Category Archives: Healthcare

Zero-Care: $2 Trillion, But CBOafs Aren’t Counting

Education, Government, Healthcare, Welfare

The CBOafs (Congressional Budget Office) will “typically first confirm government predictions of the great savings that will accrue due to this or the other wastrel, welfare program. Later, when it’s safer, they adjust their statistical sleight of hand.”

Having at first released glowing forecasts about the benefits of the new, federal, healthcare program, the bought-and-paid-for bean-counters now predict that “between 6 million and 7 million fewer people will have employment-based insurance coverage each year from 2016 through 2024 than would be the case in the absence of the ACA.”

On 6/26/2009, “Obama’s Politburo Of Proctologists” forecast that Obamacare would constitute “a modest healthcare expansion totaling $2 trillion.” Finally, in 2/2014, five years on, the CBOafs (who’re supposed to warn ahead of time) agree that the “[g]ross cost of Obamacare’s major coverage provisions from 2015-2024 is nearly $2 trillion.”

More here.

Origination-Clause Argument Against Zero-Care

Constitution, Healthcare, Law

If—or rather when—a new constitutional challenge to Obamacare fails, this won’t be because Sissel v. United States Department of Health & Human Services lacks merit, but because we are governed by a tripartite tyranny of colluding quislings and their armies of extra-constitutional commissions and agencies, in whose legislation The People have no say.

Indeed, on May 8, 2014, an interesting and rather original oral argument is scheduled to be heard by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, in the case launched against United States Department of Health & Human Services. The Plaintiff is the Pacific Legal Foundation. Here is a Summary of the PLF’s case:

Pacific Legal Foundation has launched a new constitutional cause of action against the federal Affordable Care Act. The ACA imposes a charge on Americans who fail to buy health insurance — a charge that the U.S. Supreme Court recently characterized as a federal tax. PLF’s amended complaint alleges that this purported tax is illegal because it was introduced in the Senate rather than the House, as required by the Constitution’s Origination Clause for new revenue-raising bills (Article I, Section 7).

The Origination Clause argument is part of an amended complaint filed in PLF’s existing lawsuit against the ACA, Sissel v. U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, pending before Judge Beryl A. Howell, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

PLF’s Sissel lawsuit was on hold while the U.S. Supreme Court considered the challenge to the ACA from the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) and 26 states, in NFIB v. Sebelius. As initially filed, PLF’s Sissel lawsuit targeted the ACA’s individual mandate to buy health insurance as a violation of the Constitution’s Commerce Clause (Article I, Section 8).

MORE.

ObamaCare-Related Tax Increases

Healthcare, Taxation

For the much-maligned “rich” earning between $200,000 and $250,000, the tax burden of ObamaCare over the next 10 years will be $38,200.66.

“Fox News Taxpayer Calculator breaks down the tax burden over the next 10 years by income level: If you make under $15,000: it’s just over $59.00. If you make between $50,000 and $100,000, it’s $6,069.90.”

“A wealth-transfer program with health insurance attached,” is how Cato Institute Senior Fellow Michael Tanner looks at it.

Like all taxes, Zero Care is plain theft.

A Law Unto Themselves

Constitution, Founding Fathers, Healthcare, Justice, Law, The Courts

Why stage a judicial intervention when you can sit back and let the executive and the legislature accrue more power, a power that invariably will redound to the Courts as well?

On Monday, the High Court, which should check the other two branches of government—how is that working out?—decided against taking up “the constitutionality of the National Security Agency’s surveillance program that collects bulk telephone data of millions of Americans.” (NJ)

When the Supreme Court has the chance to strike down rights-violating laws and legislation (like the Obamacare individual mandate)—it so often declines.

“Monday’s decision,” concludes the National Journal (too charitably, in my opinion), “reaffirms expectations that the justices would rather allow the issue to percolate within the circuit courts first.”

(At least NJ covers such stuff.)

In the case of Obama’s Affordable Care Act, John G. Roberts Jr., chief of the country’s legal politburo of proctologists, rewrote Obamacare, and then proceeded to provide the fifth vote to uphold the individual mandate undergirding the law, thereby undeniably and obscenely extending Congress’s taxing power.

Face it, the idea of a judiciary that would police the executive as an arm of a self-correcting tripartite government is worse than naive. Rather, it WAS recklessly naive of the American Founding Fathers to imagine that branches of a government, each of whose power is enhanced when the power of the other branches grows, would serve as a check on one another.