Topher Morrison
Thank the Heritage Foundation and Mitt Romney not Barack Obama and
Nancy Pelosi – they merely took the health care handoff. While you’re
at it, thank George W. Bush for wildly expanding Medicare and nominating
Chief Justice John Roberts who sided Thursday with the central powers
ethos of our ailing Constitution. Make no mistake the over 2,700 page
Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, known lovingly as Obama Care
is an abomination borne of the dysfunctional marriage between
Republicans and Democrats.
This is no Car Insurance
The linchpin of the entire health care reform relies on the individual mandate, the
brainchild of Stuart M. Butler
of the conservative Heritage Foundation. In 1989 Butler published
“Assuring Affordable Health Care for All Americans,” which included a
provision to “mandate all households to obtain adequate insurance.”
In 1993 amidst the Hillary Care years Republican senators Orin Hatch
and Charles Grassley proposed two bills including the mandate. In 2006
then Governor of Massachusetts Mitt Romney was “very pleased” with his
insurance mandate.
Over the last 20 years the mandate has been often rationalized as
similar to requiring motorists to purchase car insurance. The major
difference of course is not everybody drives.
Purchasing, leasing or borrowing a car moreover, involves a choice
prior to the requirement of obtaining car insurance and even then the
“minimum coverage” is designed to offset others’ costs in the result of
an accident, not your own. You being a bad driver results in higher
premiums, confined to you alone, not spread out over a large risk pool.
That being said, none of us were given the choice to live. Had we
been notified we’d be living under the thumb of centralized medical
control perhaps some of us would have taken the bus, taxi, a bike – hell
maybe we would have ran and saved millions in preventive care by
staying in shape.
The Fallacy of Insurance
Like football players who believe a helmet will protect them from
harder and harder hits on the field and pursue that behavior until an
inevitable concussion or brain damage debunks their faith the idea that
insurance will always be there to protect us from our risky lifestyles
is self deluding.
Millions of Americans are taking part in a revolution of nutrition
and exercise nothing of, which is addressed under Obama Care. One may
argue the impetus for this change was in fact rising health care costs.
It was obvious to many merely pumping ourselves full of drugs at an old
age at great cost was pointless and unsavory.
Our medical model is not expensive necessarily because of
unscrupulous corporations, although it will be as Obama Care is
implemented, but because of the treatment model rather than focusing on
prevention. Our medical establishment performs wonders in the emergency
room, in acute care and major surgery, but when it comes to some of the
biggest killers it continues to provide little besides pain management
and a fund raising bonanza for scientific research.
Real health care is a life long and dutiful process of mitigating the
affects of our environment, the modern medical establishment offers
next to nothing by way of prevention besides the regular check up.
Traditional medical schools madate little in the way of nutritional,
physical education or behavioral modification.
As we detailed in the
War on Fact Expands so does Big Government,
prexisting conditions are often similarly a part of risky behavior.
Consider the number of women giving birth into their 40s and 50s and
beyond is at record levels.
This choice is generally fraught with developmental problems, birth
defects and other maladies, which are then thrown into this
“preexisting” category.
In recent years it has become more and more accepted that major diseases like multiple schlerosis, diabetes, cancer, etc. are a
result of dietary malfeasance. While susceptibility is most assuredly genetically predetermined actually developing a disease is
vastly influenced by lifestyle. The concept we are victims of our genetic baggage is in many ways a hangover from the years of eugenic theology.
On the individual level the motivation to explore healthful
alternatives are sapped when faced with universal coverage. Similarly
on the corporate level, if prevention is no longer a preeminent
strategy, more research and development (if it gets approved) will be
devoted to invasive and life numbing treatments like chemotherapy,
radiation and the cornucopia of pharmaceuticals addicting swaths of the
American citizenry.
Who Benefits? Not Liberals Just Insurance Companies who Wrote the Law
Sensing the prevailing winds it is of course understandable that the
insurance companies injected themselves into the debate. This is what
invariably happens when government decides to regulate or wholly remake
one sixth of the economy. The power of central government beckons
legions of lobbysists to its steps and the mantra of lobbying if you
“can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” inevitably prevails.
Here are some quotes compiled by Kurt Nimmo
writing for Infowars.com:
“This is a very good bill for insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies,” said Rep. Stephen Lynch,
a Democrat, in 2010. “The insurers still rule,” Lynch added. “Were just
pumping subsidies into the current system, but that won’t drive down
costs.”
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In December of 2009,
Howard Dean,
the former Democratic National Committee Chairman, said the legislation
before Congress “is a bigger bailout for the insurance industry than
AIG.” Dean characterized it as “an insurance company’s dream.”
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Congressman Dennis Kucinich
characterized the bill as “a bailout for insurance companies…Maybe what
we’re looking at here is another way that Wall Street’s speculative
engine can be fueled, this time with the help of the premiums of tens of
millions of Americans,” he said.
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“If a government healthcare plan materializes, it might
actually generate more work for insurance companies. A new government
program would probably subcontract much of its administrative work to
existing insurance companies — which is what Medicare does,” writes Rick Newman for U.S. News & World Report.
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Do insurance companies hate Obamacare as Democrats insist? Not at all. This bill is almost identical to the plan written by AHIP,
the insurance company trade association, in 2009. The original Senate
Finance Committee bill was authored by a former Wellpoint VP. Since
Congress released the first of its health care bills on October 30,
2009, health care stocks have risen 28.35%.
States in a Straight Jacket
The Medicaid ruling specifically, according to Justice Kennedy’s dissent, puts states in
false choice position:
“States must choose between expanding Medicaid or paying huge tax
sums…for the sole benefit of expanding Medicaid in other states.” The
dissent also foreshadowed more friction between the states and the
federal government “usher[ing] in new federalism concerns and places an
unaccustomed strain upon the union.”
The union will no doubt be under increasing pressure as many of Obama
Care’s provisions have yet to be made manifest. A growing body of
administrative agencies including
an army of IRS agents will attend to that.
Most of our laws in this country are created by these agencies, which
interpret the mandate provided by congress and detail specific
provisions. The Federal Register for example in a 12-month period,
which ended in March of 2006 contained a breathtaking 77,537 pages
including laws passed from over 319 independent and executive agencies.
Barack Obama after the passage of Obama Care tentatively created
159 new bureaucratic bodies
ostensibly to encourage efficiency and cost effectiveness in the new
health care system. While it most assuredly with fail in this endeavor
it
will be able to pass laws as most other agencies do with
little impunity or oversight as the size of the executive branch and its
czars continues to eclipse the elected representatives in Congress and
as it will eventually the laws of the several states.
Robert’s Manufactured Opinion and Another Reason to Repeal the Income Tax
Paul D. Clement,
representing Florida and 25 other states objecting to the health-care
law, argued that Congress exceeded its power in passing the law, which
he said compels people to buy a product. Unfortunately, this argument
on whether it was within Congress’s constitutional powers to force
citizens to purchase a health insurance product was in essence settled
nearly a century ago after the passage of what was originally Social
Security “Insurance” under President Franklin Roosevelt.
Similar opposing arguments were lain out then, were rebuffed and
under the same “tax” provision as construed under the individual
mandate, officially known as the “minimum coverage” provision. The
main difference is Obama Care wasn’t envisaged to be a tax. Roberts did
not reinterpret, but in fact manufactured a contradictory argument in
the face of what Congress called a penalty, not a tax.
“Roberts wrote: ‘The Affordable Care Act is
constitutional in part and unconstitutional in part.’ He said the
individual mandate ‘cannot be upheld as an exercise of Congress’s power
under the commerce clause,’ which allows Congress to regulate interstate
commerce but ‘not to order individuals to engage in it.’"
Roberts added: ‘In this case, however, it is reasonable to construe
what Congress has done as increasing taxes on those who have a certain
amount of income, but choose to go without health insurance. Such
legislation is within Congress’s power to tax.’"
Roberts therein supplied his own basis for upholding the law in
absence of a similar rationalization by Congress, or argument by the
deputy attorney general and contrary to the President who signed the
legislation into law. According to the Post: “Neither the
plaintiffs in the case nor the Obama administration had argued before
the court that the individual mandate was a tax.”
Obama himself expressly refuted opponents of Obama Care who claimed that it was in fact a tax. In an ABC interview Obama
emphatically declared: “I absolutely reject that it’s a tax increase.”
The Silver Lining
It may be that Obama Care will be the kick in the pants sovereign states of America need to start
ignoring the federal government when it clearly exceeds it constitutional powers. States where
once a part of federal decision-making, via their legislature’s
appointed ambassadors, but no longer this may provide the fuel state governments need to enforce there devolved powers.
In the end Mitt Romney may be right when he defended Massachusetts’ health care reform on 10th
Amendment grounds. After all the laboratories of democracy would
produce 50 different options for all of us to decide rather than the one
size fits all monstrosity about to be imposed on us from Washington.
The Uncomfortable Irony
Mitt Romney today stood up and told us everything
we’ve already heard over the past two and a half years: it is time to
“repeal and replace.” Is it not ironic that the man who developed the
blueprint for Obama Care, albeit he managed to pass it in some
significantly smaller than Obama’s tome, and who was the first to
nationalize health care is the only option this country has for
repealing it? For now in the words of DNC executive director
@patrickgaspard:
“It’s constitutional. Bitches.”
