If the healthcare mandate is illegal, so are the mandatory private retirement funds that are so dear to the right wing think tanks is illegal too.
So, if SCOTUS strikes down Obamacare, there is a silver lining. It takes Social Security privatization off the table.
In fact, it might have the effect of ruling out a lot of the misguided “Market Based Solutions.”
Because I think that the law and precedent is clear, and the only questionis whether there are 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 justices who are corrupt enough, and partisan enough, to vote to strike down the act.
If Kennedy votes not to strike down, I think that he takes Roberts with him, giving a 6-3 decision, but if he swings the other way, so does Roberts.
The Chief Justice will not be on the dissenting side of this vote, because of the optics, not because of the law.
Roberts may be a corrupt partisan hack, but he only uses the secret sauce when it makes a difference in the final decision.
My guess is that it will be 4-5 to strike down much of the law, but if not, it will be 6-3 supporting it.
What must be noted though is that this is not a matter of law. The law has been settled for at least 60 years.
The only question is how corrupt the 5 right wing justices are.
Hoocoodanode? The lead plaintiff in the lawsuit against Obamacare that is most likely to make it to the Supreme Court went bankrupt over medical bills, dumping those costs on the rest of us:
Mary Brown, a 56-year-old Florida woman who owned a small auto repair shop but had no health insurance, became the lead plaintiff challenging President Obama’s healthcare law because she was passionate about the issue.
Brown “doesn’t have insurance. She doesn’t want to pay for it. And she doesn’t want the government to tell her she has to have it,” said Karen Harned, a lawyer for the National Federation of Independent Business. Brown is a plaintiff in the federation’s case, which the Supreme Court plans to hear later this month.
But court records reveal that Brown and her husband filed for bankruptcy last fall with $4,500 in unpaid medical bills. Those bills could change Brown from a symbol of proud independence into an example of exactly the problem the healthcare law was intended to address.
………
The business federation, along with other critics of the law, calls the insurance mandate a “threat to individual liberty” that violates the Constitution.
Obama administration lawyers argue that the requirement is justified because everyone, sooner or later, needs healthcare. Those who fail to have insurance are at high risk of running up bills they cannot pay, sticking the rest of society with the cost, they argue. Brown’s situation, they say, is a perfect example of exactly that kind of “uncompensated care that will ultimately be paid by others.”
Seriously. The hypocrisy is mind boggling.
At Digby’s place, David Adkins notes that the Obama’s “compromise” on birth control coverage with the US Conference of Catholic Bishops has had the effect making opposition to birth control mainstream:
And guess what? As Digby points out, it’s working. What just a few weeks ago was considered so mainstream as to an afterthought (providing contraception) is now seen as some sort of controversial touchstone, even as “religious freedom” has become a buzzword in the press.
Democrats can high-five one another about Republican overreach and laugh hysterically at the increased number of votes Barack Obama will receive in 2012 over Mitt Santorum. But ultimately the joke’s on us. It’s been on us ever since the Obama Administration decided to concede an inch to the misogynist conspiracy of extremist fanatics that are the Bishops, rather than mock them immediately for being out of touch with their own flock, to say nothing of the mainstream American public.
The political ground on contraception has suddenly shifted to the right faster than I have seen on any social issue in my lifetime. It’s incredible.
The appropriate response to the outrage from the medieval set is, “Sorry, I live in the 21st century, if they don’t want to, then maybe they aren’t qualified to provide medical care or education.”
As part of health care reform, consumers are supposed to be getting clear and simple summary of benefits and of an insurance policy.
This means things like deductibles, maximum out of pocket, and co-payments are supposed to be presented to the consumer in a simple and readable format.
The rather unsurprising development in all this is that Obama administration caved to insurers on the most important number of all, and there is no requirement for insurers and employers to tell people what they have to pay in premiums:
The Department of Health and Human Services recently announced that health insurers and employers must provide more information to consumers shopping for health insurance. The ensuing coverage, shall we say, was a classic case of journalistic bungling. Reporters took what HHS officials fed them and crafted their pieces for public consumption. But the stories were confusing—in some cases flat-out wrong—and did not exactly offer the clearest of explanations about what’s supposed to be a clearer process for buying health coverage. I’d wager the public didn’t understand much of what the media dished out, and probably won’t until they actually start shopping for coverage again in the fall and find the government hasn’t made it easier after all.
…………
The report that HHS released to the media discloses some important numbers: the amount of the deductible; what services don’t count toward satisfying it; what’s not included in the out-of-pocket limits, like premiums and charges from doctors who balance the bill; the copays; and, probably most important, the amount of coinsurance—the percentage of a bill patients must pay, which is increasing with each passing year.
But insurers and employers do not have to tell consumers how much a policy costs—in other words, no premium information has to be given. Yep, that’s right—the key piece of information needed to make a good decision is missing. When insurers design a policy, they consider the interplay of coinsurance, copays, deductibles, coverage, and, of course, the premium, which lets them know what price point will make a consumer say “yes.” Price is the bottom line for consumers, but it’s poison for sellers, who fear a shopper might choose a policy with a lower price, other things being equal. So much for that price competition that was to solve all the ills of U.S. health care.
This was followed up by the media almost entirely simply reprinting the HHS press releases, which means that this crucial omission was largely ignored:
What was needed from the media was analysis and sharp questioning about what these new disclosures would really mean for consumers in terms of ease of use and availability during the shopping process. We know consumers hate shopping for insurance, and take shortcuts to finish the task as fast as they can. But instead of helping them through this dreaded chore, the media gave the Department of Health and Human Services a free pass.
This is not a product of a biased media, this is a product of lazy media, which is the real problem with the media, particularly given the financial pressures present in today’s media environment, because a lazy media is a cheaper media.
The Obama administration has decided not to appeal to the full 11th circuit court and go directly to the Supreme Court, which means that we could see a ruling as early as June.
I’m not sure what the tactics are here.
There are three legal questions here
The third question is a slam dunk based on precedent, but I expect at least 4 of the justices to go full Bush v. Gore and find some contrived form of logic to ignore that.
It pretty much comes down to Justice Kennedy, but he ruled for Bush in Bush v. Gore, so I think that Obamacare is toast.
The Obama administration just shut down the CLASS long term health insurance program:
A long-term disability care program shepherded into the U.S. health overhaul by Senator Edward Kennedy before his death was canceled as financially unsustainable by health secretary Kathleen Sebelius.
Republicans opposed the so-called Class Act that created the program. It will be indefinitely suspended, Sebelius said today in a statement, because the program isn’t likely to generate enough revenue to pay for its benefits.
Democrats led by Kennedy created the plan to help people disabled by illness or accident. By paying premiums while employed, beneficiaries would be eligible after five years for at least $50 a day toward health and support services provided at home. The program was billed as paying for itself.
“I do not see a viable path forward for Class implementation at this time,” Sebelius said in a letter to congressional leaders.
Republicans celebrated the program’s demise, calling it misguided policy used as a financial gimmick to reduce cost estimates of the health law. At the time, the Congressional Budget Office subtracted $70 billion from the cost of the law thanks to Class — which stands for Community Living Assistance Services and Supports — contributing to $143 billion in total savings, because the program’s premiums would exceed benefits over its first decade.
This is what happens when you try to create a program that accommodates the sources of the problem (insurance companies and for-profit healthcare), because you lack the courage, and quite frankly the interest, in actually fixing the system, as opposed to just slapping the label “Healthcare Reform” on half measures.
The fact that this will add $70 billion over the next ten years to the cost of healthcare reform will lend credence to Republican attacks in the 2012 campaign season.
This is why half measures, particularly when they did not serve to secure meaningful bipartisan support, create more than just bad policy, they create bad politics.
It’s a battle between an insurance company and a pharmaceutical company over a drug that probably doesn’t work but has a lot of fans:
Blue Shield of California will no longer pay for the use of the drug Avastin to treat breast cancer, a sign that support for the widely debated and expensive treatment may be eroding among health plans.
Blue Shield, with 3.2 million members, is apparently the first large insurance company to end payments since a federal advisory committee unanimously recommended in June that the Food and Drug Administration rescind Avastin’s approval as a treatment for breast cancer, saying the drug did not really help patients.
The F.D.A. commissioner, Dr. Margaret A. Hamburg, has not made a final decision, so Avastin retains its approval for now.
Because it is an emotional and politically contentious issue, with some women saying the drug is keeping them alive, many insurers have said they will wait until a final decision from the F.D.A. before re-evaluating their coverage policies. And Medicare has indicated it will continue paying for the drug even if the F.D.A. revokes the approval.
Until people realize that there is not a problem with the cost of prescription drugs because the real problem is the price of drugs, and so private solutions to innovation, with the associated exclusivity provisions, are the problem, not the solution.
Paul Ryan is suggesting that Republicans should double down on killing Medicare as a political strategy.
Convince your side that this is what you want to do! Please!!!!
Throw us in that briar patch!
Could it be ………… Satan?As Obama did when he kowtowed to the insurance industry and killed the public option.
You get accelerating inflation for medical insurance:
The cost of health insurance for many Americans this year climbed more sharply than in previous years, outstripping any growth in workers’ wages and adding more uncertainty about the pace of rising medical costs.
A new study by the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit research group that tracks employer-sponsored health insurance on a yearly basis, shows that the average annual premium for family coverage through an employer reached $15,073 in 2011, an increase of 9 percent over the previous year.
“The open question is whether that’s a one-time spike or the start of a period of higher increases,” said Drew Altman, the chief executive of the Kaiser foundation.
The steep increase in rates is particularly unwelcome at a time when the economy is still sputtering and unemployment continues to hover at about 9 percent. Many businesses cite the high cost of coverage as a factor in their decision not to hire, and health insurance has become increasingly unaffordable for more Americans. Over all, the cost of family coverage has about doubled since 2001, when premiums averaged $7,061, compared with a 34 percent gain in wages over the same period.
I wonder what could be driving this? Maybe the desire to beat implementation dates for price controls?
How much the new federal health care law pushed by President Obama is affecting insurance rates remains a point of debate, with some analysts suggesting that insurers have raised prices in anticipation of new rules that would, in 2012, require them to justify any increase of more than 10 percent.
The difference between health insurance companies and Satan is that there are some things that Satan just won’t do.
I think that one of the reasons that Obama took raising the Medicare eligibility age off the table is this report, which gives us this little picture:
For the non chart pr0n inclined, the first thing that you notice is that it costs society twice as much to move these folks off the Medicare rolls.
The next thing to notice is that almost almost half of that cost is born by people who are under 65, who, because of community rating, will have to cover much of the increased expenses.
And then there is the huge hit on 65-66 year olds and their employers.
What isn’t listed here is the loss in market power that would result, with an associated increase in costs.
It’s bad policy, it’s bad politics, and thankfully Obama realizes this ……… For a while, at least.
This is your brain
This is your brain on drugs … Any Questions
About 5 years ago, a couple of young twins (about 14) achieved some notoriety as the singing group called “Prussian Blue.”
It was a white white supremacist group.
Well, these days, the girls have renounced racism, and they credit marijuana for their change of heart:
Lamb and Lynx Gaede, whose band Prussian Blue was popular back in 2005 among those inclined to like such things, ascribed their unsavory past to having been “home schooled country bumpkins” heavily influenced by their domineering white supremacist mother, reports Neurobonkers.
The twins back when they were little 13-year-old Nazis about six years ago
Since then the twins, who turned 19 on June 30, have moved to Montana to attend high school, where in her first year Lynx was diagnosed with both cancer (which led to removal of a tumor) and cyclic vomiting syndrome (CVS). Lamb developed scoloiosis and back pain, “as well as lack of appetite and intense emotional stress.”Both of the girls, who sort of became the white supremacist equivalent of the Olsen Twins, began using marijuana after Lynx had a bad reaction to the harsh pharmaceutical narcotics Oxycontin and morphine, which a doctor had prescribed to treat her pain.
“I have to say, marijuana saved my life,” Lynx said. “I would probably be dead if I didn’t have it.”
Lynx became one of the first five minors in Montana to get a medical marijuana card, and Lamb now has one, too. One can only wonder what will become of the girls now that Montana’s conservative Republican-controlled Legislature has all but repealed the state’s compassionate medical marijuana law, approved by 62 percent voters in 2004.
Apparently, the marijuana didn’t just ease the physical pain, but also quelled the psychological hatred that had been inculcated in the girls by their racist upbringing.
No, this is not The Onion.
So, it’s the former Confederacy…
And Indian Reservations
And it’s an interesting picture.
He notices that most of the counties in question are in the old south, where taxes are low, unions are under seige, and the social safety net is non existent.
He wryly observes that, “geography of the decline speaks for itself.”
I actually noticed something else, in some places, like the red spot in South Dakota, it corresponds to the Pine Ridge and other Indian reservations in that part of the state.
I understand why, if the our healthcare system is beginning to fracture, it makes sense that Indian reservations would where we see the first signs, given the history of the destruction of their culture, the mismanagement of their affairs by the BIA, etc.
Basically, the reservations were structured for a very long time as something like a penal colony and a red-headed step-child, so it’s not surprising that they would be ground zero for many forms of decay.
As to the old Confederacy, I think that it’s more a matter of choice.
Post-reconstruction, there was an embrace of myths and philosophies that serve to keep most of the population down.
This is why the South is beginning to resemble the 3rd world.
That a man just robbed a bank so that he would be thrown in jail and get healthcare:
A 59-year-old man recently walked into a bank in Gastonia, NC, intent on robbing one dollar — no more or less — from the financial institution. Was it because he was aiming low for his first foray into bank robbery? No, he says it was because he needs medical care and the only way he could think to afford it was by going to prison.
“It wasn’t done for the monetary value. It was done for medical reasons,” he tells WCNC-TV in the video interview below. “I went in knowing i was going to jail.”
In fact, the man told the teller he robbed that he was unarmed and that he’d be waiting for the police in a chair near the entrance.
Before going on his wild crime spree, the man, who says he’s got a bad back, sore foot and a growth on his chest, wrote a letter to the Gaston Gazette newspaper explaining his reasons and saying, “I am of sound mind but not so much sound body.”
The man has only been charged with larceny from a person, which carries a lesser penalty than bank robbery. His bail was reduced to $2,000 but he’s obviously refusing to pay it so long as he’s being tended to by doctors.
This is a completely rational reaction to what Republicans call “the best healthcare system in the world”.
Our healthcare system is completely insane.
In a significant portion of the United States, life expectancy is falling:
Women in large swaths of the U.S. are dying younger than they were a generation ago, reversing nearly a century of progress in public health and underscoring the rising toll of smoking and record obesity.
Nationwide, life expectancy for American men and women has risen over the last two decades, and some U.S. communities still boast life expectancies as long as any in the world, according to newly released data. But over the last decade, the nation has experienced a widening gap between the most and least healthy places to live. In some parts of the United States, men and women are dying younger on average than their counterparts in nations such as Syria, Panama and Vietnam.
Overall, the United States is falling further behind other industrialized nations, many of which have also made greater strides in cutting child mortality and reducing preventable deaths.
In 737 U.S. counties out of more than 3,000, life expectancies for women declined between 1997 and 2007. For life expectancy to decline in a developed nation is rare. Setbacks on this scale have not been seen in the U.S. since the Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918, according to demographers.
You can find the original article here.
There are some idiots out there who will suggest that it’s because we are too fat*, but the deltas in life expectancy have primarily been through eliminating infant and child mortality, as well as pregnancy related medical issues.
What is going on here is that our medical system is breaking down.
We are undergoing the same collapse of our medical system, albeit more slowly, that occurred towards the end of the USSR, and there was not an outbreak of obesity there.
We have aging and under maintained infrastructure, we are wasting our resources on endless wars and a bloated defense establishment, and we are descending into a morass of corruption and self dealing with no prospect of it being fixed (see Geithner, Tim).
It sounds an awful lot like the declining days of the USSR.
*He says that the same thing happened when we went from hunter-gatherer to farmer, but it misses little facts like:
What really happened is that people could no longer be hunter gatherers because there was not enough land. You need something like 5 square km/year to support a single hunter gatherer, and once population crosses that threshold you move to herding, and eventually to farming, because the alternative is starvation.
life expectancies falling
My wife has spent much of today finding who we need to call in order to get a certificate of what is called “creditable coverage,” which we need to get or pre existing conditions covered.
I am seriously considering moving to Vermont when their single-payer plan becomes operational.
Posted via mobile.
Of course implementing the law over the next 3-5 years is problematic, since it requires a waiver from HHS, and I don’t think that Obama will stop sucking up to the insurance and finance industries and allow that to happen:
In order to actually enact the system, the state needs a waiver from the Affordable Care Act health reform law. Currently, the federal government will start handing out state waivers in 2017 — three years after Vermont wants to implement its system. Rep. Peter Welch (D-VT) has introduced an amendment that would move the waiver date up to 2014, an idea that President Obama has endorsed.
While I am sure that Obama would love to have the ability grant a waiver moved up, he is as insistent of the prerogatives of the executive as Dick Cheney ever was, there is no way that he would allow Vermont to set in motion a series of events that would transform healthcare delivery nationwide.
Basically, if Vermont is allowed to implement single payer, businesses will start to move there, because healthcare is such a huge part of their personnel costs, and other states will start to feel pressure to follow suit, which should, eventually, lead to something like single payer being implemented nation wide.
Harry Reid put the Paul Ryan budget up for a vote in the Senate, and it lost, with all the Democrats voting against it, but 40 Republicans voted to kill Medicare, 41 if you count Rand Paul, who voted no because he thought that it was not radical enough:
The Senate on Wednesday resoundingly rejected a budget sponsored by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) that calls for significant cuts to future Medicare benefits.
The 40-57 vote came one day after Republicans suffered an upset defeat in a special election in upstate New York where Democrats made Medicare cuts the primary issue.
Five Republican senators voted against a motion to take up the ambitious House budget plan, which suffered only four Republican defections when it passed the lower chamber earlier this year.
Four centrists voted no: Sens. Scott Brown (R-Mass.), Susan Collins (R-Maine), Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine). Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who favored larger budget cuts than what was proposed in Ryan’s budget, was the fifth no vote.
Every Democrat voted no except for Sen. Charles Schumer (N.Y.), who did not vote.
By forcing a vote on this, Harry Reid did the right thing, and by forcing the Senate Republicans to choose between normal voter in the general election, and teabagger in the primary, he put the ‘Phants between a rock and a hard place, which is a very good thing.
BTW, my guess as to why Murkowski voted no, she has 5 years until her next election, and she knows that the teabaggers in Alaska will hate her no matter what she does, so this was the safer course for her.
So, after the Republican party’s attempt to demolish Medicare results in one of the most Republican districts in the nation flipping Democratic in a special election, Barack Obama completely misses the point:
I want to extend my congratulations to Congresswoman-elect Kathy Hochul for her victory in New York’s 26th Congressional District,” the president said in a statement. “Kathy and I both believe that we need to create jobs, grow our economy, and reduce the deficit in order to outcompete other nations and win the future. Kathy has shown, through her victory and throughout her career, that she will fight for the families and businesses in western New York, and I look forward to working with her when she gets to Washington.
So, what’s here? We have:
What we don’t have:
And did I mention that he neglected to mention protecting the elderly or Medicare?
Note that while this is going on, Joe Biden, negotiating for the Democrats, has not taken Medicare off the table:
Vice President Joe Biden set a goal of at least $1 trillion in budget cuts from negotiations with congressional leaders on the federal debt as talks turned to Medicare, a contentious issue that risks replicating a partisan divide on Capitol Hill.
Democrats in the meeting yesterday ruled out concessions on Medicare without Republican agreement to raise tax revenue, a step the party’s leaders so far have rejected, according to someone familiar with the talks who spoke on condition of anonymity. Biden underscored the issue in remarks to reporters afterward.
(emphasis mine)
So the deal is, so long as they can get some token tax increases from Republicans, probably directed at labor unions and single mothers, they can agree to cut Medicare.
This does not bode well for 2012.
<facepalm>
The Republicans, yet again, complaining that their attempts to dismantle and privatize Medicare are bging called an attempt to dismantle and privatize Medicare:
House GOP budget star Paul Ryan is keeping up his offensive against Democrats who claim their victory in a New York special election Tuesday night was a rebuke of his budget plan that overhauls Medicare.
Democrats “are shamelessly demagoguing and distorting” Medicare, “trying to scare seniors and using this as a political weapon,” Ryan said Tuesday morning at the Peterson Foundation Summit in Washington.
Ryan appeared on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” earlier Tuesday where he blamed Democratic attack ads for the Republican loss, not the substance of his plan.
I understand you are a little objectivist Ayn Rand groupie, and so you believe that everyone thinks that government is pernicious and evil, even when it produces programs that outperform the private sector and benefit society, but the problem here is not that people are lying about your plan, it is that they are telling the truth.
Suck it up, bitch.