are offering to pay some of but not all of the costs for these expansions. One expansion requires free healthcare for the children of households earning $68,000 a year. But wait, the feds are making “an offer we can’t refuse”. If states don’t take the new money and expand Medicaid, they lose all the funding they currently get. That boys and girls is extortion and is certainly unConstitutional.
In the midst of all this, President Obama made a statement that should outrage everyone.
“Ultimately I'm confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed … by Congress.”
We are a nation that no longer seems to teach basic civics in our schools. Our youngest generations don’t seem to even know about, let alone respect the exceptional American system of democracy with its separation of powers, checks and balances and foundation of individual rights. Current and former Justices are regularly campaigning to get civics back into the classroom. But the President’s contribution is to turn reality on its head. It is the Court’s singular responsibility to rule on the Constitutionality of laws passed by Congress and overturning one wouldn’t be anything like “unprecedented” or “extraordinary”, quite the opposite.
And the President did not “misspeak”. President Obama is a former president of the Harvard Law Review and famously taught Constitutional law at the University of Chicago so he knows what he said was a lie and we know it was deliberate.
As the President was speaking his lie about the Court, his government was arguing to get another court to overturn the Defense of Marriage Act. Personally, I hope he wins this fight but the hypocrisy of the ACA statement is appalling even by current political standards.
The Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) defines marriage as the legal union of one man and one woman. The law passed both houses of Congress by large majorities and was signed into law by President Bill Clinton on September 21, 1996. Under the law, no state or other political subdivision of the U.S. may be required to recognize as a marriage a same-sex relationship considered a marriage in another state. This thing has to be unConstitutional.
I don’t know if President Romney will be any better but the current guy has had his chance and clearly failed. And as for Congress, it’s past time to get some common sense and basic competence back into the process. It’s the deficits and debt stupid - first things first. And maybe if we got the lawyers out of the process we could write laws that legislators actually read, we voters can understand and the courts don’t have to overturn.
