Oct/090
The Price of Cost Cutting:
The Price of Cost Cutting
Sarah Palin has been ridiculed over and over for bringing up the notion of death panels, yet if we follow into the footsteps of other countries with national healthcare that’s exactly what we’ll have. Sure take away all the platitudes and politically correct language and what you are left with is a government bureaucracy that has the power to decide life and death.
You say that couldn’t happen here, well it could and will. You say we have the same situation with the insurance companies, I say you are half way right. But with the insurance companies you at least have options. You could switch companies, you could go through a charity or hospital that can help, or you can raise the money to pay yourself. In many countries with national healthcare, once the government says no you have no other choice.
This article is one of a growing many that explains the disaster of the government running end of life care.
Sep/090
The Tyranny of Health Insurance:
Obama Health Insurance
It all started with a question. If you are going to impose on every American that they must buy Health Insurance, then what is the penalty if they choose not to?
The answer is very disturbing!
A $25,000 fine or up to a year in jail!
Read more:
| September 25, 2009 Categories: Senate http://www.politico.com/livepulse/0909/Ensign_receives_handwritten_confirmation_.html?showall Ensign receives handwritten confirmation This doesn’t happen often enough. Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) received a handwritten note Thursday from Joint Committee on Taxation Chief of Staff Tom Barthold confirming the penalty for failing to pay the up to $1,900 fee for not buying health insurance. Violators could be charged with a misdemeanor and could face up to a year in jail or a $25,000 penalty, Barthold wrote on JCT letterhead. He signed it “Sincerely, Thomas A. Barthold.” |
| By Carrie Budoff Brown 11:40 AM |
| September 24, 2009 Categories: Senate Flout the mandate penalty? Face the IRS Americans who fail to pay the penalty for not buying insurance would face legal action from the Internal Revenue Service, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation. The remarks Thursday from the committee’s chief of staff, Thomas Barthold, seems to further weaken President Barack Obama’s contention last week that the individual mandate penalty, which could go as high as $1,900, is not a tax increase. Under questioning from Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.), Barthold said the IRS would “take you to court and undertake normal collection proceedings.” Ensign pursued the line of questioning because he said a lot of Americans don’t believe the Constitution allows the government to mandate the purchase of insurance. “We could be subjecting those very people who conscientiously, because they believe in the U.S. Constitution, we could be subjecting them to fines or the interpretation of a judge, all the way up to imprisonment,” Ensign said. “That seems to me to be a problem.” Ensign’s argument , however, wasn’t persuasive to the committee — which rejected an amendment from Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Ky.) to eliminate the individual mandate. Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) was the only Republican to vote with Democrats to preserve the mandate. |
| By Carrie Budoff Brown 04:04 PM |
Sep/090
Is Health Care Reform Constitutional?
We The People
By INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Wednesday, September 16, 2009 4:20 PM PT
http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=337992265461227
Federal Powers: Where in the U.S. Constitution does it say the government can force people to buy health insurance? And by what authority does it prohibit the purchasing of insurance across state lines?
A key part of the administration’s plan to reform health care is what is called the “individual mandate” — a requirement that everyone must have health insurance either through his or her employer or purchased individually.
A good chunk of the uninsured are that way of their own volition. They are young and healthy and feel they have better things to do with their money at this point in their lives. Forcing them is the only way to get them covered, but it’s not clear where the constitutional authority to do that comes from.
The Constitution specifically enumerates the powers given to each branch of government and says that any powers not mentioned revert to the states and to the people. Nowhere does it say that the feds can compel you to buy health insurance. But then, this is the administration that claims the right to a de facto nationalization of the banking system and auto industry, to set executive compensation and to fire corporate officers.
With regard to health care reform, the administration seems to be operating under a distorted version of the Commerce Clause that has been grossly misinterpreted over the years as allowing the feds to regulate and control just about everything. Because the sum total of millions of individual health decisions has a collective economic impact, the reasoning goes, government has the authority, even the duty, to regulate those decisions. It does not.
Former New Jersey Superior Court Judge Andrew Napolitano, a constitutional scholar now a Fox News analyst, says the power to “regulate” interstate commerce is just that and only that. He says that when James Madison used the word “regulate,” he meant “to keep regular.” Madison intended the government to function like a modern-day referee in football — to throw a flag once in a while and moderate disputes, but not call the plays.
The irony here, says Napolitano, is that at the same time the government wants to force people to buy insurance, it forbids them from doing so across state lines. In other words, he says, “Congress refuses to keep commerce regular when the commercial activity is the sale of insurance, but claims it can regulate the removal of a person’s appendix because that constitutes interstate commerce.”
David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey, who served in the Justice Department under both Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, wrote in the Washington Post that in United States vs. Lopez in 1995, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Congress can only regulate human activity that is truly commercial at its core. One does not go to a doctor to engage in commercial activity.
The Commerce Clause allows for the regulation of economic activity across state lines that involves the production, distribution or consumption of commodities. The Supreme Court has specifically rejected the idea that Congress can regulate noneconomic activities simply because through a chain of collective events they might have some impact down the road.
The government does not have the power to regulate individual Americans simply because they are there and you think their individual decisions are unwise. There are other concerns, such as whether the mass collection of medical records violates the Fourth Amendment’s right of people “to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects.”
The states are starting to rebel. In July, Texas Gov. Rick Perry indicated that he might join those invoking the 10th Amendment to fight a federal takeover of health care. “I think you’ll hear states and and governors standing up and saying ‘no’ to this type of encroachment on the states with their health care,” Perry said.
If passed into law, the House’s health care reform plan will be tested. We hope the Supreme Court will once again find that H.R. 3200, and any bill like it that imposes similar mandates, violates the Constitution.
Sep/091
No, Mr. President
Obama on 60 Minutes
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2009
Posted by William Kristol
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Weblogs/TWSFP/TWSFPView.asp#13172
In his 60 Minutes interview to be aired tonight, President Obama apparently says, “I intend to be president for a while and once this bill passes, I own it….I’m the one who’s going to be held responsible. So I have every incentive to get this right.”
No, Mr. President. It’s not about you. If legislation passes, you don’t own it.
We all own it. Any health care bill will become part of the U.S. Code, not simply an item on the Obama White House web site. We will all feel its effects. We are all responsible for the future of our country. Here the people rule.
Which is why it is wrong to jam through a 1,000+ page legislative act in such a rush that its defenders can’t even give a coherent account of what it will and won’t do, and in order to deal with a situation that the president himself acknowledged Wednesday night is not a crisis (“But we did not come here just to clean up crises. We came to build a future. So tonight, I return to speak to all of you about an issue that is central to that future — and that is the issue of health care.”).
The national debate on health care has just begun. Much of the popular anger of this past summer came from a feeling — a justified one — that if Obama has his way, we, the people, won’t have an opportunity to debate this issue as it deserves. The August recess seemed to be citizens’ one chance to force a reconsideration by their elected representatives before Obama succeeded in rushing the Congress to judgment.
This is a moment of truth for the two political parties.
Will enough Congressional Democrats refuse to be herded like sheep and stampeded like cattle? Will they do what is right, and insist, for the sake of the political health of the country, on an open and measured and deliberative process?
And if there are not enough such Democrats — if the Democratic party simply yields to Barack Obama and his assurance that, hey, he has every incentive to get it right, so everyone else should just get out of the way — if the Democratic Congress jams this legislation down the people’s throat — then the Republican party will have to say: We do not yield. We do not acquiesce. And we will take this issue to the country in 2010 and 2012, with the purpose of repealing this dangerous and damaging legislation.
Mar/080
NHS dentists play as patients wait
From The Sunday Times
March 30, 2008
Sarah-Kate Templeton, Health Editor
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article3646522.ece
Health service dentists have been forced to go on holiday or spend time on the golf course this month despite millions of patients being denied dental care.
Many have fulfilled their annual work quotas allotted by the National Health Service and have been turning patients away because they are not paid to do extra work. This is despite the fact that more than 7m people in Britain are unable to find an NHS dentist.
Patients have been told they must either pay privately or return in April when the new work year begins. People suffering from toothache have been advised to go to hospital.
Areas affected include Merseyside, Derbyshire, Birmingham and East Sussex. Eddie Crouch, secretary of the Birmingham local dental committee, estimates that up to a third of dentists in the West Midlands have run out of work or have had to reduce the number of NHS patients they treat. “Patients in pain have had to shop around to find a dentist that has not used up their quota,” he said.
The British Dental Association fears that other dentists have been unable to meet their quotas and will be forced to pay back thousands of pounds to the NHS.
The health department says dentists should have managed their workload throughout the year.