Justice Department sides with court ruling Obamacare invalid

Not tired of winning.

Supreme Court Doesn't Care About the Law or the Constitution. It's a policy making body.

The inside story of how John Roberts negotiated to save Obamacare.

The discussion focused on the individual insurance mandate and Congress' power to regulate commerce. Roberts went first, as was the custom, laying out his views. He emphasized that he believed the Constitution's commerce clause never was intended to cover inactivity, such as the refusal to buy insurance.

After the chief, conservative Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy and Clarence Thomas offered their views. Like Roberts, they thought Congress' commerce authority did not cover an individual's decision to forgo -- rather than obtain -- health insurance.

So far so good; what does the Constitution say?

The votes of the liberals were known, too. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, fifth in seniority, was the first to cast a vote to uphold the individual mandate. She believed Supreme Court precedent demanded the law be found constitutional. She was followed by Justice Stephen Breyer, who agreed with her.

What court precedent? Let's not kid each other, they like the policy and the constitution was not goint to get in the way..

Roberts did not want the entire law to fall. A pro-business conservative, he understood the importance of the insurance industry to US businesses, and he was genuinely concerned about invalidating an entire law that had been approved through the democratic process to solve the intractable health care problem.

There goes the constitution; the focus became the policy.

Breyer and Kagan had voted in the private March conference to uphold the new Medicaid requirement, and their votes had been unequivocal. But they were pragmatists. If there was a chance that Roberts would cast the critical vote to uphold the central plank of Obamacare -- and negotiations in May were such that they still considered that a shaky proposition -- they were willing to meet him partway. ..

Perhaps Roberts' move was born of a concern for the business of health care. Perhaps he had worries about his own legitimacy and legacy, intertwined with concerns about the legitimacy and legacy of the court. Perhaps his change of heart really arose from a sudden new understanding of congressional taxing power. However the chief would explain it -- and he has not explained it beyond his written opinion -- the case added a new dimension to a man who insisted that he always decided cases based on the law.

Viewed only through a judicial lens, his moves were not consistent, and his legal arguments were not entirely coherent. But he brought people and their different interests together. His moves may have been good for the country at a time of division and a real crisis in health care, even as they engendered, in the years since, anger, confusion and distrust.

Mark Steyn: "Swingin' Supremacists"

This is why you get such death duels about Supreme Court appointments: 

If you incline to the view that Obamacare is a transformative act, isn't there something slightly pitiful about the fact that the liberties of over 300 million people hinge on the somewhat whimsical leanings of just one man? I mean, Kennedy seems a cheery enough cove, but who died and made him the all-powerful Sultan of Swing? "It is a decision of the Supreme Court," explained Nancy Pelosi a few years back in more congenial times for the Democrats. "So this is almost as if God has spoken."

He wrote this in 2012 while the Supreme Court was debating the constitutionality of ObamaCare.

Thus, in this week's debate on whether Obamacare is merely the latest harmless evolution of the interstate-commerce clause, the most learned and highly remunerated jurists in the land chewed over the matter of whether a person, simply by virtue of being born, was participating in a "market." Had George III shown up at the Constitutional Convention to advance that argument with a straight face, the framers would have tossed aside the quill feathers and reached for their muskets.

Recall that Nancy Pelosi famously said that we have to pass it to know what's in it?

He was making a narrow argument about "severability" — about whether the Court could junk the "individual mandate" but pick and choose what bits of Obamacare to keep. Yet he was unintentionally making a far more basic point: A 2,700-page law is not a "law" by any civilized understanding of the term. Law rests on the principle of equality before it. When a bill is 2,700 pages, there's no equality: Instead, there's a hierarchy of privilege micro-regulated by an unelected, unaccountable, unconstrained, unknown, and unnumbered bureaucracy. It's not just that the legislators who legislate it don't know what's in it, nor that the citizens on the receiving end can never hope to understand it, but that even the nation's most eminent judges acknowledge that it is beyond individual human comprehension. A 2,700-page law is, by definition, an affront to self-government.

Read the whole thing.

States scrambling to avert Obamacare sticker shock after Dems balk at stabilization effort

The end of ObamaCare.  It didn't have to be repealed.  It committed suicide.

Horrid headlines on the health-care bill are about an alternate reality

From the NY Post.

Democrats and much of the media are screaming over the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate that 24 million Americans will “lose” their health insurance thanks to the GOP-proposed American Health Care Act. In fact, the CBO numbers are guesses based on an alternate reality.

Back when they wrote the ObamaCare law, Democrats gamed the system to get happy predictions out of CBO — numbers that never showed in this reality. Naturally enough, the push to replace ObamaCare now yields some scary estimates.

Proposed bill would let bosses fine you for refusing a genetic test

CBO said the Affordable Care Act would trim the deficit; reality’s been the reverse. It said 24 million people would be enrolled in the exchanges by now. Reality: below 11 million.

And the agency is still projecting the exchanges to cover 19 million by 2020 if nothing changes. In fact, enrollment leveled off this last year; at best, it’s on course to stay around 11 million. More likely, the program has begun its “death spiral,” with soaring prices prompting plummeting enrollment.

Then, too, CBO says the repeal of the “individual mandate” — the fine for going without insurance — would drive 18 million people to drop their coverage by next year. But that includes 6 million of the 11 million on the exchanges — suggesting that more than half of those people only buy insurance to avoid the fine.

Much as we hate ObamaCare, we don’t believe that — the fines aren’t high enough. And even if CBO’s right, then those people don’t really want their policies, so they wouldn’t be “losing coverage,” but fleeing it.

CBO also says 5 million would quit Medicaid — even though premiums are tiny. Anyway, everyone who qualifies can re-join Medicaid the instant they need it, so those folks wouldn’t truly lose coverage.

Plenty of other CBO assumptions are just as dubious. For example, the agency guesses that the bill would push up exchange premiums — when Health Secretary Tom Price has already started the process of pushing them down, by junking Obama-era regulations that forced every policy to cover a long liberal wishlist, from “free” contraceptives to chiropractors and other alternative medicines.

The GOP bill isn’t perfect, but it’s a realistic first step toward moving beyond a system that’s on track to implode. The scary headlines only describe a fantasy world where ObamaCare is a smashing success.

When an organization has such a bad track record on prediction, why would you believe them , unless your desperately want to.

"Give her a pain pill" Obama said

Life Expectancy In U.S. Drops For First Time In Decades, Report Finds

So the news out of the federal government Thursday is disturbing: The overall U.S. death rate has increased for the first time in a decade, according to an analysis of the latest data. And that led to a drop in overall life expectancy for the first time since 1993, particularly among people younger than 65.

"This is a big deal," says Philip Morgan, a demographer at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill who was not involved in the new analysis.

"There's not a better indicator of well-being than life expectancy," he says. "The fact that it's leveling off in the U.S. is a striking finding."

Now, there's a chance that the latest data, from 2015, could be just a one-time blip. In fact, a preliminary analysis from the first two quarters of 2016 suggests that may be the case, says Robert Anderson, chief of the mortality statistics branch at the National Center for Health Statistics, which released the new report.

Anderson says government analysts are awaiting more data before reaching any definitive conclusions.

"We'll have to see what happens in the second half of 2016," he says.

Still, he believes the data from 2015 are worth paying attention to. Over that year, the overall death rate increased from 724.6 per 100,000 people to 733.1 per 100,000.

While that's not a lot, it was enough to cause the overall life expectancy to fall slightly. That's only happened a few times in the past 50 years. The dip in 1993, for example, was due to high death rates from AIDS, flu, homicide and accidental deaths that year.

On average, the overall life expectancy, for someone born in 2015, fell from 78.9 years to 78.8 years. The life expectancy for the average American man fell two-tenths of a year — from 76.5 to 76.3. For women, it dropped one-tenth — from 81.3 to 81.2 years.

"It's remarkable," Morgan says. "There are lots of things about this that are unexpected."

Most notably, the overall death rate for Americans increased because mortality from heart disease and stroke increased after declining for years. Deaths were also up from Alzheimer's disease, respiratory disease, kidney disease and diabetes. More Americans also died from unintentional injuries and suicide. In all, the decline was driven by increases in deaths from eight of the top 10 leading causes of death in the U.S.

"When you see increases in so many of the leading causes of death, it's difficult to pinpoint one particular cause as the culprit," Anderson says.

The obesity epidemic could be playing a role in the increase in deaths from heart disease, strokes, diabetes and possibly Alzheimer's. It could also be that doctors have reached the limit of what they can do to fight heart disease with current treatments.

The epidemic of prescription opioid painkillers and heroin abuse is probably fueling the increase in unintentional injuries, Arun Hendi, a demographer at Duke University, wrote in an email. The rise in drug abuse and suicide could be due to economic factors causing despair.

"Clearly, that could be related to the economic circumstances that many Americans have experienced in the last eight years, or so, since the recession," says Irma Elo, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania.

They laughed at Sarah Palin when she mentioned "Death Panels." It looks like ObamaCare is working as designed.

Trump on Obamacare

Democrats are succeeding

Meanwhile ObamaCare, carefully crafted by Democrats to insure all Americans would lose the health insurance they liked and could afford, is imploding.  

Of course that was the intention.  

Just as it was the intention of the Democrats to re-enslave black people, herd them into ghettos and break up family formation; never having forgiven them for breaking the bonds of slavery in 1865. They turned them into dependent paupers 'cause they're easier to please.

Trump Courts Evangelical Vote at Regent University

Some excerpts:

Trump spoke before a packed theater at Regent University as part of the university's Executive Leadership Presidential Candidate Forums series.

On the debt:

"We owe $19 trillion -- most people don't even know what a trillion dollars is, how many hundreds of millions is in a trillion," Trump said. "It's such a number that, it's a name that 10 years ago you never even heard the word trillion, but we owe $19 trillion."

"A very bad budget was passed just about four weeks ago that's going to add at least $2 trillion to it. So we'll be up essentially to $21 trillion, and at a certain point it's really the point of no return. And you really have to have somebody that knows what he or she is doing,"

On the Supreme Court:

Robertson wanted to know if President Trump would have a litmus test for those he'd nominate to the Supreme Court.

"In your selection as president, what criteria would you use to pick somebody?" he asked.

"Pro-life. We want-- It starts with that, starts with it. A very conservative, a very, very smart, I mean like Judge (Antonin) Scalia would be a perfect He was a perfect representative," 

On Obamacare:

"We're going to get rid of Obamacare," .... "Obamacare has turned out to be a total disaster."

Government health insurance: the ultimate sickness

How do you take the best health care system in the world and screw it up so badly that you had better hope that you and your kids never get sick? Ask Barack Hussein Obama and the Democrats in Congress because thy managed to do it.

And my friend’s story isn’t the only nightmare Americans have been experiencing. A Facebook page dedicated to ACA horror stories has been created, and the stories are heartbreaking.

FreedomWorks last year did an article of its own, detailing top ObamaCare horror stories, including that of a pastor diagnosed with stage three cancer of the esophagus who was told – just minutes before getting chemotherapy – that his treatment would not be covered.

Meanwhile, the left’s smarmy, arrogant, lying, biased, craptastic excuse for an economist Paul Krugman last year claimed the ObamaCare horror stories were “imaginary” – concocted by those who obviously just are too ignorant to know how FAAAAABULOUS ObamaCare and too stupid to know what’s good for them.

These are real people with real life problems, betrayed by politicians and pundits who couldn’t even begin to understand what it’s like to not know how your next grocery bill will be paid, or what it’s like to lose sleep, because the IRS says you owe them money you don’t have.

Read the whole thing.

Bu Norman mentions things not in the news.

That awful deal with the Iranian government regarding its nuclear weapons program has largely gone unmentioned since President Barack Obama announced it was done, even though that’s not the end of the story. ... even the United Nations admits that Iran’s recent inter-continental ballistic missile test violated any understanding of agreement ...

 

Obamacare is just as bad as ever, too, although that’s no longer news. By now the public knows that it won’t be getting an average $2,500 a year savings and won’t be able to keep its plans or doctors and that all the other promises that were made won’t be kept ...

 

Most of those Republican candidates also go unmentioned, of course, and judging by all the “Bernie” bumper stickers we’re seeing we think there’s more going in in the Democratic race than you’d know from reading the news.

In some cases the silence is becoming deafening.

Without any benefit cuts, Obamacare costs to rise

Unexpectedly!

UnitedHealth CEO regrets entering ObamaCare

The CEO of UnitedHealthCare on Tuesday said he regretted the decision to enter the ObamaCare marketplace last year, which the company says has resulted in millions of dollars in losses.

“It was for us a bad decision,” UnitedHealth CEO Stephen Hemsley said at an investor’s meeting in New York, according to Bloomberg Business.

UnitedHealth, the country’s largest insurer, announced last month that it would no longer advertise its ObamaCare plans over the next year and may pull out completely in 2016 — a move that sent shockwaves across the healthcare sector.

United Health Care participated voluntarily.  The rest of us participate under duress.

Who wants to bet that this is a disguised demand for a government bailout?

More than half of Obamacare co-ops fail

Unexpectedly?

House bill would force the Supreme Court to enroll in ObamaCare

It's only fair and entirely logical. I'm sure it's in the emanations and penumbras of the law.

A House Republican on Thursday proposed forcing the Supreme Court justices and their staff to enroll in ObamaCare.

Rep. Brian Babin (R-Texas) said that his SCOTUScare Act would make all nine justices and their employees join the national healthcare law’s exchanges.

“As the Supreme Court continues to ignore the letter of the law, it’s important that these six individuals understand the full impact of their decisions on the American people,” he said.

“That’s why I introduced the SCOTUScare Act to require the Supreme Court and all of its employees to sign up for ObamaCare,” Babin said.

Feds Can’t Verify $2.8 Billion in Obamacare Subsidies

It's a rounding error in the Obama budget.

Republicans: There's no need to panic. Stop trying to fix American health Care

For reasons that I can only say are politically stupid (but that’s why they’re known as the Stupid Party), Republicans are hunting for a solution if the Supreme Court invalidates ObamaCare subsidies.

As they say in Bridge, let's review the bidding . ObamaCare passed without a single Republican vote. Democrats own it. It’s proven to be unpopular. It's proven to be a financial disaster for many people who have lost the health plans they were happy with, their doctors they wanted, and even the hospitals to which they were accustomed. And they did not get their premiums reduced as promised by Obama.

Now there is a possibility that the Supreme Court in King vs. Burwell will invalidate the subsidies that the Federal Government was providing in 37 states that have not set up “exchanges.” The law says that subsidies are available to exchanges set up by the states. This was an incentive for states to do so, but most states declined so the Obama Administration stepped in and provided for subsidies that are not in the law.

Stupid Republicans are scrambling around for solutions if the subsidies are struck down.

Why?

Because they are afraid. They’re afraid that they will be blamed for the failure of ObamaCare. Because they did not want it. Because they wanted to repeal it. Because they know that the press, as part of the Democrat party, will blame them.

Blame them for what? EVERYTHING.

There may be some elected Republicans who want to protect the people who foolishly believed the Obama promises. But they are far outnumbered by the ones crapping their pants about what the dinosaurs in the press will say.

Let me tell you what to do, to save your political hides as well as to do the right thing.

Don’t do anything. No proposed bills. No bailouts. No fixes. Nothing.

Then hold press conferences. 

Do it hourly. Do it daily. Make speeches in the House. Make speeches in the Senate. With one message. 

• This is the Democrat’s fault. 
• They made the mess. 
• You told them it was a stupid law. 
• Your fingerprints are nowhere near it. 
• It’s up to them to do something. 
• Borrow from Obama: “You drove the car into the ditch, it’s your mess. What are you going to do now?” 

The MSM will crucify you; they always do. 

But there’s a new media and that’s who you’re giving the soundbites to. For Limbaugh, Hannity, for Fox News, for DRUDGE, Instapundit and all its imitators. 

Their audience is one that you can galvanize. This is the part of the electorate that voted for you and is disappointed that you are not keeping your promises. This is the electorate of 2016. This is they re-awakened America that longs for leadership. This is the America that has made it possible for over a dozen young, eager, fresh Republicans to want to run for President. This is the America that the Left is afraid of.

Republicans have to resist the temptation to be the Democrats clean-up crew.

Democrats will howl, they’ll call you racist bigots, haters of the poor, that you want people to die. They do that anyway. It’s lost its sting. The press will amplify the Democrats’ accusations and think up new ones of their own.

The answer to that? Stop reading the NY Times and the other Democrat organs. You’ll find that most of your constituents don’t either. Your head will clear and you’ll see reality more clearly. You’ll be reinvigorated and empowered.

If the press interviews you, reinforce your themes.

• It’s the Democrats’ mess.
• They need to clean it up.
• You regret that the Democrats and Obama have managed to crash 1/6th of the American economy without bothering to read what’s in the bill.
• You foresaw this but the Democrats and the press would not listen.
• You’ll regret that the Democrats have made the poor poorer and the rich richer.
• You’re sorry that the people listened and believed Obama, Pelosi and Reed’s lies.

That’s the answer you give to every question, no matter what it is.

If Republicans even hint that they are looking for a solution, they will be re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic and be accused of hitting the iceberg. Stay away, far away for ObamaCare fixes. It’s a tar baby.  The solution to the issue of improving medical care in this country will come.  It will come gradually, incrementally, in stages.  Not in one all-encompassing Utopian monstrosity worked on in secret by socialist in academia.  There is no emergency.  Americans will take care of their own.  For God's sake, leave it alone for a while.

New Report Finds Obamacare Overhead to Cost $273 Billion

ObamaCare is not only screwing up your ability to get affordable insurance but it's costing a ton of money.

Obamacare will be responsible for $273.6 billion in new administrative costs between now and 2022

The former adjunct professor constitutional law’s lawyers are arguing

The former adjunct professor constitutional law’s lawyers are arguing a number of things, and here's just one ... and the media is worried.

There’s also a chance, at least according to those worried media allies of the president, that the Supreme Court will strike a blow against Obama’s big domestic triumph in the already embarrassing King v. Burwell case. That’s the one challenging the subsidies for Obamacare being offered through federally-run health insurance exchanges, on the grounds that the law clearly states that the subsidies are only available to to those enrolled through state-run systems, and because 36 of the states reasonably chose to have nothing to do with the Obamacare monstrosity the decision will have significant consequences. The former adjunct professor constitutional law’s lawyers are arguing that to insist a law be enacted as written is picky-picky-picky, and that no one should expect a 2,000-plus page bill to be free of significantly consequential errors, and never mind those statements by the bill’s “architect” that the language was clearly intended to coerce states to go along, and that, c’m’on, it’s Obama. This will probably prove persuasive to at least one of those wobbly Republican appointees, although we can hope that Chief Justice John Roberts might seize the opportunity to repent for his vote in that awful decision on the general constitutionality of Obamacare, and in any case there will be some black comedy in the arguments and a cautionary tale about passing 2,000-plus page bills that fundamentally transform a sixth of the economy and don’t promise to be free of errors with significant consequences.

Obama: Obamacare was Republicans' plan

"The Affordable Care Act pretty much was their plan before I adopted it," he said.

Oh, and Yemen is a success story.