The Rule of Law? - By Victor Davis Hanson November 14, 2013
When his pet businesses did not
like elements of the Affordable Care Act, Obama simply exempted them. When
employers objected that their mandate would unduly hamper job creation, the president
simply ignored the settled law and exempted them. Now, when millions have lost
their coverage, the president is said to be ready to again reinterpret settled
law and no longer demand that private insurance plans conform to the ACA
statute, at least for a year.
Aside from the question of
whether it is legal or right for the president to decide arbitrarily which
elements of legislation to faithfully execute, it is also a sort of new way of
ad hoc governing: The president grandly introduces a new piece of unworkable
legislation, does not know or care much about the consequences of implementing
it, demagogues the bill, demonizes the opposition, gets it passed, uses the
passage for political purposes, and then waits to see what happens in the real
world……All this is right out of the radical Athenian assembly,
which on any given day could do
whatever its majority wished and then the next undo whatever it wished. But
such governance is not what the framers had in mind when they established the
checks and balances of a republican tripartite government and entrusted the
president with faithfully executing all the laws passed by congress and signed
by him.…To Read More….
Illegal Change to Obamacare Is Designed to ScapegoatInsurers, Not Restore Canceled Insurance Policies - by
on November 15, 2013
If aliens from outer space read today’s newspapers, they
would assume that America is a dictatorship, not a republic, and that President
Obama has the authority to pass and repeal laws all by himself, though
executive decree.
Writing about President Obama’s decision to allow
insurers to temporarily reissue certain policies cancelled due to the
Affordable Care Act, The Washington Post stated, “President Obama relented
to pressure from the public and his own party Thursday and changed one of the
bedrock requirements of the new health-care law to fulfill his promise to allow
people to keep their insurance plans if they want.” But as every schoolchild
used to be taught, Presidents cannot “change” the “bedrock requirements” of a
federal law, only Congress can, since only it has the power to pass and repeal
legislation. For a bill to become law, or for a law to be repealed, legislation
must first pass both Houses of Congress before the President can act on it……As
Professor Kontorovich notes,
“President Obama in his speech on
“fixing” the Affordable Care Act today did not specify what statutory
authority, if any, he thinks authorizes him to make such dictats.” …..…ToRead More….
- By Andrew C. McCarthy November 9, 2013
If
he were a CEO in the private sector, he’d be prosecuted for such deception. ‘If you like your health-care plan, you will
be able to keep your health-care plan. Period.” How serious was this lie,
repeated by Barack Obama with such beguiling regularity? Well, how would the
Justice Department be dealing with it if it had been uttered by, say, the
president of an insurance company rather than the president of the United
States?
Fraud is a serious federal felony, usually punishable by
up to 20 years’ imprisonment — with every repetition of a fraudulent
communication chargeable as a separate crime. In computing sentences, federal
sentencing guidelines factor in such considerations as the dollar value of the
fraud, the number of victims, and the degree to which the offender’s treachery
breaches any special fiduciary duties he owes. Cases of multi-million-dollar
corporate frauds — to say nothing of multi-billion-dollar, Bernie Madoff–level
scams that nevertheless pale beside Obamacare’s dimensions — often result in
terms amounting to decades in the slammer…..To Read More….
The inevitable has happened. Now, we will see what
fallout occurs. With
the implementation of Obamacare all of its flaws, faults and failings have come
into focus. The fact that it was designed to destroy the American medical
industry has become obvious and the health insurance companies, which signed on
to supporting this debacle in the mistaken belief that they would benefit are now
finding that they have been double-crossed; the Act that they supported was
designed to sucker them in and then destroy them.
On April 3, 2013 Rush Limbaugh discussed a statement by
liberal pundit Joe Klein that Obama had to get down to handling the details or
the system will fail. Klein was only partly right. The system was going fail,
regardless, but paying attention to the details might make a case that the
campaigner in chief actually cared about the people. It would also provide
support for the Limbaugh Theorem. But aside from that, Limbaugh made three
additional statements: The system is unworkable, Obama doesn't care, and he
won't get involved in the details of administering the Act. These statements
are, for all practical purposes, correct…..To Read More…..
My
Take – I keep hearing this claim that Obama was smart enough
to know his plan would fail and was deliberately designed to do so, as if this
was some great Machiavellian conspiracy to allow him to take total control via a
“nation health care” system. While I can
believe there may be some that thought of this passingly, there is no one smart
enough to plan something this stupid.
And Obama is clearly isn’t the brightest pebble in the brook. He speaks
well, much like FDR, but FDR, much like his cousin Teddy, was an economic
ignoramus and so is Obama, so therefore much of this article is, in my opinion,
flawed.
Thousands of Doctors Dropped from Medicare Advantage
- 16 Nov 2013
The Wall Street
Journal reports that
private insurance provider United Health is dropping thousands of doctors from
its Medicare Advantage networks. Medicare Advantage is very popular with senior
citizens, but United Health says that "government cuts" will
"leave many elderly patients unsure whether they need to switch plans to
continue seeing their doctors."
The insurer
said in October that underfunding of Medicare Advantage plans for the elderly
could not be fully offset by the company's other healthcare business. The
company also reported spending more healthcare premiums on medical claims in
the third quarter, due mainly to government cuts to payments for Medicare
Advantage services.
The Journal
report said that doctors in at least 10 states were notified of being laid off
the plans, some citing "significant changes and pressures in the
healthcare environment." According to the notices, the terminations can be
appealed within 30 days. …… what's
driving our actions{?} It's no secret that we are under substantial funding
pressure from the federal government," said President Austin Pittman.… To Read More….
After Shifting Blame to Insurers, Obama May Give Them Subsidies - By Timothy P. Carney, Nov. 16, 2013
President Obama has decided
to attack the insurers again. But maybe he’s decided to subsidize them even
more. Or both. In waiving the part of
Obamacare that outlaws many insurance plans, Obama tried to shift blame for any
cancellations to the insurers. But on Friday, he met with representatives from
these same companies, sparking speculation that he had plans to offer them
subsidies to help smooth Obamacare's rocky rollout.
This seeming schizophrenia is standard fare in the
love-hate relationship between Obama and the insurers. Obama raised $1.34 million from the “Health
Services/HMOs” industry in 2008, according to the Center for Responsive
Politics. That is the most any candidate has ever raised from this industry in history,
and more than twice what John McCain raised that year……To Read More….
My
Take – This article is an excellent example of what Jonah
Goldberg calls the Sid Goldberg Rule. If
you have no moral qualms about something immoral, then it’s all about the
money. Big Business and Big Government
have no moral foundation. With Big Government it’s all about power. With Big Business, it’s all about money. The problem with Big Business is they don’t
seem to ever understand that amorality has an intrinsic danger, and potential
penalty.
They're
dealing with people as amoral as they, but Big Government is the amoral people
with the power! Amoral people with power
who don’t have a clue about what works in the real world since most of them went
from college to government, took courses that have nothing to do with how
business actually works, never had a job, and have world views shared with socialist
activists. All of that is so obvious
that it makes you wonder what was in their minds! The answer?
They think they’re so smart they will be able to mold Big Government to
their ends.
You
can’t mold people committed to an ideology - Socialism! We have, starting with the French Revolution,
224 years of history to demonstrate the truth of that. Why do we keep failing to learn that lesson? I can tell you. We don’t read history, we aren’t taught
history, and we selfishly believe we can change history to our advantage, because
we’re smarter than those who went before.
Truth is a sublime convergence of history and reality. If we distort history, and we refuse to
accept reality, when we prefer lies over facts - we get Big Business and Big Government. That shouldn’t be that hard to
understand.
Two waysliberals will now deflect blame to insurers - By Timothy P. Carney, Nov. 14, 2013
The
Obama administration's move today -- offering to ignore yet another part
of Obamacare in an effort to let people keep their health care plans -- strikes
me as a naked attempt to deflect blame to insurers. The president's partisans will say, "Hey,
Obama's not gonna bust any insurers for selling illegal insurance, so if you're
cancelled, blame those evil insurers!"
This is silliness and should be dismissed out of hand. But there's a
more nuanced argument this ploy allows President Obama to make, and Kevin Drum lays it out nicely
at Mother Jones. In short, Drum argues,
insurers (and Republicans) are blaming Obamacare for plans that would have been
cancelled anyway…..To Read More….
Rich, like you, I have great
respect for Jim Capretta. But a couple of things. First, I think it overstates
the case to describe as his take on insurance-company complaints about keeping
people on canceled plans as “overwrought.” He concedes that “reversing the
cancelations will entail significant expense and trouble for the insurance
industry.” He goes on to opine that enduring this expense and trouble would not
be “impossible” — which is hardly the same thing as saying it is practical. His
example to illustrate that it is “not impossible” is the California insurance
commissioner’s “forcing two insurers to reverse cancelations for hundreds of
thousands of individual market plan enrollees.” That is, he suggests that this
cannot be done without official coercion. I think the kind of coercion we’re
talking about is legally questionable.
Moreover, Jim proceeds to
compare the Upton proposal favorably to the Landrieu bill. This seems
problematic to me on two scores. First, the Landrieu bill is coercive, and
coercion is what Jim intimates will be required to make insurers comply.
Concededly, Jim does not have in mind the same degree of governmental pressure
as Senator Landrieu, but I’m not sure that kind of nuance is going to be clear
to people in a debate of this kind. Second, Upton — as I mentioned in my
earlier post — has expressed support
for the coercive Landrieu proposal…..To Read More…..
Count me in the Erick
Erickson camp when it comes to
the Upton gimmickry – because, at best, that’s all it is. Republicans would
make a big mistake backing it.
The GOP should not be working
to “fix” Obamacare. That would just further tar Republicans as part owners of
Obamacare. They should be working to scrap Obamacare now, while the political
momentum is swinging to their side. Democrats are rightly starting to panic, so
Republicans should be driving a hard bargain – push for repeal, settle for
nothing less than delay. The last thing they should be doing is throwing
endangered Democrats a lifeline to reelection in 2014……Yet, Mr. Anderson says
Republicans should press ahead with the Upton bill anyway, even though it
cannot do what it pretends to do – and that’s not gonna enrage people at all
when they figure that out, right? His scattershot reasoning is a good example
of why the GOP always gets rolled in these skirmishes.….To Read More….
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