Category: Health Care

SCOTUS To Decide To Hear VA ObamaCare Suit Today?

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by Smitty (h/t Theo Spark)

Read the whole thing at the American Spectator:

. . .occasionally the justices receive a “petition for certiorari before judgment” asking them to consider the decision of some District Court before it has been reviewed by a Court of Appeals. Friday’s conference schedule includes consideration of one such petition, filed pursuant to Commonwealth of Virginia v. Sebelius.
The Virginia case was, of course, the first legal challenge to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) in which the Department of Justice (DOJ) received a major defeat.

This is the next step in this Big Effing Deal moving though the public digestive system, so that its true aroma and nature can stand fully revealed.

In response to Cuccinelli’s petition, the DOJ filed a brief in opposition claiming that Virginia had provided no good reason for “short-circuiting” the appellate process. The Court does, of course, have practical and philosophical reasons not to meddle with the normal appeals process, but its procedural rules allow it to do so if a case is of “imperative public importance.” Ironically, the DOJ’s brief actually concedes that the constitutionality of the individual mandate “is undoubtedly an issue of great public importance.”

The good reason, of course, is that there is a sizable price tag for the steamer known as ObamaCare.
This is just another brick in the wall of reasons why Eric Holder should be fired and relegated to the graveyard shift at some convenience store, where the workload may be commensurate with his abilities.

A Rasher of Bacon As A Unit Of Measure

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by Smitty

It makes sense to scale food to some hand unit of measure. Who wants to fret calories and grams and whatnot?
Via the Weekday Vegetarian, which I swear my wife shared with me in the Google Reader, as I would never be caught with my masculinity so impaired as to subscribe directly, we have:

Ms. Meyer took three restaurant meals and analyzed them, and then determined how many bacon slices she would have had to eat to arrive at the same caloric count and amount of fat. Bear in mind that the average person requires about 2000 calories a day and should limit their saturated fat to 16 grams per day.

A Chicago deep dish pizza came in at 770 calories with 18 grams of fat. She could have eaten 18 strips of bacon for the same amount. A plate of ribs had a whopping 1750 calories with 29 grams of fat. That’s almost all of your caloric allotment for the entire day, and almost twice the amount of saturated fat you should have. You would get the same amount with 26 slices of bacon. A chicken and shrimp carbonara from The Olive Garden clocked in at 1440 calories with a shocking 38 grams of saturated fat. You’d have to eat 35 slices of bacon to accomplish that, but of course, you never would. It’s like figuring out how much sugar you are ingesting when you drink a regular soda. You’d never sit down and eat the equivalent amount of sugar out of a bowl.

That’s still a lot of detail. However, the entire discussion has been broken down to a simple chart by the excellent xkcd:

Also: bacon cologne, for when you haven’t time to fry up a pound and just wear it for her.

Update: linked at Dyspepsia Generation.

NY-25 Flashback: Dan Maffei Still Trying to Comprehend His Own Defeat

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Perhaps you can imagine the big grin with which I’m writing this, as I think back on that day last October when Da Tech Guy and I arrived in New York’s 25th District and the front-page headline was: “Dan Maffei leads Anne Marie Buerkle by 12 points in new poll.”

That would be former Democratic congressman Dan Maffei, who ended up losing by 567 votes to Republican Ann Marie Buerkle, and who the Politico reports is still trying to figure out how he lost:

As victims of the House Democratic election massacre speak out about what caused their ouster last November, they are pointing their fingers squarely at a Washington duo: Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama.
Then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) moved their party’s agenda too far left during the past Congress. And then they failed to help rescue the party’s mostly supportive lawmakers, two defeated first-termers who have joined Washington-based think tanks said Tuesday.
“Moderates and independents who leaned toward Obama didn’t come out because they saw a continuing polarization. Health reform was only supported by Democrats. So, the message from Washington was that Obama was getting his way,” said former Rep. Dan Maffei (D-N.Y.), who has become a senior fellow with Third Way, the centrist Democratic group.
Party leaders and liberal allies told him that he was too pessimistic last fall when he warned them that he was in danger of losing. Obama and Pelosi “couldn’t bring themselves to believe that it would be this bad,” said Maffei, who unsuccessfully sought a late campaign stop by Obama. “Low turnout was why I lost. My opponent [Republican Ann Marie Buerkle] was seen as fringe and voters didn’t think she could win.”

Look, if Dan Maffei wants to make excuses and scapegoat other people for his own failures, I suppose I ought to just laugh and move on. However, Maffei is actually kind of close to being right about what Obama and Pelosi did wrong. And the weird thing is, Democrats had plenty of warning . . . from me. Continue reading NY-25 Flashback: Dan Maffei Still Trying to Comprehend His Own Defeat →

The Nyquil Worked

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Just to update y’all on the illness I announced Wednesday: I took the NyQuil about 1 p.m. and by 3 p.m. was asleep. I woke up about 11 p.m. and took another dose of NyQuil. Some time Thursday afternoon, I woke up long enough to do one brief post, but was still feeling very woozy, so I went back to bed.

When I got up this morning, I said to my wife, “Well, I got a good night’s sleep.” She said: “No, you got a good two days’ sleep.”

One of the commenters said:

NyQuil, or, as it is soon to be known, “all of the state-of-the-art medical care you can afford under ObamaCare.”

Hey, not that it’s all bad. Another commenter recommended this Dennis Leary riff on NyQuil (foul language warning):

So the good news is, I’m not dead yet. Still not 100% however. My head is still stuffy, but the coughing and sneezing have abated significantly. Then again, I’m only on my third cup of coffee this morning. Thanks for all the kind expressions of sympathy, and especially thanks to the tip-jar hitters Joel in Indiana, Robert in Colorado, and Mark in Minnesota.

This Is Probably Not the Onset of an Incurable Terminal Illness, But …

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. . . you never know. By the time you read this, I might be pushing up the daisies, shuffling off this mortal coil, pining for the fjords. My plan, however, is to be deep into the merciful bliss of a Nyquil-induced sleep.

So let’s hope it is only a late-winter head cold that has put me in such desperate need of the sniffling, sneezing, coughing, aching, stuffy head, fever, so-I-can rest medicine.

While I am probably not yet dead, then, I’m still not likely to be doing much blogging for the next several hours.

But for all you know, my wife and six kids are even now mourning my recent passing, so you should probably hit the tip jar just in case.

Cough cough. Sniff sniff.

Good-night . . .

‘Wrist Slaps for Everyone’

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That’s Allahpundit’s prognosis for the outcome of the “investigation” of University of Wisconsin doctors writing bogus excuses for protesters in Madison:

This involves a few individuals out of the nearly 1,300 physicians at UW Health.
These UW Health physicians were acting on their own and without the knowledge or approval of UW Health. These charges are very serious and in response, University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health and University of Wisconsin Medical Foundation, the UW Health entities that employ the physicians, have immediately launched an investigation of the reported behavior.
The investigation will identify which UW Health physicians were involved and whether their behavior constituted violations of medical ethics or University of Wisconsin and UW Health policies and work rules.

The situation in Madison illustrates what happens when “medical ethics” meets “social justice”:

Although this might seem an outrageous breach of professional ethics, it is actually entirely consistent with the new brand of “progressive” medical ethics currently taught to medical students. . . .
In 2002, the American College of Physicians proposed a charter in which the three guiding ethical principles for physicians would be: patient welfare, patient autonomy, and “social justice.” In 2007, the AMA ITME (American Medical Association Initiative to Transform Medical Education) reported on the importance of training medical students to be better advocates for “social justice,” and proposed changes in the medical school admissions criteria and curriculum to address this perceived inadequacy.

And let’s face it: Once doctors are taught that abortion is a “right,” any traditional concept of “medical ethics” becomes invalid. Whence did such value-judgments (e.g., that the “right” to abortion trumps the physician’s interest in preserving life, or that the “right” of protesting budget cuts justifies a bogus medical excuse) arrive in our institutions of higher learning? How did these ideas entrench themselves so deeply in academia? Continue reading ‘Wrist Slaps for Everyone’ →

In Case You Didn’t Notice, ObamaCare Is Both Unconstitutional and Un-American

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This falls under the category of “Not Exactly News,” although it’s good to have a federal judge say so:

A second federal judge ruled on Monday that it was unconstitutional for Congress to enact a health care law that requires Americans to obtain commercial insurance, evening the score at two-to-two in the lower courts as conflicting opinions begin their path to the Supreme Court.
Unlike a Virginia judge in December, Judge Roger Vinson of Federal District Court in Pensacola, Fla., concluded that the insurance requirement was so essential to the workings of the Affordable Care Act that its unconstitutionality required that the entire Obama health care law be invalidated.
“The Act, like a defectively designed watch, needs to be redesigned and reconstructed by the watchmaker,” Judge Vinson wrote.

Liberals are whining about like you’d expect, while conservatives are chuckling at Judge Vinson’s cleverness:

“I note that in 2008, then-Senator Obama supported a health care reform proposal that did not include an individual mandate because he was at that time strongly opposed to the idea, stating that ‘if a mandate was the solution, we can try that to solve homelessness by mandating everybody to buy a house,’” Judge Vinson wrote in a footnote toward the end of the 78-page ruling Monday.

Bwaaahahahaha! Dave Weigel detects a bit of Tea Party sentiment in this part of Judge Vinson’s ruling:

It is difficult to imagine that a nation which began, at least in part, as the result of opposition to a British mandate giving the East India Company a monopoly and imposing a nominal tax on all tea sold in America would have set out to create a government with the power to force people to buy tea in the first place.

Bwaaahahahaha! Chew on that one, lefties!

(Via Memeorandum.)

Health Care and the ‘N-Word’

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Last week, when I did a post about efforts to promote state nullification of ObamaCare, my friend Ali Akbar joked on Twitter that I was using the “n-word,” but now apparently nullification is the latest rage:

BOISE, Idaho — Republican lawmakers in nearly a dozen states are reaching into the dusty annals of American history to fight President Obama’s health care overhaul.
They are introducing measures that hinge on “nullification,” Thomas Jefferson’s late 18th-century doctrine that purported to give states the ultimate say in constitutional matters.
GOP lawmakers introduced such a measure Wednesday in the Idaho House, and Alabama, Kansas, Maine, Missouri, Montana, Oregon, Nebraska, Texas and Wyoming are also talking about the idea. . . .

You can read the whole thing. Professor Thomas Woods’s recent book Nullification has helped promote this trend, but the Associated Press didn’t find him worth quoting, instead relying on anti-nullification sources who derogate the authority of states to defend the liberty of their citizens. Certainly the revival of interest in this doctrine — first promulgated by Jefferson and Madison in the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions — is a testimony to the depth of opposition to ObamaCare.

UPDATE: Via Red State Eclectic, here’s video of Professor Woods discussing the recent controversy in Idaho:

Watch this mild-mannered scholar and try to convince yourself that he’s a radical extremist. His Web site is TomWoods.com.