The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday ruled that the health care reform law’s requirement that nearly all Americans buy insurance is unconstitutional, a striking blow to the legislation that increases the odds that the Supreme Court will have to review the law.

The suit was brought by 26 states — nearly all led by Republican governors and attorneys general. The Department of Justice is expected to appeal.

The 2-1 ruling marks the first time a judge appointed by a Democrat has voted to strike down the mandate. Judge Frank Hull, who was nominated by former President Bill Clinton, joined Chief Judge Joel Dubina, who was appointed by George H.W. Bush, to strike down the mandate.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0811/61218.html#ixzz1UrhBoCKg

Here’s the link to the list.

From the Washington Times

After taking a beating at the hands of Missouri voters in August, “Obamacare” could be roughed up once again at the ballot box in November.

Following the lead of the successful Missouri initiative, which passed with 71 percent of the vote, Arizonans, Coloradans and Oklahomans will decide this fall whether to approve proposed constitutional amendments that would allow them to opt out of key provisions of President Obama‘s signature national health care law.

The three initiatives prohibit the government from forcing individuals to buy health care insurance – a “mandate” that critics say violates the U.S. Constitution – and would allow patients and employers to pay providers directly without penalty. The idea is to protect state residents from “the ongoing takeover of health care by government,” backers of the Colorado campaign say.

There’s just one problem, say opponents of the state ballot initiatives: The entire strategy is “an exercise in futility,” in the words of Oklahoma Gov. Brad Henry, a Democrat. Federal law trumps state law, meaning that the measures are certain to be overturned even if they win 100 percent of the vote.

“No state has the authority to selectively ignore federal laws of its choosing, no matter how much some people may dislike them, and any attempt to do so will be ruled unconstitutional by the courts,” said Mr. Henry, who opposes State Question 756. The only practical outcome of the vote, he added, would be a “costly legal battle.”

“I don’t think it makes sense to waste taxpayers’ money on a legal action we know we will lose, particularly during a historic revenue crisis,” he said.

Jon Caldara, who is spearheading the Amendment 63 campaign in Colorado, said opponents are forgetting about “a pesky little thing called the 10th Amendment,” which reserves to the states “the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution.”

“There have been numerous examples to suggest that there are times when state law supplants federal law,” said Mr. Caldara, president of the free-market Independence Institute in Golden. “If federal law always supplanted state law, then we wouldn’t have 20 state attorneys general suing to overturn the federal law.”

That joint lawsuit, challenging the constitutionality of the health care law primarily over the insurance-buying mandate, is proceeding in the courts even as the political fight continues.

Mr. Caldera added that, if opponents truly thought the states and the voters were powerless, then “they wouldn’t have spent so much trying to keep us off the ballot.”

Read the rest of the story.

From Human Events

The Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) is providing $160 million to the state of Pennsylvania to set up a new high-risk insurance pool program that pays for abortions, as part of a larger $5 billion commitment of taxpayer funds that will include abortion coverage for over 400,000 people nationwide.

“This is the boldest admission yet from the Obama administration that the President’s Executive Order on taxpayer-funded abortion was a sham.  The fact that the high-risk pool insurance program in Pennsylvania will use federal taxpayer dollars to fund abortions is unconscionable,” said House Republican leader John Boehner.

Steven Ertelt reports on LifeNews.com that HHS has approved the program in Pennsylvania that will soon spread to other states paying abortions nationwide.

From the report:

[HHS] has quietly approved a plan submitted by an appointee of pro-abortion Governor Edward Rendell under which the new program will cover any abortion that is legal in Pennsylvania.
…
“The Obama Administration will give Pennsylvania $160 million in federal tax funds, which we’ve discovered will pay for insurance plans that cover any legal abortion,” said Douglas Johnson, legislative director for the National Right to Life Committee.

Johnson told LifeNews.com: “This is just the first proof of the phoniness of President Obama’s assurances that federal funds would not subsidize abortion — but it will not be the last.”
…
The pro-life community strongly opposed the executive order and said Rep. Bart Stupak and other House Democrats who voted for the pro-abortion health care bill in exchange for it were selling out their pro-life principles. This first case of forcing taxpayers to pay for abortions under the new law appears to prove them right that the bill language and executive order were ineffective.

Boehner has led the effort to require President Obama to keep his word that no tax dollars would be used to fund abortions.  Holding the president to his word is a tall order.

“Just last month at the White House I asked President Obama to provide the American people with a progress report on the implementation of his Executive Order, which purports to ban taxpayer-funding of abortions.  Unfortunately, the President provided no information, and the American people are still waiting for answers,” Boehner said.

Read the rest of the story

From the Washington Times

From the Washington Examiner

From Investors Business Daily

Broken Pledge: An early draft of regulations written for the health care overhaul estimates that more than half of U.S. workers will see their medical insurance change. Funny, that’s not the promise we remember.

Late last week, reports surfaced that an 83-page White House document had been leaked from the White House. If the rules included in this draft are promulgated, the health plans of 51% of workers will be subject to change within three years.

In the new system, companies that modify employee coverage after Jan. 1, 2014, will lose their “grandfather” status and be forced to comply with ObamaCare rules. This means they will have no choice but to buy plans that will cost more because the law says they must include expanded coverage.

Changes in plans that would cause a company to lose its grandfather status can be as modest as a small shift in the co-payment amount or in the employees’ contribution to the coverage. By merely asking workers to share a bit more of the burden, companies will have to buy new plans.

Many Americans are likely to find the added coverage of the new plans unnecessary for their needs and the extra costs taxing to household budgets. How many who liked their plans will have new ones forced on them by a bureaucracy that’s not equipped to make decisions for people it doesn’t know?

According to the midrange estimate cited in the White House document, small businesses will be hit hardest. Two-thirds of them “will relinquish their grandfathered status by the end of 2013″ while 45% of large employer plans will be affected.

“In the worst-case scenario,” reported IBD’s Sean Higgins and David Hogberg on Monday, “69% of employers — 80% of smaller firms — would lose that status, exposing them to far more provisions under the new health law.”

Are the bureaucrats writing these regulations unfamiliar with the promise President Obama made repeatedly last year: “If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan”?

Did they know that Linda Douglass, the White House fixer who said it was her job to “keep track of all the disinformation out there about health insurance reform,” assured the public that Obama was sincere when he said that? The answer to both is an emphatic yes.

So why write regulations that break a presidential promise? Because that promise was never meant to be kept. Like all the misrepresentations about cost, it was meant to mislead the public and generate support for, or at least blunt opposition to, a government takeover of the health care sector.

From the Washington Examiner

By Senator Tom Coburn — President Obama and his allies kicked off an unusual, and perhaps unprecedented, taxpayer-subsidized political campaign this week to sell to the public a legislative program that has already been signed into law.

The obvious coordination between the White House and its allies outside government who are running a $125 million campaign raises troubling questions. But, first, I’ll address the substance of what the president talked about, and ignored.

On Tuesday, the president trumpeted a provision in his plan that will give seniors a $250 rebate check if they reach the Medicare prescription drug benefit “doughnut hole” coverage gap in 2010. The president also spent a great deal of time repeating his talking points from last year’s health care debate. He claimed his plan would reduce the deficit and claimed the arguments of his critics were not “anchored in reality.”

As a practicing physician with more than 25 years of experience, and as a former business owner in the health care sector, I’d suggest this new PR campaign is grounded in politics rather than reality. The so-called experts behind this effort appear to be political hacks and career politicians who have zero real-world experience in the health care sector.

First, the president’s claims about the supposed benefits of a $250 rebate check for seniors are wildly out of proportion to both the reality of Medicare and his own program. Less than 10 percent of seniors enrolled in Medicare will receive a rebate check.

On the other hand, a greater percentage of seniors enrolled in Medicare – the 25 percent participating in Medicare Advantage – will see their benefits cut because the White House ultimately wants to kill the program for ideological reasons. Seniors are about to learn that if they like their plan, they can’t keep it. Medicare Advantage providers are already planning on cutting benefits and raising fees because of the law.

The president’s interest in the doughnut hole also suggests the PR campaign is willfully overlooking and exacerbating a much greater threat – Medicare’s $38 trillion unfunded liabilities. Our real national challenge is not the doughnut hole but our financial black hole of debt that is threatening to swallow not only Medicare but our entire economy.

During the most recent meeting of the president’s debt commission two esteemed economists, Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard and Carmen Reinhart of the University of Maryland, declared that our debt is already at 90 percent of our GDP, which they view as a tipping point at which economic growth slows considerably.

Borrowing from future generations and foreign governments to pay for rebate checks represents the kind of perverse short-term decision making that has brought our nation to the edge of a fiscal black hole. At best, throwing rebate checks at Medicare is an exercise in futility that will postpone real reform.

The president made a number of other claims that weren’t anchored in reality, such as his claim that his plan will reduce the deficit. When real-world accounting is applied to health care spending and necessary expenses like the doctor fix are included, all of the so-called savings evaporate.

Even the Congressional Budget Office, which the White House sites as its authoritative source, has contradicted the White House. CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf recently said, “The rising costs of health care will put tremendous pressure on the federal budget during the next few decades and beyond … In CBO’s judgment, the health legislation enacted earlier this year does not substantially diminish that pressure.”

Yet, perhaps the most important reality check in this debate is to acknowledge the obvious. This new PR campaign has nothing to do with improving the health of Americans and everything to do with improving the job security of politicians who voted for this bill against the wishes of their constituents. Turning federal agencies into de facto direct mail and political advertising branches of the Democratic political establishment will refill the swamp and remind voters why they loath Washington.

The American people have not only made up their minds about this bill, they are fatigued with this debate and the condescension of the Washington establishment who considers their objections to be based on fear, scare tactics and hysteria.

The American people have studied this law more intently the politicians and unelected staff who wrote it. They have made decisions based on information, not misinformation. The campaign’s rhetoric of victimization is not a comeback at Republicans but an insult to the millions of Americans who did their homework and made good faith, informed judgments about a bill that fixed the wrong problem.

The reality is Congress and the White House had a chance to do something bold and bipartisan to fix the real problem, and they blew it. This law represents a failure of content, not communication. Sooner or later, a nation that aspires to a future beyond a rendezvous with debt will insist that this misguided law be repealed and replaced.

From John Goodman’s blog

Rick Foster is the Chief Actuary of Medicare, and his office has just released a devastating critique of the Administration’s health reform law.

Before getting to details, let me say there is nothing in the report that is surprising to independent health economists. The conclusions are consistent with everything The Lewin Group and other private estimates have been saying for months. What is surprising is that one of the most respected agencies of the U.S. government is completely undermining the Alice-in-Wonderland fables being spun by the White House, on Capitol Hill and in the mainstream media. To wit:

• You cannot take close to one trillion dollars away from one group of people and spend it on another group of people and somehow leave those footing the bill better off.
• You cannot give millions of people large increases in medical care without creating any new doctors, new nurses or other paramedical personnel.
• You cannot arbitrarily reduce what you are paying providers by billions of dollars and still expect to get the same quantity and quality of care.
• You cannot give millions of patients and thousands of doctors new incentives to waste medical resources and then expect health care spending to go down.

In other words, the Chief Actuary is simply saying reality is reality. Economics is economics. A is A.

 

Convenient summaries of the Actuary’s report have been produced by the Republican staff of the House Ways and Means Committee and by the Senate Republican Policy Committee. Although these are partisan groups, the summaries appear to be quite faithful to the source. Here are the salient findings (with page numbers in the Actuary’s report):

• Health care costs will go up, not down. National health expenditures will increase from 17 percent of GDP now to 21 percent under the new law and will be higher than without the legislation. [Page 4] Net federal spending on health care will also increase.
• Health care shortages are “plausible and even probable.” Because of the increased demand for health care, “supply constraints might initially interfere with providing the services desired by the additional 34 million insured persons.” [Page 20]
• 14 million employees will lose their employer coverage. Employees of small firms are especially at risk (despite small employer tax credit subsidies). [Page 7]
• 2 million employees who lose coverage will have to enroll in Medicaid. [Page 3]
• A Medicaid insurance card is not a guarantee of care. An estimated 18 million people will be added to Medicaid. [Page 3] However, because there is no corresponding increase in the supply of caregivers, “it is reasonable to expect that a significant portion of the increased demand for Medicaid would be difficult to meet, particularly over the first few years.” [Page 20]
• One in ten insured workers will see their health benefits taxed. By 2019, more than 10% of insured workers will “be in employer plans with benefit values in excess of the thresholds (before changes to reduce benefits) and this percentage would increase rapidly thereafter.” [Page 13]
• Higher taxes will lead to higher premiums. The new taxes on medical devices, prescription drugs, and insurance plans “would generally be passed on through to health consumers in the form of higher drug and device prices and higher insurance premiums.” [Page 17]
• There are more than one-half trillion in Medicare cuts. The new health law cuts “$575 billion” from Medicare. [Page 4]
• Medicare cuts would threaten almost one in every seven hospitals. About “15 percent of Part A providers would become unprofitable within the 10-year projection period.” [Page 10]
• Overall access to care for seniors would go down. Because of the law’s payment reductions, “providers for whom Medicare constitutes a substantive portion of their business could find it difficult to remain profitable and, absent legislative intervention, might end their participation in the program. [Page 10]
• 7.4 million people will lose access to Medicare Advantage plans. Enrollment in MA plans will be cut in half (from its projected level of 14.8 million under the current law to 7.4 million under the new law). [Page 11]
• False advertising: The new “Medicare Tax” doesn’t go to Medicare. “Despite the title of this tax, this provision is unrelated to Medicare; in particular, the revenues generated by the tax on unearned income are not allocated to the Medicare trust funds.” [Page 9]
• False advertising: Budgetary double-counting does not improve Medicare’s solvency. Medicare cuts “cannot be simultaneously used to finance other federal outlays (such as the coverage expansions) and to extend the [life of the Medicare] trust fund, despite the appearance of this result from the respective accounting conventions.” [Page 9]
• The new long-term care insurance plan (CLASS Act) is unsound. The program faces “a significant risk of failure” because the high costs will attract sicker people and lead to low participation. [Page 15]
• The promise to those with pre-existing conditions is unfunded. “By 2011 and 2012 the initial $5 billion in Federal funding for [high risk pools] would be exhausted, resulting in substantial premium increases to sustain the program.” [Page 16]
• The law does almost nothing to limit actual fraud and abuse. The fraud provisions in the law will save only about two percent of $47 billion in suspect claims.

From the Orlando Sentinal

MOUNT DORA — A doctor who considers the national health-care overhaul to be bad medicine for the country posted a sign on his office door telling patients who voted for President Barack Obama to seek care “elsewhere.”

“I’m not turning anybody away — that would be unethical,” Dr. Jack Cassell, 56, a Mount Dora urologist and a registered Republican opposed to the health plan, told the Orlando Sentinel on Thursday. “But if they read the sign and turn the other way, so be it.”

The sign reads: “If you voted for Obama … seek urologic care elsewhere. Changes to your healthcare begin right now, not in four years.”

Estella Chatman, 67, of Eustis, whose daughter snapped a photo of the typewritten sign, sent the picture to U.S. Rep. Alan Grayson, the Orlando Democrat who riled Republicans last year when he characterized the GOP’s idea of health care as, “If you get sick, America … Die quickly.”

Chatman said she heard about the sign from a friend referred to Cassell after his physician recently died. She said her friend did not want to speak to a reporter but was dismayed by Cassell’s sign.

“He’s going to find another doctor,” she said.

Cassell may be walking a thin line between his right to free speech and his professional obligation, said William Allen, professor of bioethics, law and medical professionalism at the University of Florida‘s College of Medicine.

Allen said doctors cannot refuse patients on the basis of race, gender, religion, sexual orientation or disability, but political preference is not one of the legally protected categories specified in civil-rights law. By insisting he does not quiz his patients about their politics and has not turned away patients based on their vote, the doctor is “trying to hold onto the nub of his ethical obligation,” Allen said.

“But this is pushing the limit,” he said.

Read the rest of the story.

From World Net Daily

President Obama’s recently passed health-care reform legislation includes a surprise for many Americans – a beefing up of a U.S. Public Health Service reserve force and expectations that it respond on short notice to “routine public health and emergency response missions,” even involuntarily.

According to Section 5210 of HR 3590, titled “Establishing a Ready Reserve Corps,” the force must be ready for “involuntary calls to active duty during national emergencies and public health crises.”

The health-care legislation adds millions of dollars for recruitment and amends Section 203 of the Public Health Service Act (42 U.S.C. 204), passed July 1, 1944, during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency. The U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps is one of the seven uniformed services in the U.S. However, Obama’s changes more than double the wording of the Section 203 and dub individuals who are currently classified as officers in the Reserve Corps commissioned officers of the Regular Corps.

The U.S. Public Health Service website describes its commissioned corps as “an elite team of more than 6,000 full-time, well-trained, highly qualified public health professionals dedicated to delivering the nation’s public health promotion and disease prevention programs and advancing public health science.”

According to its mission page, officers of the commissioned corps may:

• Provide essential public health and health care services to underserved and disadvantaged populations

• Prevent and control injury and the spread of disease

• Ensure that the nation’s food supply, drinking water, drugs, medical devices and environment are safe

• Conduct and support cutting-edge research for the prevention, treatment and elimination of disease, health disparities and injury

• Work with other nations and international agencies to address global health challenges

• Provide urgently needed public health and clinical expertise in response to large-scale local, regional and national public health emergencies and disasters

Members are trained to respond to public health situations and national emergency events, such as natural disasters, disease outbreaks and terrorist attacks.

Read the rest of the column.

U.S. Representative Michele Bachmann (MN-06) issued the following statement today after introducing legislation to repeal the Democrats’ government takeover of health care:

 

“It’s no secret, President Obama and Democrat leaders have ignored the will of the people and have chosen to ram through their trillion-dollar health care bill despite the American people’s overwhelming objection to it.

“It’s future generations, our children and grandchildren who will pay the price for our government’s arrogance and recklessness, and the American people won’t ever forget the irresponsible actions of this Administration and Democratic Majority. After all, government answers to the people, not the other way around. I’m asking my colleagues to join me in repealing this monstrosity of a bill.”

Click here to view the legislation .

From Investor’s Business Daily

By BETSY McCAUGHEY. By Demagogue — a word of Greek origin — means a person who uses falsehoods, prejudices and emotional appeals to gain power. Huey Long, governor of Louisiana from 1928 to 1932, U.S. senator from 1932 to 1935 and creator of the Share Our Wealth Program, fit that definition.

Long stirred crowds with fiery denunciations of corporate greed. Ultimately, even fellow Democrats grew alarmed and backed away from his legislation.

Demagogue also describes how President Obama revved up crowds as he crisscrossed the country selling his health legislation.

“A big part of our campaign,” he told audiences in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Missouri, “was about changing the way Washington works — including the responsibility to live within its means. Over the last year, we’ve gone through the budget line-by-line looking for places to trim the fat out of government.”

The truth is, as soon as he took office, the president signed bills that flooded the nation with new spending, resulting in a fiscal 2009 budget 19% above the previous year.

He also promised audiences that “for the first time, uninsured individuals and small businesses will have the same kind of choice of private health insurance that members of Congress get.”

That’s not true. According to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, members of Congress “enjoy the widest selection of health plans in the country and can choose from health savings accounts, catastrophic plans with high deductibles, fee-for-service plans, preferred provider plans and HMOs.”

Read the rest of the column.