Happy Birthday ObamaCare

indyfromaz|

Happy Birthday, ObamaCare. Six months old today and raising the cost of medical care, restricting patient options and causing employers to drop workers three years before even being fully implemented.
Congratulations!!

Steve Kelly

Take Minnesotan Gail C., who hoped to offset a monthly premium increase by raising her deductible. Instead, her insurer advised that such a change would not comply with ObamaCare provisions. She could make the adjustment but would no longer have guaranteed rates and could face penalties for exercising what used to be her freedom of choice.
When Conservatives for Patients’ Rights launched in February 2009, we called for patient-centered, free-market health care reform based on Four Pillars — choice, competition, accountability and personal responsibility. Instead, ObamaCare removes choice from patients and doctors, strangles market competition, provides no accountability from government and relegates personal responsibility — and control — to the ash heap of history.
Worse, it includes purchase mandates forcing individuals to buy health care — and employers to provide it — or face stiff fines.
Citing constitutional and statutory grounds, 43 states have now either joined Florida’s lawsuit to oppose ObamaCare, instituted their own legal challenges, filed legislation against coverage mandates or have citizen initiatives in play.
As far back as June 2009, national polls showed that Americans opposed key provisions by more than 55%. A poll taken by CNN hours before the March 2010 vote found that the majority of Americans did not support the bill. Sixty-two percent felt it would increase health care costs, and 70% thought it would swell the deficit. They were right.
The will of the people remains clear. An August poll by the liberal-leaning Kaiser Family Foundation found that 48% of independent voters held unfavorable views, and a recent Rasmussen poll shows that 61% of likely voters and 74% of “mainstream” voters openly favor repeal. With $500 billion in Medicare cuts heading to states and $600 billion in taxes and penalties aimed at consumers and businesses, Americans know that ObamaCare is a train wreck.
Government actuaries are predicting that health care costs could soon rise 20%, faster than if government had done nothing. A Congressional Budget Office analysis released just before the March vote indicated that premiums could double in six years.
Americans don’t need a 14-digit calculator to predict what happens when insurers must immediately take all comers to coverage — even those who got sick yesterday — without higher premiums. Restrictions make private coverage unsustainable. Which, of course, was always the endgame of ObamaCare.
As midterm elections approach, voters’ aversion to ObamaCare is apparent. Many House and Senate Members who voted for the plan are preparing for pink slips. In Arkansas, 64% opposed the “yea” vote of incumbent Sen. Blanche Lincoln, and 61% approved the “nea” of GOP Rep. John Boozman, who is challenging her. Boozman leads Lincoln by 17 points.
While many incumbents lost to primary challengers, the 34 House Democrats who voted against ObamaCare survived. And it’s impossible to find pro-ObamaCare references in any campaign advertising.
More significant than actual election results, these prevailing political trends demonstrate the resurgent will of the American people. All is not lost; that which has been done can be undone.
In early 2009, CPR met with the editorial board of a major national newspaper. After hearing our Four Pillars and mission to oppose government control of health care and the public option in particular, board members said we were wasting time and money as the debate would be over and government health care passed within 90 days.
Fifteen months later, ObamaCare barely passed, and only when conservative Democrats caved to leadership pressure and the offer of tantalizing political goodies. And it passed without the public option, previously considered a given. Such miscalculations show political elites to be fundamentally at odds with values like choice, competition, accountability and personal responsibility.
The people were right last March and are still right today. Because groups like Conservatives for Patients’ Rights embraced real, constructive reform, ObamaCare was passed over the objections of a public educated on its details and the consequences for American health care. Speaker Nancy Pelosi may have needed to pass it to know what was in it, but America didn’t.
The people didn’t want it then, don’t want it now and have always had the power to go back. They want patient-centered reforms that lower cost and expand choice without government control. And they want Obama-Care repealed. Americans will not cease efforts to that end, and no elected official is safe until it’s done. In this republic, the will of the people ultimately prevails. (IBD)

There is ample evidence to show that ObamaCare will cost jobs, raise health care costs and saddle future generations with crippling debt.
But don’t you dare blame the increases in premiums and costs on Obamacare!
Straight from the Horse’s Mouth, or in this case a Jackass (Donkey).
HHS Secretary Sebelius has already threatened them, but now Sen. Max “I never read the bill” Baucus (and Senate Health Care Bill author) is threatening them.
NEW YORK, Sept 20 (Reuters) – Two Democratic U.S. senators are demanding more transparency about premium increases from health insurers and warning them against blaming higher rates on a newly passed reform law. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus of Montana and Commerce Committee Chairman John Rockefeller of West Virginia said they sent a letter to the five largest health insurers by enrollment registering their concerns over increases for next year.
“I want health insurance companies to be transparent and honest when increasing premiums  (You First. )– and health care reform is simply not to blame,” Rockefeller said in a statement.
“Health plans will continue to do everything they can to implement the new law in a way that minimizes disruption and keeps coverage as affordable as possible for individuals, families and employers,” Robert Zirkelbach, spokesman for America’s Health Insurance Plans organization, said in a statement. “Political attacks won’t do anything to make coverage more affordable for working families and small businesses that are struggling in a slow economy,” Zirkelbach said.

But Politicial attacks is all the Democrats now how to do. Especially 40 days from an election it’s all they know how to do.
“Health insurers should be transparent about the assumptions they use to arrive at their premium increases,” the senators wrote. “If an insurer thinks it can blame the enactment of the Affordable Care Act for its rising premiums, it is surely mistaken.”
Don’t blame the actual cause, because that’s not politically advantageous to us. So we want you to lie, just like we do and sugar coat it, suck it up, and give them the Orwellian Bovine Fecal Matter that we have been shoveling in their direction for 2 years.
Or at the very least shut up and do as you are told.
Health Czarina and Grand Vizier, the Great and Powerful OZ Says so or else we will bring about our terrible wrath upon you!
You wouldn’t want to be on their Enemies List now would you?


ObamaCare gives Ms. Sebelius’s regulators the power to define “unreasonable” premium hikes, which will mean whatever they decide it will mean later this fall. She promised to keep a list of insurers “with a record of unjustified rate increases” and then to bar them from ObamaCare’s subsidized “exchanges” when they come on line in 2014. In other words, insurers must accept price controls now or face the retribution of a de facto ban on selling their products to consumers four years from now.
This is nasty stuff and an obvious attempt to shift political blame for rising insurance costs before the election. It’s also an early sign of life under ObamaCare, when all health-care decisions are political and the bureaucrats decide who can charge how much for a service or product.
Democrats built this system and they now own it politically. The least they could do is take credit for its consequences. (WSJ)

Senator Max Baucus recently admitted that he never read the Obamacare legislation.  But that hasn’t stopped him from trying to re-write it after the fact, asserting that Congress intended to give people even less choice of private health plans than described in the bill!
This overreach should encourage states that are trying to block Obamacare: It’s going to be even worse than we initially thought.
Obamacare reduces choice of health plans by giving government the power to control the Medical Loss Ratio (MLR) – the amount of dollars an insurer spends on medical care divided by the total premiums. Under Obamacare, policies that cover large businesses will have to achieve an MLR of 85 percent, while those for small businesses and individuals will have to achieve an MLR of 80 percent. This sounds simple but leaves many issues unresolved.
An important one is the treatment of taxes: Taxes are not medical care, but nor are they under health plans’ control. So, Obamacare excludes taxes from total costs used to calculate the MLR. Senator Baucus leads a group of senators who now assert that what they meant to pass was a bill that exempted some taxes from health plans’ MLR calculations, but not corporate income taxes.
If it prevails, Baucus’ flawed notion will lead to an immediate reduction of choice of health plans.  Suppose two insurers of the same size compete in a region’s large-group market. They earn premiums of $1 million each. They each spend $850,000 on medical claims, thereby achieving an MLR of 85 percent. One insurer is for-profit, earning a profit of 4 percent ($40,000), and pays combined federal and state corporate income tax of 45 percent ($18,000). Its MLR automatically shrinks to 83.5 percent and Obamacare shuts it down.
Even without Baucus’ newly invented interpretation, the MLR is deadly for increasingly popular consumer-directed plans. Suppose a traditional policy costs $4,000 and spends $3,400 on patient care, for an MLR of 85.00. With the consumer-directed policy, the patient controls $800 more of the medical spending than with the traditional policy, through a higher deductible, and his premium goes down by $800. In this case the MLR goes down to 81.25 ($2,600/$3,200). There is no real difference, but the accounting looks worse, and Obamacare shuts it down. (In fact, consumer-driven plans have lower total costs than in this simple example, because cutting out the middleman and giving more health dollars to patients to control themselves motivates them to get better value for money.)
MLRs are also irrelevant because the insured and their employers tend to choose health plans based on other criteria—likely invisible to politicians and bureaucrats. Plans with relatively low MLRs have increased market share in the last few years.
There is no doubt: Obamacare will severely reduce Americans’ choice of health plans. Fortunately, states are using a number of tools to resist Obamacare, until it is repealed. To impose its anti-choice regulations, the federal law relies on state-based “exchanges” that would choose health insurance for their citizens.
Tim Pawlenty, governor of Minnesota, has signed an executive order forbidding state bureaucrats from even applying for federal grants to set up an “exchange” to limit people’s choice of health plan. As Obamacare deploys its regulatory regime, other governors are likely to follow his lead.
So Happy Birthday to the worst political stink bomb in American History.

Carry me back to old Virginny

The Commonwealth of Virginia is obvious the next target for the Chicago Mob in the White House.

But will they go there? That is the question.
The Commonwealth has enacted an Illegal Immigration strategy that is very similar to Arizona, but with some key differences.
But they have also won Round 1 in the “Up Yours!” Obamacare fight. And they are just the first out of the gate.
The state of Virginia can continue its lawsuit to stop the nation’s new health care law from taking effect, a federal judge ruled Monday.
U.S. District Court Judge Henry Hudson said he is allowing the suit against the U.S. government to proceed, saying no court has ever ruled on whether it’s constitutional to require Americans to purchase a product.
“While this case raises a host of complex constitutional issues, all seem to distill to the single question of whether or not Congress has the power to regulate — and tax — a citizen’s decision not to participate in interstate commerce,” Hudson wrote in a 32-page decision.
“The congressional enactment under review — the Minimum Essential Coverage Provision — literally forges new ground and extends (the U.S. Constitution’s) Commerce Clause powers beyond its current high watermark,” Hudson said.

“Given the presence of some authority arguably supporting the theory underlying each side’s position, this court cannot conclude at this stage that the complaint fails to state a cause of action,” he wrote.
The decision is a small step, but in no way a minor matter to opponents of the health care bill rejected by all congressional Republicans but signed into law by President Obama earlier this year.
“This lawsuit is not about health care, it’s about our freedom and about standing up and calling on the federal government to follow the ultimate law of the land — the Constitution,” said Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, who brought the suit. “The government cannot draft an unwilling citizen into commerce just so it can regulate him under the Commerce Clause.”
“Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli has brought forward a specific and narrowly tailored objection to the Act. It warrants a full and thorough hearing in our courts. It is meritorious and constitutionally correct. … I look forward to the full hearing this fall,” said Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell.
Cuccinelli filed the suit almost immediately after the law was signed, arguing that it conflicts with Virginia’s legislation — also passed this year — exempting state residents from the requirement that all Americans be forced into health care coverage. Cuccinelli argued that the law violates the Constitution’s Commerce Clause.
The Commerce Clause allows the U.S. government to regulate economic activity. But Virginia argued that it’s not economic activity when someone chooses to refrain from participating in commerce.
The U.S. government, which was defending itself through the Health and Human Services Department run by Secretary Kathleen Sebelius argued that everyone will need medical services at some point in their life and therefore is either a “current or future participation in the health care market,” and therefore subject to taxation.
“We do not leave people to die at the emergency room door — whether they have insurance or not. Those costs — an estimated $43 billion annually — are absorbed by everyone else paying into the health care market including doctors, hospitals and insured patients. Congress has the authority under the Commerce Clause to address that cost-shifting burdening the interstate market for health care,” argues the brief filed by the Justice Department on behalf of HHS.
“Today’s ruling is merely a procedural decision by the court to allow this case to move forward. We believe there is clear and well-established legal precedent that Congress acted within its constitutional authority in passing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010. We are confident that the health care reform statute is constitutional and that we will ultimately prevail,” the department said in a statement.
Supporters of the law say the decision Monday is merely procedural, but the law will be proven constitutional when it gets to a hearing on the content.
“This case is really a politically motivated ploy aimed at diverting attention from the many benefits of the new law,” said Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA, which lobbied in favor of the bill. “The decision today should not distract states and the federal government from focusing on implementing the new law in the most effective way possible. The benefits of the new law are just becoming apparent, and substantially more help is on the way.”
More than a dozen state attorneys general have filed a lawsuit in Florida challenging the federal law, but Virginia’s is the first to reach a courtroom. (FOX)
Missouri voters are expected to pass a measure on Tuesday to forbid the federal government from penalizing individuals for refusing to buy health insurance. But it could be symbolic because federal law typically supersedes state laws.
The federal penalty provision does not take effect until 2014 and the Obama administration has pointed to tax credits, subsidies and other mechanisms to help those who cannot afford to buy insurance. Some 46 million people in the United States lack healthcare coverage.
The Obama administration has countered that the government always has the ability to levy taxes and that the Constitution places the federal government’s powers over the states.
Shut up and sit down, we have supreme executive power and can do anything we want!
Never before has Congress sought to use its powers under the Commerce Clause to force a private citizen to buy a good or service from another private person or entity.  If Congress can do that in the name of ensuring that everyone has health insurance, what is to stop it from ordering citizens to buy a particular brand of car to ensure that everyone has a car to drive?  The possibilities, and hence the power claimed, are virtually limitless.– Virgina AG Cucchinelli
Naturally, the Ministry of Truth and the Liberals are playing it down as no big deal. Just a “procedural” victory they all say in unison. It’s no big deal.
But the “procedural” partial victory they got in the Arizona case was a full-on party-hardy yippee! victory against the evil racists!
Fascinating…
The media’s bias and ideology shines through again!
Meanwhile, It’s Mayberry to the Rescue!
The latest ObamaCare ad, curiously out at the same time as this decision, has Andy Griffith touting the greatness of Medicare and now ObamaCare and how it’s going to take care of Seniors.
I saw they ad, it thought it was very self-centered, arrogant, and greedy. Which means it’s perfect for Obama.
Factcheck.org:
Would the sheriff of Mayberry mislead you about Medicare? Alas, yes.
In a new TV spot from the Obama administration, actor Andy Griffith, famous for his 1960s portrayal of the top law enforcement official in the fictional town of Mayberry, N.C., touts benefits of the new health care law. Griffith tells his fellow senior citizens, “like always, we’ll have our guaranteed [Medicare] benefits.” But the truth is that the new law is guaranteed to result in benefit cuts for one class of Medicare beneficiaries — those in private Medicare Advantage plans.
The White House released the ad on the 45th anniversary of the Medicare program, and said it would run nationally on cable TV networks. Griffith, whose “Andy Griffith Show” was a TV comedy hit at the time Medicare was first enacted in 1965, explains the “good things” that the new health care law will mean for Medicare beneficiaries.
“This year, like always, we’ll have our guaranteed benefits,” he says. An announcement of the ad on the White House website reinforces that claim, saying: “Under the Affordable Care Act … Seniors guaranteed Medicare benefits will remain the same.” But the truth is, for millions of seniors, benefits won’t remain the same.
As we wrote most recently last December, about 10 million Medicare Advantage recipients could see their extra benefits reduced by an average of $43 per month, according to the Congressional Budget Office. And more recently, a detailed analysis by the Medicare program’s own chief actuary, Richard Foster, stated in April:

Medicare Actuary Richard Foster: The new provisions will generally reduce MA rebates to plans and thereby result in less generous benefit packages. We estimate that in 2017, when the MA provisions will be fully phased in, enrollment in MA plans will be lower by about 50 percent (from its projected level of 14.8 million under the prior law to 7.4 million under the new law).

Even the head of the White House Office of Health Reform, Nancy-Ann DeParle, acknowledges that Medicare Advantage benefits are going to be reduced. “I’m sure that some of those additional benefits have been nice,” the Wall Street Journal quoted her as saying in a July 25 report. “But I think what we have to look at here is what’s fair and what’s important for the strength of the Medicare program long term.”
A Weasel Word
So how can the Obama administration claim that “guaranteed Medicare benefits will remain the same”? The answer is that the term “guaranteed” is a weasel word — a qualifier that sucks the meaning out of a phrase in the way that weasels supposedly suck the contents out of an egg. It may sound to the casual listener as though this ad is saying that the benefits of all Medicare recipients are guaranteed to stay the same — and that may well be the way the ad’s sponsors wish listeners to hear it. But what the administration is really saying is that only those benefits that are guaranteed in law will remain the same.
There’s even a section in the new law (section 3601) that says: “Nothing in the provisions of, or amendments made by, this Act shall result in a reduction of guaranteed benefits under title XVIII of the Social Security Act” (the title that establishes the Medicare program). Section 3602 says even Medicare Advantage recipients won’t suffer any reduction of “any benefits guaranteed by law.”
But here’s the catch: The extra benefits generally offered by Medicare Advantage plans aren’t guaranteed by law. They are offered by private insurance companies as inducements. The companies have been able to offer somewhat more generous packages than traditional, fee-for-service Medicare because the system pays them as much as 40 percent more per patient than it pays for traditional Medicare, according to the chief actuary. The average in 2009 was about 14 percent more, according to the most recent analysis by the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation, issued in February. But the new law generally eliminates the extra payments in the coming years. Foster, the chief actuary, estimates that federal spending for Medicare Advantage will be reduced by $145 billion over the law’s first decade.
Currently, about 1 in every 4 Medicare beneficiary is enrolled in a Medicare Advantage plan. For many of them, the words in this ad ring hollow, and the promise that “benefits will remain the same” is just as fictional as the town of Mayberry was when Griffith played the local sheriff.
But Barney Fife wrote the Law and now expects you believe them when they say, it’s for your own good.
The The American Spectator and American’s For Tax Reform:
The Spectator blog reports on a conference call held this morning by HHS Secretary Sebelius to promote a new report regarding the health law’s impact on Medicare.  Questioned about claims by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ chief actuary that the Medicare reductions in the law “cannot be simultaneously used to finance other federal outlays and to extend the [Medicare] trust fund” solvency, Secretary Sebelius replied that

There are two different operating methods of looking at this, and the CMS actuary in the report that you cite differs in his strategic opinion from every accounting methodology that’s used for every other program in the federal budget, that has traditionally used for Medicare.  And he has a different interpretation that is not agreed upon by either the Congressional Budget Office or the OMB or traditionally in Congress.

Unfortunately for the Secretary, however, the Congressional Budget Office has on numerous occasions confirmed that any claims the law will improve Medicare’s solvency revolve around notional double-counting under federal budgetary conventions.  A January CBO letter found that “the majority of the [Medicare] trust fund savings…would be used to pay for other spending and therefore would not enhance the ability of the government to pay for future Medicare benefits.”  And in a March letter, CBO quantified the amount of that double-counting, estimating that, if the law’s Medicare savings were actually set aside to improve the solvency of the Medicare trust fund (as opposed to being used for other spending), the bill would increase the deficit by $260 billion over its first ten years alone.
In other words, the CBO agrees with the CMS actuary that the same money the same money can’t be used twice – once to expand coverage, and a second time to extend the life of the Medicare trust fund.  The Secretary’s statement that “there are two different operating methods of looking at this,” and that CBO disagrees with the Administration’s own actuaries on the impact of this budgetary double-counting, is demonstrably FALSE.

But don’t worry, the Ministry of Truth is right on top of it.
http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/us/2010/08/03/pkg.tuchman.sanctuary.city.cnn?hpt=C2
President Obama described officials who “demagogue” immigration or take sudden “anti-immigrant” stances as people who want to make a name for themselves and not help solve what he called “a national problem.” (CBS)
But his demagoguery is not worth mentioning.
“I understand the frustration of people in Arizona,” Mr. Obama said. “But what we can’t do is demagogue the issue, and what we can’t do is allow a patchwork of 50 different states, or cities or localities, where anybody who wants to make a name for themselves suddenly says, ‘I’m going to be anti-immigrant, and I’m going try to see if I can solve the problem ourself.’ This is a national problem.”– on CBS “Early Show”
But I end on a Vote of No Confidence  on ICE Director John Morton, from his own people.
http://www.pdfdownload.org/pdf2html/view_online.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Fkfyi.com%2Fcc-common%2Fmlib%2F622%2F08%2F622_1280843100.pdf
or http://kfyi.com/pages/jimsharpe.html
But don’t it’s all for your own good. We are the Washington Elites, we are just better than you unwashed peasant masses.
And now the New York City government elites says it’s ok for there to be a 13-story Islamic Mosque 600 yards from Ground Zero built by a guy who believes in Shiria Law in America.
Doesn’t that just make you feel safer about the government.

The Truth of Power

I, like many others who read the health care bills, unlike the mainstream Media, which did it’s best to hide and deny what was going to happen, have now been shown the light of our truth.
But I’m sure the Ministry of Truth will do it’s best to diminish, dismiss and deny it even now.
That is that Mandatory Health Insurance is a TAX.
Shocking revelation, I know…

On poor people no less!!
CBS Sept 2009: President Barack Obama says requiring people to get health insurance and fining them if they don’t would not amount to a backhanded tax increase. “I absolutely reject that notion,” the president said.
“My critics say everything is a tax increase,” Mr. Obama said on “This Week.” “For us to say that you’ve got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase.”
ABC: The—for us to say that you’ve got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase. What it’s saying is, is that we’re not going to have other people carrying your burdens for you anymore . . .” In other words, like parents talking to their children, this levy—don’t call it a tax—is for your own good.
Mr. Stephanopoulos: “But you reject that it’s a tax increase?”
Mr. Obama: “I absolutely reject that notion.”
President Obama said in his not quite State of the Union address that Americans earning less than $250,000 would pay “not one dime” in new taxes.
Well, it’s time to reveal Lie #4,362. The Big Whopper.
The one all of us “racist” “teabagger” “idiots” and “terrorist” warned you about.

WASHINGTON — When Congress required most Americans to obtain health insurance or pay a penalty, Democrats denied that they were creating a new tax. But in court, the Obama administration and its allies now defend the requirement as an exercise of the government’s “power to lay and collect taxes.”

And that power, they say, is even more sweeping than the federal power to regulate interstate commerce.
Administration officials say the tax argument is a linchpin of their legal case in defense of the health care overhaul and its individual mandate, now being challenged in court by more than 20 states and several private organizations.
Under the legislation signed by President Obama in March, most Americans will have to maintain “minimum essential coverage” starting in 2014. Many people will be eligible for federal subsidies to help them pay premiums.
In a brief defending the law, the Justice Department says the requirement for people to carry insurance or pay the penalty is “a valid exercise” of Congress’s power to impose taxes.
Congress can use its taxing power “even for purposes that would exceed its powers under other provisions” of the Constitution, the department said. For more than a century, it added, the Supreme Court has held that Congress can tax activities that it could not reach by using its power to regulate commerce.
While Congress was working on the health care legislation, Mr. Obama refused to accept the argument that a mandate to buy insurance, enforced by financial penalties, was equivalent to a tax.
“For us to say that you’ve got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase,” the president said last September, in a spirited exchange with George Stephanopoulos on the ABC News program “This Week.”
When Mr. Stephanopoulos said the penalty appeared to fit the dictionary definition of a tax, Mr. Obama replied, “I absolutely reject that notion.”
Congress anticipated a constitutional challenge to the individual mandate. Accordingly, the law includes 10 detailed findings meant to show that the mandate regulates commercial activity important to the nation’s economy. Nowhere does Congress cite its taxing power as a source of authority.
They knew they were lying. They didn’t care. Because the end justified the means.
And the Mainstream Media was either brain-dead stupid or in on the lies. Period.
Under the Constitution, Congress can exercise its taxing power to provide for the “general welfare.” It is for Congress, not courts, to decide which taxes are “conducive to the general welfare,” the Supreme Court said 73 years ago in upholding the Social Security Act.
Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director, described the tax power as an alternative source of authority.
“The Commerce Clause supplies sufficient authority for the shared-responsibility requirements in the new health reform law,” Mr. Pfeiffer said. “To the extent that there is any question of additional authority — and we don’t believe there is — it would be available through the General Welfare Clause.”
The law describes the levy on the uninsured as a “penalty” rather than a tax. The Justice Department brushes aside the distinction, saying “the statutory label” does not matter. The constitutionality of a tax law depends on “its practical operation,” not the precise form of words used to describe it, the department says, citing a long line of Supreme Court cases.
Orwell is smiling on you, Mr President and AG Holder.
Masters of Doublespeak.
Orwell on “The Party” of Big Brother: The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power.  Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites.
To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them… – (Orwell, New American Library, 1981, p35)
Moreover, the department says the penalty is a tax because it will raise substantial revenue: $4 billion a year by 2017, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
In addition, the department notes, the penalty is imposed and collected under the Internal Revenue Code, and people must report it on their tax returns “as an addition to income tax liability.”
2009: What’s more, the agency is limited in the actions it can take to enforce compliance. “Congress was very careful to make sure that there was nothing too punitive in this bill,” {IRS Chief} Shulman said. “There’s no criminal sanctions for not paying this, and there’s no ability to levy a bank account or do seizures or [use] some of the other tools” available to the agency for enforcing laws.
If necessary, the IRS will levy fines against individuals who fail to purchase adequate insurance and collect them though tax return offsets. But the agency’s “first line of defense is education,” he said.
Because the penalty is a tax, the department says, no one can challenge it in court before paying it and seeking a refund.
Jack M. Balkin, a professor at Yale Law School who supports the new law, said, “The tax argument is the strongest argument for upholding” the individual-coverage requirement.
Mr. Obama “has not been honest with the American people about the nature of this bill,” Mr. Balkin said last month at a meeting of the American Constitution Society, a progressive legal organization. “This bill is a tax. Because it’s a tax, it’s completely constitutional.”
Mr. Balkin and other law professors pressed that argument in a friend-of-the-court brief filed in one of the pending cases.
Opponents contend that the “minimum coverage provision” is unconstitutional because it exceeds Congress’s power to regulate commerce.
“This is the first time that Congress has ever ordered Americans to use their own money to purchase a particular good or service,” said Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah.

In their lawsuit, Florida and other states say: “Congress is attempting to regulate and penalize Americans for choosing not to engage in economic activity. If Congress can do this much, there will be virtually no sphere of private decision-making beyond the reach of federal power.”

In reply, the administration and its allies say that a person who goes without insurance is simply choosing to pay for health care out of pocket at a later date. In the aggregate, they say, these decisions have a substantial effect on the interstate market for health care and health insurance.
In its legal briefs, the Obama administration points to a famous New Deal case, Wickard v. Filburn, in which the Supreme Court upheld a penalty imposed on an Ohio farmer who had grown a small amount of wheat, in excess of his production quota, purely for his own use.
The wheat grown by Roscoe Filburn “may be trivial by itself,” the court said, but when combined with the output of other small farmers, it significantly affected interstate commerce and could therefore be regulated by the government as part of a broad scheme regulating interstate commerce.

But it will bring prices down: Lie #4,264
The Democratic co-chair of President Obama’s fiscal commission said Wednesday that the president’s health care bill will do very little to bring down costs, contradicting claims from the White House that their sweeping legislation will dramatically impact runaway entitlement spending.
“It didn’t do a lot to address cost factors in health care. So we’ve got a lot of work to do,” said Erskine Bowles, former White House chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, speaking about the new health law, which was signed into law by Obama this past spring after a nearly year-long fight in Congress.
Esrkine Bowles is one of the two stooges who will anounce AFTER the mid-term election that all is crap and we have to have massive Tax increases in order to save us all, including likely, the VAT.
And if the republicans are in charge of at least one side or both of Congress it will be even  more there fault!
And Obama is going to, “Well, I have to do what the report says…”
It’s the ultimate Dog & Pony show.
Just keep that in mind.
Bowles, speaking at an event hosted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said that even with the passage of Obama’s legislation, health care costs are still going to “really eat us alive” unless dramatic changes are made. The commission will submit recommendations on how to fix America’s long term fiscal problems to Congress in December.
Bowles’ point will be amplified Thursday when a conservative think tank releases a paper arguing that Obama’s health plan “is not entitlement reform,” at an event intended to highlight an alternative plan for reforming health care spending that is the brainchild of Rep. Paul Ryan, Wisconsin Republican.
James C. Capretta, a former White House budget adviser on health care to President George W. Bush, will present the paper for the Galen Institute at an event on Capitol Hill with Ryan, one of the Republican Party’s rising stars, and Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a top conservative economist.
Even as many on Capitol Hill are talking about addressing Social Security spending, Capretta writes in the 19-page paper that Medicare is the real problem.
Most Democrats and Republicans agree, Capretta says, that the 30 to 35 million seniors in Medicare’s fee-for-service (FFS) insurance program are “the engine … pulling the rest of the health system down the tracks at an accelerated and dangerous rate.”
And who just got recess appointee to the job of head of Medicare, a NHS Single-payer Health Care rationing lover.
No coincidence there mind you.
Most FFS participants pay nothing out of their own pockets for health care, and hospitals and doctors are incentivized to provide them with as many services and tests as can be loosely justified.
But Capretta says in the paper that the Obama health bill is not reform because it attempts to stop price inflation and inefficient care through top-down government control rather than bottom-up consumer demand.
“When attempts have been made in the past to steer patients toward preferred physicians or hospitals, they have failed miserably because politicians and regulators find it impossible to make distinctions among hospitals and physician groups based on quality measures that can themselves be disputed,” Capretta says.
Capretta goes on to say that Paul Ryan’s plan would move Medicare recipients from defined benefits to defined contributions, in which “cost-conscious consumers choose between competing insurers and delivery systems based on price and quality.”
“Beneficiaries would get to decide which insurance plan they want to enroll in. If the premium were more than the amount they are entitled to from Medicare, then they would pay the difference. If it were less, they would keep all of the savings,” Capretta says.
“Millions of otherwise passive Medicare participants would become active, cost-conscious consumers of insurance and alternative models for securing needed medical services,” Capretta writes. “Cost cutting innovation would be rewarded, not punished as it is today.”
White House officials pointed to recent blog posts by White House budget director Peter Orszag, who said that “if implemented effectively, [Obama’s health care bill] can play an important role in moving toward a healthier fiscal future.” (Daily Caller)

Welcome Big Brother Obama and Big Mother Michelle’s New and Improved IRS:
If it seems as if the tax code was conceived by graphic artist M.C. Escher, wait until you meet the new and not improved Internal Revenue Service created by ObamaCare. What, you’re not already on a first-name basis with your local IRS agent?
National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson, who operates inside the IRS, highlighted the agency’s new mission in her annual report to Congress last week. Look out below. She notes that the IRS is already “greatly taxed”—pun intended?—”by the additional role it is playing in delivering social benefits and programs to the American public,” like tax credits for first-time homebuyers or purchasing electric cars. Yet with ObamaCare, the agency is now responsible for “the most extensive social benefit program the IRS has been asked to implement in recent history.” And without “sufficient funding” it won’t be able to discharge these new duties.
That wouldn’t be tragic, given that those new duties include audits to determine who has the insurance “as required by law” and collecting penalties from Americans who don’t. Companies that don’t sponsor health plans will also be punished. This crackdown will “involve nearly every division and function of the IRS,” Ms. Olson reports.

Well, well. Republicans argued during the health debate that the IRS would have to hire hundreds of new agents and staff to enforce ObamaCare. They were brushed off by Democrats and the press corps as if they believed the President was born on the moon. The IRS says it hasn’t figured out how much extra money and manpower it will need but admits that both numbers are greater than zero.
Ms. Olson also exposed a damaging provision that she estimates will hit some 30 million sole proprietorships and subchapter S corporations, two million farms and one million charities and other tax-exempt organizations. Prior to ObamaCare, businesses only had to tell the IRS the value of services they purchase. But starting in 2013 they will also have to report the value of goods they buy from a single vendor that total more than $600 annually—including office supplies and the like.
Democrats snuck in this obligation to narrow the mythical “tax gap” of unreported business income, but Ms. Olson says that the tracking costs for small businesses will be “disproportionate as compared with any resulting improvement in tax compliance.” Job creation, here we come . . . at least for the accountants who will attempt to comply with a vast new 1099 reporting burden.
Meanwhile, the IRS will be inundated with useless information, because without a huge upgrade its information systems won’t be able to manage and track the nanodetails.
In a Monday letter, even Democratic Senators Mark Begich (Alaska), Ben Nelson (Nebraska), Jeanne Shaheen (New Hampshire) and Evan Bayh (Indiana) denounce this new “burden” on small businesses and insist that the IRS use its discretion to find “better ways to structure this reporting requirement.” In other words, they want regulators to fix one problem among many that all four Senators created by voting for ObamaCare.
We never thought anyone would be nostalgic for the tax system of a few months ago, but post-ObamaCare, here we are.(WSJ)
On Friday, Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman of California, the chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, declared that the sky is about to fall on the Medicare system. His plea to fellow Democrats to pass a $22.9-billion fix for Medicare doctors’ fees reveals the fraudulent nature of our new national health care regime.
Remember the health care issue? Well, the fiscal consequences of the socialized medicine scheme enacted by President Barack Obama and Congress just two months ago are already beginning to snowball.
Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman of California, the chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, was one of the key architects and advocates of Obamacare. He was back on the House floor on Friday delivering an urgent plea to fellow Democrats that inadvertently—or, perhaps, unavoidably—revealed the fraudulent nature of our new national health care regime.
It was supposed to save the taxpayers money, remember? “This legislation will lower costs for families and for businesses and for the federal government, reducing our deficit by over $1 trillion in the next two decades,” Obama said when he signed the bill.
On Friday, Waxman declared that the sky is about to fall on the Medicare system. He went to the House floor to “urge” his colleagues to vote for a bill that includes $102 billion in new federal spending and would add $54 billion to the national debt over the next 10 years — $25 billion of it in the few months remaining in this fiscal year.
Why did Waxman believe this new borrowing-and-spending was necessary?
“It’s absolutely critical to do this if we are going to keep doctors in Medicare and keep the promise to Medicare beneficiaries that they will have access to physicians’ services,” said Waxman. “This provision will provide a moderate increase in physicians’ fees, 2.2 percent for the rest of the year. If we don’t act, doctors’ fees will be cut by 21 percent from where they are today. This would be unconscionable.”
It would not merely be unconscionable. If the 21-percent cut in Medicare fees for doctors—that, in fact, legally took effect on June 1 — is allowed to stand, many doctors in this country will simply stop seeing Medicare patients. They will not be able to afford it. The cost to them of serving their patients will exceed what they are paid. Their profit margin will be swept away.
To make precisely this point, 12 national surgeons’ associations—including the American Association of Neurological Surgeons, the American Association of Orthopedic Surgeons and the American Academy of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery—sent House Speaker Nancy Pelosi a letter last Wednesday warning her what would happen if Medicare doctors’ fees are slashed as they are scheduled to be under current law.
“These continued payment cuts, rising practice costs and a lack of certainty going forward, make it difficult, if not impossible, for already financially challenged surgical practices to continue to treat Medicare patients,” the surgeons’ associations told Pelosi.
The letter pointed the speaker toward the results of a survey of more than 13,000 physicians done in February by the Surgical Coalition, a group of more than 20 medical associations. The survey asked these doctors what they would do if Medicare fees were slashed by the scheduled 21.2 percent.
Twenty-nine percent said they would opt out of the Medicare system entirely. Almost 69 percent said they would limit the number of appointments they would take from Medicare patients, 45.8 percent said they would start referring complex Medicare patients to other physicians, 45.3 percent said they would stop providing certain services, 43.8 percent said they would defer purchasing new medical equipment and 42.7 percent said they would cut their staff. Almost 4 percent of the doctors said they would close or sell their practices.
Why did Congress plan to slash the doctors’ Medicare fees in the first place? It didn’t. In the past, the majority in Congress has routinely enacted budget bills that fraudulently assumed that on some future date the federal government would dramatically slash the Medicare fees paid to doctors, knowing that before that date arrived the majority would pass “emergency” legislation postponing the cuts to some still-future date. The majority in Congress does this so the long-term deficits caused by their spending bills appear to be smaller than they actually are.
As originally proposed, Obamacare would have ended this practice, permanently setting Medicare reimbursement rates for doctors at the true anticipated level. But the Congressional Budget Office determined that doing so would have added $208 billion to the cost of Obamacare over 10 years, forcing the CBO to declare that Obamacare added to the deficit rather than reduced it. That would have cost Obamacare votes on the House floor and quite possibly defeated the legislation.
So the congressional leadership stripped the “doc fix” out of Obamacare and left it to another day.
Waxman went down to the floor last Friday to declare that day had come. Unfortunately, for him, the Senate had already left town for its Memorial Day vacation. So, the current fix will have to wait until it returns.
Even then, the fix only accounts for $22.9 billion of the $102 billion cost of the bill the House did pass on Friday. Most of the rest of the money is for extending unemployment benefits and special targeted tax breaks.
The $22.9 billion fix for the doctors’ fees—if passed by the Senate—would only last through September 2011. Then Congress will presumably do it all again—or let the Medicare system collapse.
And they did.
In the meantime, Obamacare is supposed to cut half a trillion in spending from elsewhere in Medicare, while Obama’s budget—not counting the $54 billion in new debt included in this bill—is expected to add $9.8 trillion to the national debt over the next 10 years.(IBD)

And then there’s still more on the “Financial Reform” bill related to the IRS:
“Small businesses are America’s job creators and essential to our nation’s economy,” Roberts said in prepared remarks. “Under the new healthcare law, small businesses will be hit with a costly tax reporting provision that will increase the cost of doing business at a time of economic uncertainty.”
Beginning in 2012, the law states that businesses, tax-exempt organizations, and state and local governments must submit a separate 1099 form for every business-to-business transaction totaling more than $600. The impetus behind the requirement is help the IRS better enforce the tax law by forcing companies to disclose whom they do business with.
Several organizations, including the IRS watchdog The National Taxpayer Advocate, have questioned how effective this requirement will be on enforcement.
The new mandate applies to everyday purchases, like shipping costs, supplies, even Internet and phone service. The senators argue this will overburden companies. The Taxpayer Advocate questions the IRS’ ability to handle all the documentation.
“Unless corrected, this time-wasting mandate of 1099 filings on common purchases needed to do business, will stifle economic growth and job creation while the IRS will be handed a paperwork nightmare,” Roberts said.
The senators contend the requirement will affect 40 million businesses nationwide.
“I have heard from many Kansas small businesses and farmers, already burdened with government bureaucracy, that these new reporting requirements will waste time and negatively impact their bottom-line,” Roberts said.

Abortion, anyone?
As reports are coming out that Pennsylvania is receiving $160 million from the Department of Health and Human Services to set up a new high-risk insurance pool program that will fund abortions, we are seeing, yet again, that the Obama Administration will say and do anything to pass their liberal agenda — ignoring public opinion along the way…
LIES: “You’ve heard that this is all going to mean government funding of abortion – not true. These are all fabrications.” — President Obama on August 19, 2009
D*MN LIES: “The executive order provides additional safeguards to ensure that the status quo is upheld and enforced, and that the health care legislation’s restrictions against the public funding of abortions cannot be circumvented.” — White House Statement on March 21, 2010
STATISTICS: 67 percent of Americans oppose funding abortions with public funds under the health care bill. — Quinnipiac University Poll, January 14, 2010
As pundits have commented in recent weeks, and many of us have realized, you need to watch what the President really does, not listen to what he says, as the two are often in vast contrast of one another. As you can read above, nowhere is this truer than on the issue of abortion.
Back in March, when the offer to sign an Executive Order was made, many pro-lifers questioned why the order was needed after President Obama, Speaker Pelosi and Secretary Sebelius had been saying for months that no federal dollars would be used to fund abortions. On the day of the vote, I personally spoke on the House floor about how an Executive Order has no effect of law and cannot override the clear intent of a statute, as well as on how an Executive Order is only a piece of paper. Now that we know how little the President values his word and that he is comfortable violating an Executive Order, we are only left to wonder what other secrets are lurking for us in the dark. (The Hill)

Remember, it was abortion that was the very last hurdle that Obama had to jump over to get his power over life and death.
He promised to Federally ban it.
He said Health Care Reform wasn’t tax.
The Stimulus will create 3 Million Jobs. (not “save or create”)
I said at the time he was lying.
I got called a racist so many times I could have paid off my house with the money if I got paid for it.
Saying this President is lying when his lips are moving is like saying the sun will come up tomorrow.
It’s an absolute certainty.

“If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.”-Orwell

Thank you, Big Brother and Big Mother and Big Sis…
Anyone got a crate of Tea handy…

Bureaucrats Everywhere!

Sept 2009: President Barack Obama says requiring people to get health insurance and fining them if they don’t would not amount to a backhanded tax increase. “I absolutely reject that notion,” the president said.”for us to say that you’ve got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax” (CBS)

OBAMA (On ABC): My critics say everything is a tax increase. My critics say that I’m taking over every sector of the economy. You know that. Look, we can have a legitimate debate about whether or not we’re going to have an individual mandate or not, but…
STEPHANOPOULOS: But you reject that it’s a tax increase?
OBAMA: I absolutely reject that notion.
The U.S. Justice Department officially responded to a legal challenge against the federal health-care overhaul Wednesday and called on a federal judge to dismiss the case.
Twenty attorneys general, led by Republican Bill McCollum of Florida, filed suit against the federal government immediately after President Obama’s health-care overhaul became law in March. The attorneys generals are questioning the constitutionality of the law, claiming that Congress does not have the power to require that all Americans purchase health insurance.
The federal health-care law requires that all legal U.S. residents be insured or else pay a penalty — beginning in 2014 — that fines individuals $695 annually or up to 2.5% of their income.
In its defense of the law, the Justice Department invoked the Commerce Clause and claimed penalties for Americans without health-care coverage were consistent with the federal government’s powers to regulate interstate commerce and impose taxes.

The Justice Department filing describes the penalty as a tax, stating that the law “imposes a tax on the choice of a method to finance the future costs of one’s health care.”

McCollum responded to the Justice Department filings Thursday, claiming that the government’s response contradicted the comments that President Obama made during the health-care debate earlier this year.
“The Justice Department’s defenses clash directly with comments made by President Obama during the debate on the health care reform bill, including the President’s insistence on national television that the purchase mandate was absolutely not a tax. Yet in its motion to dismiss, the Obama administration defends the individual mandate under Congress’ ‘taxing and spending’ power,” said McCollum in a press statement.
“Nothing in the Justice Department’s motion filed last night changes the States’ view that we will prevail. Instead, the Justice Department’s defenses clash directly with comments made by President Obama during the debate on the health care reform bill, including the President’s insistence on national television that the purchase mandate was absolutely not a tax. Yet in its motion to dismiss, the Obama Administration defends the individual mandate under Congress’ ‘taxing and spending’ power.
“Not only does the U.S. Department of Justice contradict public statements made by the President and Congressional leadership, it demonstrates in its motion to dismiss that it seems to view this lawsuit by the 20 states and NFIB as a significant challenge, signaling this lawsuit may pose more of a threat in its chances for success.
“Our lawsuit challenges the individual mandate that violates the U.S. Constitution. Furthermore, the federal government is threatening our state sovereignty with this unprecedented expansion of federal powers and commandeering of state resources. This is not acceptable, and we will pursue this litigation as far as necessary to obtain relief for our citizens and our states.”
The lawsuit was filed on March 23, 2010 with 13 original state plaintiffs and was amended on May 14, 2010 to add seven additional states and the National Federation of Independent Business, as well as two individual plaintiffs.
So the Tax that wasn’t a tax is now officially a Tax.
I wonder how the Mainstream Media/Ministry of Truth will ignore that. (I already know BTW).
************
Sixteen crude-sucking barges are back in the Gulf of Mexico working to clean up oil, but the Coast Guard is defending its decision to ground the vessels because it couldn’t verify whether there were fire extinguishers and life vests on board.
“The Coast Guard is not going to compromise safety … that’s our No. 1 priority,” Coast Guard spokesman Robert Brassel told The Daily Caller.
The decision to ground the ships is under intense scrutiny after Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal expressed his deep frustration with the decision Thursday.
“You got men on the barges in the oil, and they have been told by the Coast Guard, ‘Cease and desist. Stop sucking up that oil,’” Jindal said to ABC News.
But don’t worry Obama is going to do everything he can to stop the Oil.
But the bureaucrats aren’t though.
Further, the government’s response is clumsy. “The Army Corps of Engineers, the Coast Guard, the EPA all these different agencies aren’t talking to each other,” Florida’s Okaloosa County commissioner Wayne Harris said.
Anyone seeing National Health Care Administration (aka ObamaCare) in your future?
So why is Obama so slow, it’s 60 days later.
Imagine Bush dithering 60 days after Katrina?
The meltdown would have been apocalyptic. (It already was according to the media back then, but they were “fair” and had no agenda…)
So why doesn’t he do it?
In a word: Unions.
The answer comes in the form of an obscure law called the Jones Act. A throwback to the days of American protectionism, the Jones Act is a piece of 1920s-era legislation that requires ships working in U.S. waters to be built here and crewed by Americans. This is why skimmers from the Persian Gulf, the heavy-duty ships that have proved themselves capable of cleaning up disasters like the one currently facing the Gulf, aren’t employed here doing the vital work for which they’re built. What’s more, it’s why they’re not on their way (which, considering the distance they’d have to cover, is in itself is no small feat).
The president, however, has the power to waive the Jones Act. His predecessor, the one so criticized for his failure to pull out all the stops in responding to Hurricane Katrina, did just that within days of that storm’s devastation. So why hasn’t President Obama taken the same measure?
Therein lies the rub. There is much talk about the political interests that have essentially prevented this administration from acting with common sense time and time again. It’s why many believe competitive market forces won’t be considered as options, even though competition, with little government involvement, would certainly contribute to cleanup efforts in the Gulf of Mexico. Are suspicions that foregoing market fixes is directly tied to protection of union jobs and, by extension, political allies? Using foreign technologies manned by foreign crews will, after all, necessarily keep union bosses from cash they so desperately need going into a tough election season.
This is the political cronyism of the worst sort. It is bad enough the president’s economic recovery plan was convoluted and weighted towards payback of labor unions; worse still are the bailouts being directed toward private and public sector union pensions. Now we have an entire region’s ecological and economic existence being held hostage to the president’s pro-Union myopia.
This is inexcusable.
The president needs to facilitate clean-up. He needs to immediately start cutting red tape and getting the federal government out of the way. First and foremost, he needs to immediately waive the Jones Act and get those foreign crews to the Gulf.
Millions of Americans, not just those suffering in the Gulf, are depending on this. Their voices are far more important than the ever-weakening unions constantly nipping at the president’s heels. (Daily Caller)
He’s a prisoner yet again of a very rigid ideology.
And these are the people from the Government who are here to save you, protect you, keep you healthy and make you “green”.
Doesn’t it just fill you will confidence!
I believe it was Jean Giraudoux who first said, “Only the mediocre are always at their best.”
And if we all strive to be mediocre we can all be at our best!
Rejoice Comrade, The Government has your back (it’s reaching for your wallet!).