New Requirement--Electric Car In Every Garage

Yes, that was a made up headline, but it could become reality.  If ObamaCare stands its Supreme Court challenge, it will empower the government to require everyone to purchase any product they deem "necessary"  for an American to own. No, it won't be guns! It could be electric cars, windmills or solar collectors on your house, doubling of insulation in your attic, or some product or service into which the government has invested.  Any other ideas?

Today, there is no product that we Americans are required to purchase.  We do have to purchase car insurance, if we own a car, but you are not required to own a car. ObamaCare requires each and every American to purchase health insurance, or pay a fine which will be collected by the IRS.  If you fail to make the payment, you can go to jail for years, it is called tax evasion! Does that not scare you?

We cannot see anyway that the Supreme Court could validate the law, however, who knows what pressure has been brought against those Justices who might vote against the plan. It probably only takes one to switch sides and give the Administration a major win.  Could the IRS or Justice Department or some other government agency quietly be putting pressure on certain individuals to assure they vote the right way? Could investigations been conducted to gain information that could be used against any Justice who did not vote for ObamaCare? Why has Elena Kagen not been forced to recuse herself? Could the decision already been made and the hearings are only a formality? We know these are scary, but could we be right? We will find out in just a couple months.

Legally, we are not scholars, but our reading of the Constitution tells us ObamaCare should not stand up to close inspection and should be deemed unconstitutional. However, with the way this Administration works, we would not bet against them. They will do anything to keep their hallmark legislation legal.  

Conservative Tom

Virginia AG: If Obama's Mandate Stands, the Gov't ‘Can Order You To Do Anything’

By Melanie Hunter

March 19, 2012

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Then-state Sen. Ken Cuccinelli addressing the Virginia State Republican Convention in May 2009, where he was nominated for state attorney general. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)

(CNSNews.com) – “If the government can just order you to buy something, and fine you if you don’t” – the way the individual mandate of Obamacare requires every American to buy government-approved health insurance and fines them if they don’t comply – “they can order you to do anything,” Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli said during an appearance on C-SPAN’s “Newsmaker” on Sunday.

Cuccinelli, the first attorney general to file a lawsuit challenging Obamacare, said out of 16 judges that have heard the lawsuit so far, only one has ruled that the fine amounts to a tax.

“Of 16 judges, one found it to be a tax. Unfortunately for Virginia, he sits in the 4^th Circuit and he’ll be there for a long time. But, this is a truly radical position, because if the government can just order you to buy something, and fine you if you don’t, and because they can fine you, that comes under the taxing power and therefore makes it constitutional, they can order you to do anything,” Cuccinelli said.

“There has never been a case like this ever before in the over 200 years since the Constitution was passed. The federal government has never compelled people to buy a product under the guise of regulating commerce,” he said.

“The centerpiece constitutional issue is the individual mandate – the requirement in the health care bill that every American buy government-approved health insurance, and this is done under the Commerce Clause. It is commonly talked about as the 10^th Amendment – it is not a 10^thAmendment case,” Cuccinelli said.

The question at hand, he said, is whether Congress’ power to regulate interstate commerce allows them “compel you to buy health insurance.”

“And our side obviously says, No. The federal government says, ‘Yes.’ And there has never been a case like this ever before in the over 200 years since the Constitution was passed. The federal government has never compelled people to buy a product under the guise of regulating commerce,” Cuccinnell added.

He said when they filed their case against Obamacare on March 23, 2010, “it was all about the Commerce clause,” and the critics predicted that the federal government would win, “but as we just kept making our case – and ‘we’ here is all of the states that address the limited government side of this that said this is too much power for the federal government. As we just kept making the case, kept making the case, gradually, it became clear the other side began to get worried that they could lose.”

“They started out saying, ‘This is a slam dunk. We’ll never lose, etcetera.’ And of course, we won in the district court, and so about a month later in April of 2010 if you read the accounts, you’ll start to see this tax argument arise. And what it is is that the fine you have to pay, if you do not buy the mandated health insurance, which is called a penalty in the bill, is in fact a tax,” he said.

“And that’s important because Congress has very broad taxing power, and my prediction in the outset of this is case is that no judge or justice anywhere in America would agree with that argument, and so far I’ve been wrong by one” – the judge in the 4^th Circuit Court in Virginia, who ruled in favor of Obamacare, Cuccinelli said.

    

Finally A Health Care Suggestion That Makes Sense

In the following article, Paul Hsieh, provides a rational suggestion for health care after discussing the issues related to ObamaCare.  It is an article worth reading.

Conservative Tom

Free Market Lessons from Contraception Fight

Once again, liberty provides the answer.

by
PAUL HSIEH

Bio

March 8, 2012 - 12:00 am

 

The Obama administration’s decision to require religious-based employers to include birth control coverage in their employee health plans has spawned a heated debate. Catholic employers object to being compelled to cover medical services they consider immoral. This has resulted in acrimonious debates over religious freedom, reproductive freedom, and even Rush Limbaugh’s bad language.

The controversy has also made apparent three lessons about America’s current health care system and why we need free-market health care reforms.

1) Health insurance should be uncoupled from employment.

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The contraceptive coverage problem arises because most people with private health insurance receive it as a job benefit. Most Americans now take this for granted. But consider how odd it would be to receive, say, auto or homeowner insurance from our workplace.

The current system of employer-based health insurance is an artifact of federal tax rules from World War II. When the U.S. government imposed wartime wage and price controls, employers could no longer compete for workers by offering higher salaries. Instead, they competed to offer more generous fringe benefits such as health insurance. In 1943, the IRS ruled that employees did not have to pay taxes on health insurance paid for by employers, and the IRS made this permanent in 1954.

This law permanently distorted the health insurance market in favor of employer-based plans. If an employer pays $100 for health insurance with pre-tax dollars, the employee enjoys the full benefit. But if the employer pays that $100 as salary, the worker will only be able to purchase $50-70 of insurance after federal, state, and Social Security taxes. Over time, this tax disparity allowed employer-based health insurance to dominate the private insurance market. In 2008, over 90% of non-elderly Americans with private insurance received it through their workplace.

Hence, most workers don’t own their own health insurance in the same way that they own their auto or homeowners insurance. Employers generally decide which health plans their workers receive. When workers change jobs, they must almost always also change health plans. U.S. tax law thus artificially injects employers into decisions about employees’ health benefits. In contrast, note how employers need not become involved with their workers’ choices of auto or homeowner insurance.

2) Mandated benefits will become political footballs.

The current controversy arose from the government mandating coverage of contraceptives. But this problem is not isolated to contraceptives. Rather, any mandated health insurance benefit could ignite a similar political firestorm.

For instance, Massachusetts requires insurers to cover in vitro fertilization, a procedure recently condemned by the pope. Should Massachusetts Catholics be compelled to pay for others’ in vitro fertilizations despite their religious objections?

Under any system of mandatory insurance (such as in Massachusetts), the government must necessarily specify what constitutes an acceptable policy. This creates a giant magnet for special interest groups seeking to include their own favorite benefits in the mandatory package.

As Michael Cannon noted in 2009:

In the three years since Massachusetts enacted its individual mandate, providers successfully lobbied to require 16 specific types of coverage under the mandate. … The Massachusetts Legislature is considering more than 70 additional requirements.

Under ObamaCare, this special-interest feeding frenzy will expand nationwide. At a 2011 Dept. of Health and Human Services “listening session” to help determine the mandated “essential benefits” package, special interest groups openly lobbied for numerous benefits, including:

* Expanded services for autism and phenylketonuria

* Coverage for “eating coaches”

* Expanded coverage for HIV testing

* Coverage for medical nutrition therapy, especially for the African-American population

Mandatory benefits thus allow those with sufficient political influence to compel others to subsidize their favored medical expenses. Yes, it’s wrong to compel Catholics to pay for others’ birth control. But it’s equally wrong to compel women to pay for prostate cancer checks, or teetotalers to pay for alcoholism treatments they do not wish for and will never use.

3) We must fight for freedom as a principle.

As George Will noted:

The Catholic Bishops, it serves them right. They’re the ones who were really hot for Obamacare, with a few exceptions. But they were all in favor of this. And this is what it looks like when the government decides it’s going to make your health care choices for you.

If the Catholic bishops had previously opposed ObamaCare and supported free market health care reforms on principle, they would now have the moral high ground to argue for religious freedom. But having made their earlier deal with the devil to support ObamaCare, they’re now paying the price.

And their current attempts to seek their own ObamaCare exemption merely turns them into just another special interest group lobbying for a waiver, such as labor unions or the politically connected friends of Nancy Pelosi.

The Catholic bishops can recapture the moral high ground by not merely seeking a narrow exemption for themselves, but rather by supporting broader free market health care reforms, including:

A) Eliminating the tax disparity between employer-provided health insurance and individually-purchased health insurance. This would uncouple health insurance from employment and restore a level playing field to the individual insurance market. Individuals could then purchase policies that they kept even when they changed jobs (just as they already do with their car and homeowners insurance). Employers would no longer be responsible for coverage choices made by their employees.

B) Eliminating all mandated benefits — not just contraceptives, but the dozens of others such as orthotics, autism therapy, in vitro fertilization, etc. Insurers should be free to offer to willing consumers inexpensive policies covering only catastrophic accidents and illnesses. Insurers would remain free to offer richer policies that covered varying levels of elective procedures (but cost correspondingly more). Customers could purchase whatever levels of coverage they wished from willing insurers based on their own individual needs and circumstances.

These free market reforms would lower insurance costs for many consumers, allow individuals to keep their insurance when they changed jobs, and free employers from having to pay for medical services that violated their religious principles.

In summary, the root cause of the current controversy is government interference in the marketplace for health insurance. And the only proper solution is to repeal those government controls and move towards a fully free market in health insurance.

Paul Hsieh, MD, is a member of the Colorado chapter of Docs4PatientCare (www.Docs4PatientCare.org) and co-founder of Freedom and Individual Rights in Medicine (www.WeStandFIRM.org).

Governmental Hypocrisy

When it comes to illegal immigration and health care "reform", this says it all!

Quote of the Day

 

"Fathom the hypocrisy of a Government

that requires every citizen to prove

they are insured...but not everyone

must prove they are a citizen."

The Frog In The Pan

I feel like the frog that is placed in the pan of cool water which is slowly heated. I will not jump out because I feel comfortable. If I had been plunked into the pan of heated water, I would have bolted out of the pan without thought.

The pan in my analogy is the United States and Obama is slowly turning up the heat. We have seen the takeover of banks, autos and now the health care of America. Don't be fooled, this health care plan is just the first step to nationalization which I predict will happen either before 2014 or just afterward. There are two reasons for my negativity. First, the plan's penalty for not having insurance is meaningless. Rationally, would you rather pay a $695 penalty or $1200 per year for insurance? Most would rather pay the penalty especially since I can get insurance anytime I get sick or hurt. Remember there is no pre-existing clause after September. So I get sick, I go to the insurance company or cooperative of my choice and say "give me some of that insurance" and they have to. What is the incentive to purchase insurance when you are not
sick?

Employers also will do the math. Do they provide health insurance for their employees which might cost the corporation $7000-$12000 or more per year or pay the penalty of $2000? If the corporation does provide the insurance, their employees can go to the insurance companies or cooperatives and get their coverage. From a purely economic analysis, the companies are going to do what is in the best interests of the stockholders which is not to provide insurance but to pay the penalty.

Secondly, employer paid insurance will drop off significantly in the next 4 years to a point that Congress will wake to the horror that most people are using the cooperatives and/or personally owned insurance. To remain profitable, largely due to the lack of screening for pre-existing issues, the premium increases for all insurance will rise by double digits. To answer complaints by the populace Congress will declare the experiment of a quasi government/insurance company solution a failure and to declare that "we must control costs and the only entity that can do that is the government."

Whereupon Congress will create an American Health Plan entirely run and administered by the government. All those entities who bought into the current health plan namely AARP, the insurance companies, hospitals and doctors will lose their power and will be dictated to by the government. The heat in the pan just went up some more.

Agree? Disagree?