Dr. Marcia Angell MD wrote this thoughtful piece at the Huffington post the day after the Health Care Law was upheld as a Tax by The Supreme Court.
In her piece titled Did John Roberts just give Mitt Romney a gift? she expresses her concerns:
“The Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, puts me in mind of the old proverb: Be careful what you wish for. Democrats on a victory lap should watch their step, because John Roberts may have given Mitt Romney a gift. The impact on the health system will be much smaller than the political fallout, because with or without Obamacare, the American health system will continue to unravel — quickly if Romney is elected, slowly if Obama is re-elected.
First the policy, then the politics:
Obamacare is simply incapable of doing what it is supposed to do — provide nearly universal care at an affordable and sustainable cost. The problem is that three years ago, in his futile efforts to win over Republicans (remember the embarrassing courtship of Olympia Snowe?), Obama gutted the law before it was even passed. He made the private insurance companies the linchpin of the new system, and promised them millions of additional customers and billions of taxpayer dollars. He also did nothing to rein in the profit-oriented delivery system that rewards providers on a piecework basis for doing tests and procedures. So with all the new dollars flowing into the system and no restraints on the way medicine is practiced, the law is inherently inflationary….
…Now for the politics. Even though the Supreme Court decision will have little long-term effect on our health system, the political ramifications will be great. To be sure, it’s a victory for Obama, but that will be evanescent. Now the Republicans are on the offensive, and greatly strengthened by John Roberts’ insistence that the mandate is a tax, not a penalty. Remember how hard Obama tried to avoid the T-word?…
…The only way to provide health care to all Americans at an affordable cost is by instituting some form of publicly-administered nonprofit system like those in other advanced countries. After all, they manage to provide universal care at less than half the cost, on average, and their costs are rising more slowly. I have long advocated expanding Medicare (which is a single-payer program) gradually by lowering the eligibility age one decade at a time, while phasing out for-profit health facilities and changing doctors’ fees to reward primary care more and specialist care less.
On July 22, 2009, Obama said in a press conference, “Now, the truth is that unless you have what’s called a single-payer system in which everybody is automatically covered, then you’re probably not going to reach every single individual.” Bingo. Too bad he didn’t hang on to that insight, and use his rhetorical skills to make the case strongly to the American public. If he had fought for single-payer health care at the beginning of his administration, while he had both houses of Congress, and mobilized public opinion behind it, he might have made it. After all, the only thing members of Congress need more than industry money is votes.”
In reponse to her article I said this:
Thanks Dr. Angell,
It is refreshing to read such a thoughtful analysis of the situation.
Health Care in America will only be reformed when the sick incestuous relationship that currently exists between the FDA and Big Pharma is dissolved, drug commercials marketed directly to consumers are abolished, and the toxic, sick, bloated, parasitically infested swamp known as the American Medical Association is exposed as the fraud that it is.
The Alterenative Health Care system in the US defined by Chiropractic, Naturopathic, Midwifery, Herbalist, Homeopathic, and a variety of other healing modalities like Acupuncture currently exists and thrives without government money in a Free Market Capitalist environment. Allopathic Drugs and Surgery medicine should be compelled to halt its Crony and Crisis Capitalism and get into the market, where consumers will decide what they are willing to pay for, not Washington.
Jenny Hatch
I do not understand what was so controversial about what I said. I completely agree with Dr.Marcia in her analysis of the situation, I just disagree with her on where the healing of our Obese Health Care system is to be found.
Huffington Post is NOT an online newspaper, it is a leftist prostitute belching out Statist Philosophy and Socialist Propaganda even in the comment section. My comment was truthful and legitimate. There is a Market Based fix for healthcare, as articulated by the owner of Whole Foods in a wall street journal piece that was published the summer of 2009 when we were all debating Health Care. John Mackey articulated some great ideas and the left organized a boycott of his store because he had the gall to speak out.
I attended a rally in Boulder at my Congressmans office and said these words the summer of 2009:
The Healthcare fix will come with freedom.
Jenny Hatch
This Post brought to you by Fatcow Web Hosting
* A material connection exists between this blog and Fatcow Web Hosting
Click on the image to get to Lamars Lovers for Life web site!
“Change absolutely starts with each of us, as individuals, taking responsibility for ourselves and our families because we know that our kids won’t grow up healthy until our families start eating right and exercising more. That’s on us,” she said. “We know that we won’t close that education gap until we turn off the TV, and supervise homework, attend those parent-teacher conferences, and serve as good role models for our own children.”
My husband and I have been extremely disciplined with our family since the beginning. Going to extremes to feed our children a whole foods diet, taking them out to the park every day for fresh air and sunshine, teaching them how to read, write, spell, take proper care of their bodies, and watching to make certain they had enough sleep, were properly hydrated, and that we always had a strong spiritual environment for them to grow up in.
I chaff when a politician and his family start dictating lifestyle habits to We the people. It always brings to mind Winston in 1984 being forced to exercise and chastised for not trying hard enough.
So in the spirit of attempting to teach my children how to respond to the political elites dictum about diet and exercise, EVERY time I have heard Michelle talk about obesity I made a point to head out to Lamars to pick up a couple dozen donuts and explained to the children why we were eating them.
Every time I have heard Michelle talk about parents supervising homework, I encouraged my kids to put away the books and watch the most pointless drivel on Television.
Every time I have heard Michelle talk about fresh food I have made a point to cook a high fat supper with lots of refined and processed foods.
And every time I have heard Michelle talk about being a good role model for my children I have made a point of being a bad role model; crude, lazy, uncouth, and I publicly mock her in front of my children.
Why?
I am an American Citizen. My rights are God Given. My Lord and My Savior Jesus Christ anointed me with the gift of being created equal to all other human beings and free to pursue whatever brings me happiness and joy.
I do not need some busybody politicians wife telling me how to raise my children. And I don’t need some America Hating Socialist to lecture me about my lifestyle.
“Yes, Obama and the Democrats are entitled to a bit of a victory lap today, after Chief Justice Roberts searched deeply within his political self and found a path to uphold ObamaCare. Sure, the individual mandate was unconstitutional on the two arguments made by the Obama Administration. But, on the argument they expressly didn’t make–that the mandate was really a tax–the Court decided that Congress was well within its power to enact the provision. So, its still the law of the land. But, today’s ruling will probably go down in history as the most effective GOP voter turnout operation ever. There is only one way to repeal ObamaCare and that is through the ballot box. It will happen.
During the debates over ObamaCare, the President and Democrats strained themselves to argue that the individual mandate wasn’t a tax. Obama himself had campaigned on a promise to never raise taxes on any families earning less than $250,000 a year. Today, the Court called the mandate for what it is…a tax. In doing so, it acknowledged that, not only did Obama break his campaign promise, but he and his leftist allies have ushered in the largest tax hike in history. They will go with that record into the voting booth in November.
From a nakedly partisan viewpoint, today’s ruling is the best case scenario for the GOP. ObamaCare is still deeply unpopula,r and now the only way to undo it is to sweep Obama and dozens of Democrats out of office. The GOP base will speed up its rallying to Romney, because it is their only chance to repeal this monstrosity. Independents, who have been peppered with silly social issue memes from the media, will put all of that aside to ensure that ObamaCare is repealed.”
2. With his ironic style Fund outlines the fact that the Unions have blown their wad with overreach and hubris:
“Los Angeles — Since 2008, we’ve seen the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression. Unlike 75 years ago, however, unions and the Left have this time largely failed to build a rigorous movement of economic populism to further their goals: Witness the now largely disbanded Occupy movement. Indeed, as members of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees gathered here last week, the mood was pessimistic.
“Our success or failure will mark a turning point not only for our union but for the entire labor movement,” Lee Saunders, the new AFSCME president, told his members. Attendees noted how few changes in labor law they had been able to get through Congress since President Obama’s election. Union members in San Diego and San Jose, two cities that voted heavily for Obama in 2008, mourned the overwhelming passage this month of ballot measures in those cities curbing public-sector pension benefits: In both, two-thirds of voters approved the measures. Hanging over the crowd was the crushing loss unions experienced in Wisconsin three weeks ago, when GOP governor Scott Walker won 38 percent of the votes of union members and apparently carried a majority of private-sector-union members.
But even as AFSCME delegates convened in Los Angeles, they received word of yet another blow. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a case out of California that if a union wants to make a special demand from members for political activity in addition to its regular fees, it must give them ample notice so they can ask for their money back. But the court, in an opinion by Justice Samuel Alito, went further and indicated the union must also make its fee assessment opt-in instead of opt-out. That means the union would get no money unless workers affirmatively agreed to pay it, instead of the workers’ getting to keep their money only if they specifically asked for it back…
…This time, key initiative supporter Frank Baxter, a retired banker, says he expects a much more level playing field. “The fiscal situation in California, voter anger at excessive pensions, and the Wisconsin example will mean we will have enough money to get our message out. I’m optimistic.”
No wonder the mood was so gloomy at the AFSCME conclave in Los Angeles this month. After 50 years of unchecked growth of the public-sector unions, the political abuse of the system and a resulting voter revolt is now threatening to catch up with them.”
3. This factual report by Dave Boyer lays out the ruling on Obamacare:
“The Supreme Court handed President Obama a major political victory on his signature health care issue Thursday, but the justices also provided Republicans with a sharper campaign issue by defining the law’s individual mandate as a tax.
The ruling allows Mr. Obama to engage in a four-month-long victory lap as he campaigns for re-election. It also validates the president’s decision to devote so much time and energy to getting the legislation passed in 2009 while the economy was in free fall — a divisive vote that contributed to the Democrats’ loss of House control in 2010.
Democrats didn’t try to hide their “I-told-you-so” reaction to the decision, although Mr. Obama and some others tried to downplay the political benefits…
…The ruling also promised to boost campaign fundraising.
The Romney campaign reported raising about $1 million in the first three hours after the decision was announced. Shortly after 9 p.m., Romneycampaign spokeswoman Andrea Saul tweeted that Mr. Romney’s website had “raised $3.2 million online & counting!”
Obama campaign manager Jim Messina sent out a fundraising email to supporters 90 minutes before the ruling was made public, telling potential donors that Thursday was “an important day to have Barack Obama’s back.”
However, an Obama for America spokeswoman said later that the campaign does not give out specifics on fundraising except at filing time.”
4. The smartest Blogger on the web. Jeff Goldstein stands up and shouts:
“Over. And over. And over and over and over and over and over. And over and over and over.
Intentionalism just is. But because we can’t concern ourselves with what we believe we’re doing when we claim to be interpreting, we’ve ended up institutionalizing a tyrannical form of “interpretation” that is linguistically incoherent. Thus, behold:
The Federal Government does not have the power to order people to buy health insurance. Section 5000A would therefore be unconstitutional if read as a command. The Federal Government does have the power to impose a tax on those without health insurance. Section 5000A is therefore constitutional, because it can reasonably be read as a tax.
I won’t have to unpack that for longtime readers of this site, but do allow me to unpack it — as I’ve done with similar linguistically incoherent statements in the past — for those who will spend today bemoaning a ruling that, when viewed from their own intepretative perspective (rather than their policy desires), they can’t honestly fault.
To wit: “Section 5000A is therefore constitutional, because it can reasonably be read as a tax.””
by Doug Weber on Facebook
5. Krauthammer chimes in with this analysis of why Roberts did what he did:
“It’s the judiciary’s Nixon-to-China: Chief Justice John Roberts joins the liberal wing of the Supreme Court and upholds the constitutionality of Obamacare. How? By pulling off one of the great constitutional finesses of all time. He managed to uphold the central conservative argument against Obamacare, while at the same time finding a narrow definitional dodge to uphold the law — and thus prevented the Court from being seen as having overturned, presumably on political grounds, the signature legislation of this administration.
Why did he do it? Because he carries two identities. Jurisprudentially, he is a constitutional conservative. Institutionally, he is chief justice and sees himself as uniquely entrusted with the custodianship of the Court’s legitimacy, reputation, and stature.
As a conservative, he is as appalled as his conservative colleagues by the administration’s central argument that Obamacare’s individual mandate is a proper exercise of its authority to regulate commerce.
That makes congressional power effectively unlimited. Mr. Jones is not a purchaser of health insurance. Mr. Jones has therefore manifestly not entered into any commerce. Yet Congress tells him he must buy health insurance — on the grounds that it is regulating commerce. If government can do that under the Commerce Clause, what can it not do?
“The Framers . . . gave Congress the power to regulate commerce, not to compel it,” writes Roberts. Otherwise you “undermine the principle that the Federal Government is a government of limited and enumerated powers.”
That’s Roberts, philosophical conservative. But he lives in uneasy coexistence with Roberts, custodian of the Court, acutely aware that the judiciary’s arrogation of power has eroded the esteem in which it was once held. Most of this arrogation occurred under the liberal Warren and Burger Courts, most egregiously with Roe v. Wade, which willfully struck down the duly passed abortion laws of 46 states. The result has been four decades of popular protest and resistance to an act of judicial arrogance that, as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg once said, “deferred stable settlement of the issue” by the normal electoral/legislative process….
…That’s not how I would have ruled. I think the “mandate is merely a tax” argument is a dodge, and a flimsy one at that. (The “tax” is obviously punitive, regulatory, and intended to compel.) Perhaps that’s not how Roberts would have ruled had he been just an associate justice, and not the chief. But that’s how he did rule.
Obamacare is now essentially upheld. There’s only one way it can be overturned. The same way it was passed — elect a new president and a new Congress. That’s undoubtedly what Roberts is saying: Your job, not mine. I won’t make it easy for you.”
6. Beck had several guests on his TV show this past week talking about Agenda 21: (This is the main reason I use the UN flag as a doormat)
“While liberal journalists continue to claim that Agenda 21 is just a “conspiracy theory” being advanced by right-wing crackpots, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the International Council for Environmental Law (ICEL) have released their fourth Draft of the International Covenant on Environment and Development. This document was designed from the beginning to convert the “soft-law” non-binding Agenda 21 into firmly binding global law – enforceable through the International Criminal Court and/or the dispute resolution features of the Convention on the Law of the Sea.
Two excellent analyses of this document are available here and here.
Few people understand that it is standard operating procedure for the U.N. to issue a massive non-binding policy document to test the water and make adjustments to its plans before introducing the real, legally binding treaty. For example, the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a “soft-law” instrument, was the precursor to the two 1966 U.N. Covenants on Human Rights. The 1992 U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change called for “voluntary” compliance. But at the first meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention, the group agreed to create a Kyoto Protocol to the Convention that would set legally-binding targets for all member nations.
Noah M. Sachs, a University of Richmond law professor and environmental expert, said: “Agenda 21 has been a dead letter for 20 years; its recommendations have not been implemented by most governments, and the U.S. has largely ignored it.”
Mr. Sachs is either ignorant of the facts, or is deliberately trying to mislead his readers. President Clinton’s President’s Council on Sustainable Development operated between 1993 and 1999 expressly for the purpose of implementing the recommendations in Agenda 21. At the 11th meeting of the PCSD, Ron Brown, then-secretary of commerce, said that his department could implement 67 percent of the recommendations under his jurisdiction by rule, without the need for new legislation.
The International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI) was created at the behest of the U.N. expressly for the purpose of advancing Agenda 21 around the world. They claim more than 1,200 cities around the globe have joined their organization for assistance in implementing “sustainable development” – defined to be the recommendations contained in Agenda 21. More than 600 of these cities are in the United States.”
Communicatin’ is now open to all the people of the world, who have ever had a thought worth expressin…. and WHO never really, actually, um (Pausin’ to scratch Head)… had a chance to go to skool and learn all them there idioms n words and such like, whoever said writin’ was fer the educatid and annointed elitistests amungst us?!!!?
In this article Bloom dumps on the Latter Day Saints as well as the Tea Party, so for me it was a double whammy…
“Rather than living in reality they yield to what oddly are termed “cultural” considerations: moral and spiritual, or so their leaders urge them to believe. Under the banners of flag, cross, fetus, exclusive marriage between men and women, they march onward to their own deepening impoverishment. Much of the Tea Party fervor merely repeats this gladsome frolic.”
The article was such a mish mash of incoherent blatherings that it was difficult to recognize what point Professor Bloom was trying to make. Professors of his stature often forget that Humanism is in fact a religion. A religion as easily defined and practiced as my Mormon Faith.
His Point seemed to be:
Tea Partying Mormons influencing the electorate with their morals = BAAAADDDD
Secular Humanistically Inclined Yale Professors of English dumping on those of us who teach our families eternal truths = GOOOOOODDD (Bloom fails to question if his lifes work and decades of indoctrinating the nations youth in relativistic nothingness has led to students pooping on cop cars as a form of “speech”)
Bloom finished up his piece with this little nugget of insight:
“Mormonism’s best inheritance from Joseph Smith was his passion for education, hardly evident in the anti-intellectual and semi-literate Southern Baptist Convention. I wonder though which is more dangerous, a knowledge-hungry religious zealotry or a proudly stupid one? Either way we are condemned to remain a plutocracy and oligarchy. I can be forgiven for dreading a further strengthening of theocracy in that powerful brew.”
One has to wonder if the current nightmare of Marxist Moonbattery that has taken over the White House, which is the intellectual bastardized political child that Bloom and his cohorts in Academia have been gestating in the halls of ivy on American Students since the late 1800’s, is preferable to a little bit of Mormon Pioneer Zealotry, horse sense, and practical economic philosophy, often simplified in this couplet: Use it Up, Wear it Out, Make it Do, or Do Without!
Society should have one simple test for those who would presume to teach the nations youth, and run for Political office:
Start your own business and run it successfully with no outside help from anyone and show a profit after a couple of years, and you can have the honor of attempting to teach young people in a University setting. If we were to set up that standard of “purity” for our society, we could fix this thing in a generation…
Dr. Marcia Angell MD wrote this thoughtful piece at the Huffington post the day after the Health Care Law was upheld as a Tax by The Supreme Court.
Jenny Hatch
It is refreshing to read such a thoughtful analysis of the situation.
Health Care in America will only be reformed when the sick incestuous relationship that currently exists between the FDA and Big Pharma is dissolved, drug commercials marketed directly to consumers are abolished, and the toxic, sick, bloated, parasitically infested swamp known as the American Medical Association is exposed as the fraud that it is.
The Alterenative Health Care system in the US defined by Chiropractic, Naturopathic, Midwifery, Herbalist, Homeopathic, and a variety of other healing modalities like Acupuncture currently exists and thrives without government money in a Free Market Capitalist environment. Allopathic Drugs and Surgery medicine should be compelled to halt its Crony and Crisis Capitalism and get into the market, where consumers will decide what they are willing to pay for, not Washington.
Jenny Hatch