Category Archives: Healthcare

The Powers Of Obama’s ‘Politburo of Proctologists’

Barack Obama, Constitution, Founding Fathers, Healthcare, Individual Rights, Regulation, Socialism

Not even the US Solicitor General Donald Verrilli can muster a spirited defense of ObamaCare. Said Verrilli, almost apologetically, on Tuesday before the Supreme Court: “Maybe they were right, maybe they weren’t, but this is something about which the people of the United States can deliberate and they can vote, and if they think it needs to be changed, they can change it.” [Oh really?]

Our state’s Attorney General Rob McKenna sees this as the most important case of our lifetime on Federal power under the Commerce clause. The Supreme Court was treating it very seriously, as have all the courts so far, in ruling on the individual mandate. The power to order individuals into private contract, says McKenna, is made up. It’s not as if it had been lying around undiscovered.

It’s a shame that McKenna seems to both support and anticipate ‘severability”—an outcome whereby the individual mandate is severed from the rest of the law, which is upheld.

To the fatuous point of the health-care market being unique, and thus requiring special treatment by the state, McKenna counters that uniqueness is not a constitutional principle.

The issue here is not healthcare policy but Federal power, he says, intimating that Obama’s “politburo of proctologists” cannot “create commerce in order to regulate it.” This is a first, claims McKenna.

As was pointed out in “Destroying Healthcare For The Few Uninsured,” the number of uninsured, by choice or not by choice, is grossly exaggerated.

“The key legal thinker in developing the case against the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate” is Facebook Friend Randy Barnett. Randy is “the originator of the activity/inactivity distinction” being used in the arguments against Obamacare.

Here is Randy’s interview on Ezra Klein’s WaPo’s blog.

Especially pertinent, in the Klein interview, is Randy’s distinction between “the government’s power to tax in order to pay for Medicare, which is a single-payer insurance program that [you’ll] get when over 65,” and the same entity’s constitutional authority to compel the individual to “self-insure on the private market before [he’s] 65.”

RB: “There are several answers, but I’ll limit myself to two. First, there’s the text of the Constitution itself. The text of the Constitution itself gives Congress the power to levy taxes on people and on income. We can’t dispute that. It does not give Congress the power under its commerce power, at least not expressly, to make them do business with private companies.
The second point I would make is that the duty to pay taxes is part of your duty to support the government in return for the protections the government gives you. What the government is claiming here is this power — and this ought to disturb people on the left — to make people do business with private companies when Congress thinks it’s convenient.”

It’s safe to say that even libertarians like Randy who might uphold the elaborate public works sprung from the General Welfare and Interstate Commerce Clauses as constitutional, have to agree that Thomas Jefferson would probably be appalled with it all.

Whither HellCare?

Barack Obama, Constitution, Healthcare, Law, Political Philosophy, Regulation, Socialism

As freedom lovers know, the case pitting the DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES against FLORIDA, ET AL is simply one more stage on the road to socializing the means of health-care production. Americans already labor under, as one wag put it, “a seeming patchwork of indemnity insurance arrangements, managed care, private payment, and charity.”

Increasing interventionism is always accompanied by the use of brute force, the legitimacy of which the nation’s Supreme Politburo Of Proctologists (the SCOTUS) is currently debating.

Not surprisingly, “the four jurists appointed by Democratic presidents — Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan — seemed sympathetic to the government’s defense of the [ObamaCare], at times offering Solicitor General Donald Verrilli helpful answers to their colleagues’ questions,” reports the National Journal’s Margot Sanger-Katz. “Justices Samuel Alito and Antonin Scalia — who had been considered by some Court watchers to be in play — seemed to stand firmly with the challengers.”

Equally predictable: “Chief Justice John Roberts, whose questions suggested a discomfort with the health care law, … also defended the government’s argument at times.”

Both Kennedy and Roberts will probably find a way to make ObamaCare palatable by papering over arguments against it. While they “seemed particularly concerned about the question of whether upholding this law would mean that Congress’s authority to pass regulation would be virtually unbounded, [t]hey repeatedly asked Verrilli to identify a limiting principle that would allow this mandate to go forward without opening the door to requirements to purchase other products.” [NJ]

The gist of the case being argued:

The 26 states challenging the mandate say it is an unprecedented demand, one that regulates economic “inactivity” and forces people into purchasing a product they do not want. If the government can compel the purchase of health insurance, they argue, then nearly any sort of purchase mandate could also be permitted. The administration counters that there’s basically no avoiding the health care market: Everyone needs health care at some time, often with little warning or financial preparation. Health insurance is not a standalone product, but merely a means of regulating the financing of that activity, it says

[NJ]

The elaborate public works sprung from the General Welfare and Interstate Commerce Clauses are unconstitutional. However, despite the fact that there is no warrant in the Constitution for most of what the Federal Frankenstein does, the Proctologists will find a way around what is already a dead-letter document.

UPDATED: Mindless Medic Gives Patient Marching Orders

Healthcare, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Socialism

I would not have believed Karen De Coster’s blog post and LRC.COM article, “Medical Establishment Firing Patients Who Refuse Big Pharma-Big Government Vaccines,” if … it had not happened to me last year—around the same time! Except that the two certified letters that arrived in short succession from my frantic, histrionic (female) physician remain unopened. After we had a tiff during a visit in December or November, I think it was, I decided to leave the woman forthwith. That’s why I did not bother to open her letters. But the description Karen gives of the certified mail, two items, in my case, matches the things I queued up for at the horrible post office.

Unfortunately, I have not been as firm as Karen about refusing mammograms. But I certainly have never and will never have the flu shot. When I politely declined the shot at the new practice, the assistant seemed unfazed. Of course, I was a lot more timid about it. Just said, “No need. I seldom get sick.”

There’s strength in numbers. De Koster has empowered patients. I will eventually get around to opening the certified letters of dismissal (I presume) from my doctor and deal with the issue in a more public manner. The “exchange” we had in her office bears repeating. At the time, I did, of course, send a devastating letter pinpointing this medic’s substandard care, and asking her to quit harassing me with unsolicited mail (which I do not open) and causing iatrogenic illness.

UPDATE (Feb. 12): Further reading: “Robb Wolf on Things Paleo.” And “South African Professor Tim Noakes, an influential sports performance scientist, author, and long-time carb loader, has gone primal.”

UCT (Sean’s Alma Mater) scientist says, “Sorry, but carbo is really a no-no.”

‘Math for Morons’

Economy, Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Free Markets, Healthcare, Trade

Having just feasted on an excellent, fresh, Chilean orange, here is a reminder, via the one and only John Stossel, that eating organic, local produce must not turn into an irrational fetish. Read “Math Lessons for Locavores”:

the local food movement now threatens to devolve into another one of those self-indulgent — and self-defeating — do-gooder dogmas. Arbitrary rules, without any real scientific basis, are repeated as gospel by “locavores,” celebrity chefs and mainstream environmental organizations. Words like “sustainability” and “food-miles” are thrown around without any clear understanding of the larger picture of energy and land use.

The result has been all kinds of absurdities. For instance, it is sinful in New York City to buy a tomato grown in a California field because of the energy spent to truck it across the country; it is virtuous to buy one grown in a lavishly heated greenhouse in, say, the Hudson Valley.

The statistics brandished by local-food advocates to support such doctrinaire assertions are always selective, usually misleading and often bogus. This is particularly the case with respect to the energy costs of transporting food. One popular and oft-repeated statistic is that it takes 36 (sometimes it’s 97) calories of fossil fuel energy to bring one calorie of iceberg lettuce from California to the East Coast. That’s an apples and oranges (or maybe apples and rocks) comparison to begin with, because you can’t eat petroleum or burn iceberg lettuce.

It is also an almost complete misrepresentation of reality, as those numbers reflect the entire energy cost of producing lettuce from seed to dinner table, not just transportation. Studies have shown that whether it’s grown in California or Maine, or whether it’s organic or conventional, about 5,000 calories of energy go into one pound of lettuce. Given how efficient trains and tractor-trailers are, shipping a head of lettuce across the country actually adds next to nothing to the total energy bill.

MORE.