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.

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.

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 Examiner

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.

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.