Category: Health Care

Wonder If Anything Important Happens At The SCOTUS Today?

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by Smitty

Stacy has been too occupied of late to bequeath his wisdom upon the country. Today, hopefully, will be our Progressive nadir. The point were we read Madison in Federalist #62:

It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be to-morrow. Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and less fixed?

. . .and offer a general ‘no kidding.’

It’s been a whacky two years and three months since the Code Red rally, which didn’t halt the Wicked Witch of the West and “Sleazy” Reid from debasing themselves the next day, on 21March2012.

I’ll come at Stacy’s “don’t care” position from another angle. What’s significant isn’t so much today’s data point in American history, but rather the engagement of the American people. If ObamaCare is overturned and the people gaff off the responsibility to pay attention, then ObamaCare will return in more ugly forms. Cancer is like that. If it’s upheld and the plurality of the people give in to O’Donnell-ism, then we are also toast.

Today’s decision won’t “solve” jack. Indeed, whenever a politician talks about “solving” anything, the tugging senstation at your hip is meaningful. Today marks a historic, meaningful blip on the grand course of recovering homo sapiens from homo bureaucratus. We’re exceptional, and here’s where it shows.

Check back for updates. In the meantime:



UPDATE: Pictures from a SCOTUS exhibition

Lively costumes!

The scrum at 0900

My Son’s Not Brain Dead; That’s His Obama Impression

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by Smitty

Via Daily Pundit and All American Blogger comes a creepy tale from Old Blighted of some ‘doctors’ who, for whatever reason, didn’t seem interested in doing their job:

The Mail reports that Stephen Thorpe, then 17, was placed in a medically-induced coma following a multi-car pileup that had already taken the life of his friend Matthew, who was driving the vehicle.
Although a team of four physicians insisted that his son was “brain-dead” following the wreck, Thorpe’s father enlisted the help of a general practitioner and a neurologist, who demonstrated that his son still had brain wave activity. The doctors agreed to bring him out of the coma, and five weeks later Thorpe left the hospital, having almost completely recovered.

This will be our ObamaCare future, when those without the resources find legitimate care will become pray for lazy doctors. Brave, brave new ObamaCare world.

Update: animals are getting into the act. Here, via American Power, a black bear does an impression of Obama’s popularity:

Update II: linked at The Daley Gator.

Dean Clancy At FreedomWorks Didn’t Get The Memo

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by Smitty

And so here is Clancy, nattering on, in defiance of the Received Wisdom that the GOP has no ideas of how to improve health care in the United States. He even blasphemes the Holy Tax Code:

The Republicans do have a bunch of ideas for fixing what ails our health care system. I’ll just mention a few of them here. For example:

  • Reform state medical malpractice laws.
  • Incentivize hospitals and doctors to publish their prices, to promote comparison shopping.
  • Let people purchase insurance across state lines.
  • Let small businesses band together to obtain insurance for their workers at group rates.
  • Expand Health Savings Accounts and flex benefits.
  • Ease federal mandates that contribute to emergency-room over-crowding.
  • Block-grant the Medicaid program back to the states.

Here’s my personal favorite:

  • Let seniors join their Member of Congress’s health plan.

Those are just some of the ideas that various Republicans have proposed. And they’re by and large pretty good, common-sense ideas. I think they’d reduce costs without costly mandates, without a big new bureaucracy, without a 2,801-page bill that “they have to pass so we can find out what’s in it.” Oh, and by the way, with all of these ideas, you would actually get to “keep your coverage if you like it,” unlike under the president’s plan. Anyway, that’s all great.

But the one problem that I haven’t mentioned the Republicans dealing with — and it’s very important — is pre-existing conditions. You probably know what that is. It’s the most important problem in health care. If you fix the problem of pre-existing medical conditions, I think you fix the health care issue, as a general matter.

What is that, exactly? It’s the problem you face when, let’s say you have diabetes and you’re unemployed or you lose your job — you have no health insurance. So you go to buy coverage online or out of the yellow pages, and they want to charge you an arm and a leg because of your health status, because of your preexisting condition. That’s a problem for a lot of people, maybe 2 to 4 million people in this country, so not a huge percentage of us, but for each one of those people it’s a big deal.

And guess what? That problem can be addressed. It’s mainly caused by government policy. My line is whenever someone tells you that there’s a “market failure,” look closer: it’s a government failure. There’s some government policy causing the problem. And that’s definitely the case here. The problem with pre-existing conditions is primarily caused by the United States tax code. That’s right, it’s the tax code. And how does that happen? Well, basically the government doesn’t create a level playing field for health care versus health insurance, for health insurance obtained at the workplace versus health insurance obtained out of the yellow pages, for health insurance that has a low deductible versus health insurance with a high deductible. By the way, a deductible just means the amount that you pay out of pocket before the insurance kicks in. All of those distortions are caused by the way we treat health benefits in our tax code.

Read the whole contra-Narrative mess, and remember to savor the Ultimate Truthiness: the GOP has no reform ideas.

It’s either ObamaCare, or under the bus for every manjack among you.

Update: linked by The Lonely Conservative.

Update II: linked at Daley Gator.

The Cold Civil War

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by Smitty

My current commute is ~45 minutes. I like to use that time to check in with Stacy, and continue the attempts to guide him along paths of TweeDeck righteousness. We’ll get him there.

I also like to chat up my dad, a retired Navy E-7 with a GED who may or may not be a representative sample of the ‘boomer‘ set (he actually predates Stacy’s cadre by just over a year) who, on the cusp of retirement, is shocked, Shocked! to discover there’s a Commie in the White House.

Dad, who quit smoking after about 40 years, just had his blood sugar clock in at 200+. He’s controlling it nicely with diet and exercise (two things he’d paid scant attention these decades), thank heaven. He’d already been irritated, since his mid-eighties retirement from the Navy, with that relative success story in government-run medicine, the Veteran’s Administration. As the pill-eating stage of life looms, the thought of ObamaCare not only offends him as a case study in stillborn policy, but also as the antithesis of what he spent 23 precious years of his life defending against: a threat to liberty.

What would the third POTUS do?
My task, in these conversations, is to offer dad the value of the education the taxpayers have poured into my head (thanks!), as well as the blogs I consume at just below the addiction level. Like TweetDeck, an RSS reader is a powerful tool. I recently blew away about 75% of my subscriptions, because the signal-to-noise ration was too far gone. One of the keepers was The Corner, where there was a choice Thomas Jefferson quote from 1807 that cuts to the heart of our Constitutional crisis:

Congress may make the law; whatever is proper to be executed by way of a treaty, the President & Senate may enter into the treaty; whatever is to be done by a judicial sentence, the judges may pass the sentence. Nothing is more likely than that their enumeration of powers is defective. This is the ordinary case of all human works. Let us go on then perfecting it, by adding, by way of amendment to the Constitution, those powers which time & trial show are still wanting. But it has been taken too much for granted, that by this rigorous construction the treaty power would be reduced to nothing.

and, later:

I confess, then, I think it important, in the present case, to set an example against broad construction, by appealing for new power to the people.

Read the whole, beautiful thing. It’s refreshing to read of a President who grasped that he was ultimately a servant of the people. That’s the sort of thing dad expects.

Doing your job is unprecedented? Only if your name is Barack Obama.
Via Sissy Willis on Twitter (Stacy, your attention is called to the TweetDeck agent) we have the contrast of #OccupyResoluteDesk quoted at Red State taking a far less American tack on the question of the source of power in our nation, with a response from Leon Wolf:

(BHO):“Ultimately, I’m confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.”

Look, I’m not here to debate the finer points of Marbury v. Madison with anyone, but the fact remains that since that decision was handed down over 200 years ago, it has not exactly been “unprecedented and extraordinary” for the Supreme Court to overturn laws passed by Congress (no matter the size of the majority). In fact, it happens all the time. That is the entire point of the doctrine of judicial review, first announced in Marbury and affirmed without serious challenge ever since.

Read the whole thing. But understand that, past Obama’s bluster, ObamaCare is the antithesis of everything our system of limited government is intended to do:

  • Who:A small number of people of only one party drafted a bill in relative secrecy.
  • What: A bill so vast that no one could hope to achieve due diligence in reading it, estimating its costs, or even have an honest grasp of its Constitutionality.
  • Where: The location where ObamaCare was crafted is about the only straight piece of the puzzle.
  • When: The shenanigans of the timing for ObamaCare are one of the less murky aspects of it. Other than the fact that is was rammed through so quickly that no one read it.
  • How: All of the drama of the Town Halls, the Scott Brown election, the attempt to deem ObamaCare passed to avoid personal responsibility, the propaganda drama of the Word that Rhymes With ‘Bigger’ allegedly being used on Representatives. . .are we supposed to forget that, Barack?

I’m saving the question of Why for the conclusion, but I will claim Progressive and Postmodern reasons when I get there. But first, a couple of other points. Dad hates these sorts of digressions, but I don’t often break away from TweetDeck for a real McCain-ian stemwinder, so bear with me.

Flogging the SCOTUS like a rented mule
Ace links to Mickey Kaus, wondering aloud if the details of Friday’s initial vote at the Supreme Court may have been leaked to #OccupyResoluteDesk.

Kaus wondered a few days ago if/when we’d get a leak from the result of the conference vote — the first, non-binding vote by the judges.
This is the hottest question in the nation– could any wife or husband not help but beg to be told? And what about all those clerks? Secrets are fun to keep, but even more fun to tell!

Let’s see here: Elena Kagan on the softball diamond with the iPhone, or Sonia Sotomayor sharing wisdom in the restaurant with the Blackberry? Why would they not tell their patron? The vote may have been secret, but it wasn’t secret secret. Perhaps the two ladies have some sense of obligation to the Constitution and their respective oaths. I will cheerfully retract my impingement of their honor if they join the opinion that ObamaCare is as anti-American as the Yamato, beside the fact that ObamaCare has a similar displacement.
Yid with Lid notes the pattern at work:

This is not the first time this President has tried to intimidate the court. During his 2010 State of the Union Address, he lied about the court’s decision in the Citizens United Case,

“Last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests – including foreign corporations – to spend without limit in our elections.” Justice Alito shook his head and mouthed, “Not true.”

Alito was correct the POTUS was twisting the truth for his own political ends.

The Supreme Court, flawed though it may be, is almost the last remaining impediment to BHO’s power, at least within the Beltway.

Now, why?
In discussing current events with dad, merely hating on the Commies is not enough. That’s just present-tense, emotional outlet. One needs to understand why, in order to formulate a solid strategy. While I offered a think piece on the topic a few weeks ago, let me summarize that in closing.

  • Postmodernism rejects the notion of Truth outright. Reason without Truth is a boat with no rudder; no forcing function to keep it on a stable course. Lacking such, Postmodern politicians are all after power. Their own, really, but couched in terms of the state. State power also hates liberty, the power of the individual. Whenever a Postmodernist speaks something correlating with history, fact, and reality, it is either accidental, or camouflage.
  • Progressives don’t believe in liberty. Tracking the teachings of Gustav le Bon, the Progressives behave as though the American people are a vast, mindless mob, suitable for herding. The iron bureaucratic rod of ObamaCare is thus a fun way to fetish power, to rake in a boatload of cash on the stock market, and a civic duty to keep the hoi polloi properly penned.

This old lust for power of these Postmodern Progressives represents a return to medieval days. When power is held by few, having the correct patron is paramount. Ask Sotomayor and Kagan, who can be relied upon to disgrace themselves and try do defend ObamaCare with their opinions. How could 26 of 57 states be correct in their suit against The State? (Please prove me wrong, ladies). When the public debt finally destroys the economy, having the correct friends and speaking correct thought will become more important than liberty.
And so history will reflect some years hence, and decide we are currently in a Cold Civil War. The zombie of Communism has arrived, even though the Cold War officially ended a score of years ago. To finish the deed that the Soviet Union started, the destruction of the exceptional American Constitutional order, #OccupyResoluteDesk is striving to foment this second Civil War. To divide Americans racially, economically, and spiritually, and so ease the conquest.
Thus, resist we much. 2012 is not just ‘the most important election of our lifetimes’. It is shaping up to be the climax of this Cold Civil War, where zombie Communism is thrown back, and a third, post-Progressive era begins. Or the birth of AmSoc.

Update: Jimmie Bise offers a great chaser.

E.J. Dionne, Political Psychic

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Everybody knows that E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post is a liberal Democrat — both a partisan and an ideologue — a “social justice” Catholic from Massachusetts whose political beau ideal is Ted Kennedy. (Ah, “compassionate liberalism“! Mary Jo Kopechne could not be reached for comment.)

Only a person of such impeccably ironclad progressive credentials — author of the 1996 book, They Only Look Dead: Why Progressives Will Dominate the Next Political Era — could ever have been employed as political reporter (!) for the New York Times and the Washington Post before being promoted to the op-ed pages, the faculty of Georgetown University, et cetera.

So we know who Dionne is, what his qualifications are, and we recognize him as a special pleader for the Democratic Party and in particular its most left-wing elements. Yet it is apparently Dionne’s belief that his mental superiority is so vast as to endow him with omniscience, and it is this belief in his own clairvoyance — E.J., the All-Knowing! — which is on display in Dionne’s latest op-ed expedition:

Right before our eyes, American conservatism is becoming something very different from what it once was. Yet this transformation is happening by stealth because moderates are too afraid to acknowledge what all their senses tell them. …

Thus he begins, and thus he ends:

If our nation’s voters want to move government policy far to the right, they are entirely free to do so. But those who regard themselves as centrist have a moral obligation to make clear what the stakes are in the current debate. If supposed moderates refuse to call out the new conservatism for the radical creed it has become, their timidity will make them complicit in an intellectual coup they could have prevented.

You see how Dionne, unquestionably himself a man of the Left, here presumes to discern the intentions of the Right — a stealthy “transformation” of this “new conservatism” into a “radical creed” — even as his mind-reading powers enable him to see that it is the “timidity” of moderates which stops them from preventing “an intellectual coup.”

We presume that Dionne can only have known these things by mystical processes, because no one has ever accused E.J. of speaking two words to any genuine right-winger, and his idea of a “moderate” almost certainly includes half the Democrats in the Senate.

But wait: What is it that has inspired E.J. the All Knowing to this extraordinary exertion of his psychic powers? It was last week’s oral arguments in the Supreme Court about the constitutionality of ObamaCare. You will recall the Left’s panicked reaction at the skeptical SCOTUS questioning and the obvious inability of Obama’s solicitor general to refute the doubts raised by the justices:

Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. should be grateful to the Supreme Court for refusing to allow cameras in the courtroom, because his defense of Obamacare on Tuesday may go down as one of the most spectacular flameouts in the history of the court.

That’s from Adam Serwer in Mother Jones, for crying out loud! If even such a deep-dyed Bolshevik sees it like this — Serwer’s March 27 item was headlined, “Obamacare’s Supreme Court Disaster” — we can expect, at a minimum, that a 5-4 majority of the court will find ObamaCare at least partly unconstitutional.

That was what prompted Dionne’s March 28 denunciation of “judicial activism” by the court’s conservatives, merely for the tone of their questions, without waiting to learn what their actual ruling might be:

Three days of Supreme Court arguments over the health-care law demonstrated for all to see that conservative justices are prepared to act as an alternative legislature, diving deeply into policy details as if they were members of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.

Right: And the Supreme Court never touched “policy details” in Brown v. Board, Roe v. Wade, Lawrence v. Texas or any other landmark ruling of which E.J. the All-Knowing approves. I remain convinced that the final verdict on the ObamaCare debacle was not written by a Georgetown professor, but by a blogger named Jimmie Bise Jr.:

“They could have been honest with us. They could have come to us as men and women and talked with us, sought our counsel. They could have tried to convince us that the good of their ideas was worth all we would have to give up to get it. They did not. They lied and lied and lied some more. They called us ignorant and vicious and heartless and stupid. They pushed a bill none of them had read in the middle of the night on Christmas Eve. They fudged numbers so badly they ended up counting whole piles of money twice. They accused anyone who disagreed with them of wanting to kill old people and innocent children. They built a law their own lawyers can not ably defend.”

Any rational, well-informed and intelligent observer could see that Nancy Pelosi’s frantic ram-it-through-in-the-middle-of-the-night trainwreck of a bill would turn out badly, and when even the Solicitor General — for whom no task is more important than protecting his boss’s signature legislation — can’t defend its constitutionality, we can only conclude that it is constitutionally indefensible.

So we return to today’s column by E.J. the All-Knowing. Donald Douglas says Dionne is pining for the days of Eisenhower, and William Jacobson is impressed with the awesome success Dionne ascribes to the Right: “Are We Really Doing That Well?”

What’s E.J. really up to? And who the hell does he think he’s fooling? What Dionne is clearly trying to do is to drive a wedge between the four conservatives — Roberts, Alito, Thomas and Scalia — and the court’s only true “swing” vote, Justice Anthony Kennedy.

If Dionne were honest, he would admit that he wet his pants when Kennedy declared during oral argument that ObamaCare’s individual mandate “changes the relationship of the federal government to the individual in a very fundamental way.”

Instead of doing that, however, Dionne pretends to discern a “stealth” radicalism among conservatives (i.e., Chief Justice Roberts & Co.) and accuses moderates (i.e., Justice Kennedy) of “timidity” in refusing to prevent an “intellectual coup.”

The wonder of it all is that E.J. the All-Knowing thinks that we — including Justice Kennedy — are too stupid to see what he’s doing.

 

 


Brutal: New Rick Santorum TV Ad Compares Mitt Romney to Barack Obama

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According to Politico, this new TV ad is now running in Wisconsin and will soon be running in Pennsylvania:

UPDATE: This ad appears to be part of a general effort by the Santorum campaign to put the focus squarely on health care, as the candidate also publishes an op-ed column in USA Today:

As the Supreme Court considers the constitutionality of the individual mandate in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, we Americans need to remember that we have the freedom to make choices for ourselves. We, not our government, choose the food to eat, the clothes to wear, the ideas to believe. “ObamaCare” is the opposite of freedom. Under ObamaCare, the government, not the individual, has freedom. We can do better.
Just ask the Congressional Budget Office. It forecast that as many as 20 million Americans could lose their employer-provided health insurance under ObamaCare, and that premium costs will rise over the next decade.
ObamaCare – based on RomneyCare, the plan Massachusetts adopted when Mitt Romney was governor – tells insurance companies which benefits their policies must offer and what range of prices they could charge. It requires that individuals buy conforming policies, and cuts $500 billion from Medicare. The Independent Payment Advisory Board will limit what treatments doctors can prescribe. . . .

Read the rest.

 
 


ObamaCare: The Big Lie

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“They could have been honest with us. They could have come to us as men and women and talked with us, sought our counsel. They could have tried to convince us that the good of their ideas was worth all we would have to give up to get it. They did not. They lied and lied and lied some more. They called us ignorant and vicious and heartless and stupid. They pushed a bill none of them had read in the middle of the night on Christmas Eve. They fudged numbers so badly they ended up counting whole piles of money twice. They accused anyone who disagreed with them of wanting to kill old people and innocent children. They built a law their own lawyers can not ably defend.”
— Jimmie Bise Jr., “They’re Always Shocked When We’re Not Stupid”

Rutherford B. Hayes Responds To Pelosi

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by Smitty

On the topic of Bobby Rush beclowning himself:

On the topic of writing ObamaCare Constitutionally:

“I’m a supporter of judicial review, I honor the Constitution in that regard,” Pelosi said to reporters. “That’s why we wrote our bill in a way that was Constitutional. I still feel pretty confident about it. And if and when — this game is not over. In March Madness, what happens when your team doesn’t win one — well wait a minute, let’s have the game.”

Many thanks to Political Clown Parade!

Update: linked by That Mr. G Guy.