Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Liberalism: Do You Agree We've Had Enough of It? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sedohr Nod who wrote (110726)	8/16/2011 8:35:16 PM
From: TideGlider	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 224755

B ill was a hayseed and turned carpetbagger after hooking up with Hillary.

To: Sedohr Nod who wrote (110726)	8/16/2011 9:31:23 PM
From: Hope Praytochange	3 Recommendations Respond to of 224755

ObamaCare's Sleight Of Hand By BETSY MCCAUGHEY Posted 06:21 PM ET In the 304-page ruling it handed down last Friday, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals eviscerated a key provision of the Obama health law, ruling it unconstitutional. The court gutted the Obama lawyers' key rationale for making all Americans buy health insurance, calling their argument less than truthful, indeed a "convenient sleight of hand." The Obama lawyers claim that all Americans consume health care, so Congress can use its Commerce Clause power to compel everyone to pay for their care via insurance. Health care consumption is "universal" and "inevitable." No one is "inactive" or uninvolved in the health care market. Untrue, said Judges Frank Hull and Joel Dubina, the bipartisan team that struck down the law. The judges got it right. Half the population buys little or no health care, according to the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Yet the law would subject them to the same insurance mandate as someone who actually needs health care. It's like forcing everyone to buy flood insurance, regardless of where they live. The Obama lawyers also claim that the individual mandate is intended to prevent "free riders" who use health care without paying for it. That's a whopper, said the judges. Drawing on copious statistics, the judges showed that today's health-care free riders are largely illegal immigrants (who are exempt from the mandate) and low-income Americans (who will get coverage under the law's vast expansion of Medicaid). In other words, the mandatory insurance does not solve or even address the free-rider problem. The judges said that the true purpose of the law is to force healthy people to buy expensive health plans to subsidize insurance companies — which in turn are compelled to provide unlimited coverage to people with chronic illnesses and pre-existing conditions. In short, the law converts insurers into private tax collectors, collecting mandatory premiums from the healthy to pay for politically popular changes in the insurance laws. In the law "the Congress sought to mitigate" the costs of popular reforms "by compelling healthy Americans outside the insurance market to enter the private insurance market and buy insurers' product." Forcing people to enter the insurance market is different from regulating them once they are in there. Only the latter is constitutional. The factual issues raised for this first time in this ruling could be the silver bullet that kills the administration's commerce-clause argument and puts the Obama health law to a final rest.