“Tax to live” works as well. Frankly, it’s the kind of smugness to be expected from this White House that smuggles guns to narcoterrorist cartels to undermine the Second Amendment, leaves our ambassadors to die and blames it on the First Amendment, targets citizens with different opinions with the IRS, and targets reporters who aren’t quite being the perfect Obama-propagandists with wiretaps. Hence why the low road response comes first. They’ve earned it.
There were several really good tweets by a host of folks who find this insulting and demeaning, if not tyrannical:
Didn’t expect to do another Obamacare post so fast, but I just found out my car insurance went up. I’m with a very major insurance company, and in the many, many years I’ve been with them, they aren’t the type to raise rates arbitrarily. I called up and asked why my rates went up about $50.
The answer I got was that in my state, the company has assessed the new costs of Obamacare and started raising rates to compensate for those increased costs that Obamacare is causing. The increased health care costs as a result of Obamacare are now raising car insurance rates because those same car insurance companies also end up paying medical bills for those injured in car accidents.
The Independent Payment Advisory Board, or IPAB, is one of the lesser known features of “healthcare reform” tucked away in the thousands of pages of the “Stimulus Bill” from 2009 and the healthcare law passed in March 2010.
Just exactly what is IPAB and how does it affect your life and health, and your access to medical care? And how does IPAB fit with our Constitutional Republic and our guarantees to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” under the US Constitution?
IPAB is a panel of unelected, government-appointed bureaucrats set up under the guise of “efficiency” and “clinical effectiveness” to “recommend” cuts to Medicare services in order to “bend the cost curve downward.” That is government-speak for “spend less money on patient care.”
IPAB is a threat to your health, and your life, if you are the patient whose care is denied because of your age, your condition, and cost based on how many “quality” years you are expected to live.
IPAB is set up to function exactly like the rationing board of the National Health Service (NHS) in Britain, called National Institute of Clinical Excellence (NICE). The strong arm of NICE prevents NHS doctors from prescribing state-of-the-art drugs for breast, stomach, lung, and prostate cancer or diseases like multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, and many others.
IPAB is also charged with slowing the growth of payments to doctors and hospitals, reducing the rate of medication reimbursement under Medicare, and “reducing waste” in Medicare spending. “Waste,” however, is defined solely by bureaucrats, and may include medicine you actually need.
You never learn, do you? History teaches you nothing!
On the contrary, history teaches us a great deal! We had predecessors, Mr. Wordsworth, who had the beginnings of the right idea.
Hitler!
Yes, Hitler of course.
Stalin!
Stalin too. But their error was not one of excess, it was simply not going far enough! Too many undesirables were left around, and undesirables eventually form a core of resistance! Old people, for example, clutching to the past, and won’t accept the new. The sick, the maimed, and the deformed! They fasten onto the healthy body and damage it! So we eliminate them! And people like yourself – they can perform no useful function for the state – so we put an end to them.
- Mr. Romney Wordsworth and The Chancellor, Twilight Zone: The Obsolete Man
The president claimed that “both parties have worked together to reduce the deficit by more than $2.5 trillion.” But that’s only an estimate of deficit reduction through fiscal year 2022, and it would be lower if the White House used a different starting point.
The “estimate of deficit reduction” is like writing out a diet. You come up with a plan that says you’re only going to eat 2000 calories a day, you’re going to run 3 miles a day, lift weights for an hour, and do another hour of cardio. By the end of 2013, you should be ready to run in an iron man triathalon. Of course, when the day after you write that plan, you eat 4000 calories, waddle 30 yards to the fridge and back in a day, lift only food to your mouth, and do another hour of sleeping to rest from all your eating… you won’t find yourself at the end of the year ready to run an iron man triathanlon.
Obama touted the growth of 500,000 manufacturing jobs over the past three years, but there has been a net loss of 600,000 manufacturing jobs since he took office. The recent growth also has stalled since July 2012.
To continue with the working out analogy, Obama’s growth of jobs is like adding a half hour of running to your daily workout in the evening… after you take out an hour of running from your daily workout in the morning. You can say you’re running an extra half hour, because it is a different half hour, but you still have a loss.
He claimed that “we have doubled the distance our cars will go on a gallon of gas.” Actual mileage is improving, but Obama’s “doubled” claim refers to a desired miles-per-gallon average for model year 2025.
Ford and Toyota both make good cars. The Taurus with a V6 over 12 years was able to be improved by 4 mpg. The Camry with a 4-cylinder over 12 years was able to be improved by 4 mpg. The new demands by government are that they go up to 54.5 mpg. For the Taurus, that’s requiring an increase of 31.5 mpg – more than double. For the Camry, that’s requiring an increase of 26.5 mpg – almost double. And remember again, that’s average economy, so for every fun, desirable vehicle like the Ford Raptor, Toyota FJ, Jeep Wrangler, Ford Mustang, Dodge Challenger or any of the light trucks that are made that get in the teens to 20s for mpg, they’ll have to crank out some ridiculous number of vehicles that get above 55 mpg.
Keep in mind this is the Obama government that declared that we need to be running on biofuels that DO NOT EXIST. They can make mandates, and when the mandates can’t be met, they impose fines, or seize control. The objective is to fundamentally transform America, and it’s working. Auto manufacturers will have to either stop making cars people want, or they’ll have to make the ones the government lets them.
And government-made cars suck.
Obama said the Affordable Care Act “is helping to slow the growth of health care costs.” It may be helping, but the slower growth for health care spending began in 2009, before the law was enacted, and is due at least partly to the down economy.
There is nothing there that will “slow the growth of health care costs” under Obama policies unless you have a very fanciful vision of the future… just like the 54.5 mpg cars, magic biofuels, increasing jobs, and recovering economy.
Obamacare contains twenty new or higher taxes. Five of the taxes hit for the first time on January 1. In total, Americans face a net $1 trillion tax hike for the years 2013-2022, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
Just a couple examples:
The Obamacare “Haircut” for Medical Itemized Deductions: Currently, those Americans facing high medical expenses are allowed a deduction to the extent that those expenses exceed 7.5 percent of adjusted gross income (AGI). This tax increase imposes a threshold of 10 percent of AGI. By limiting this deduction, Obamacare widens the net of taxable income for the sickest Americans. This tax provision will most harm near retirees and those with modest incomes but high medical bills.
Seems to me every time government gives haircuts to citizens, things are going badly.
The Obamacare Medical Device Tax: Medical device manufacturers employ 409,000 people in 12,000 plants across the country. Obamacare imposes a new 2.3 percent excise tax on gross sales – even if the company does not earn a profit in a given year. In addition to killing small business jobs and impacting research and development budgets, this will increase the cost of your health care – making everything from pacemakers to artificial hips more expensive.
Bolded for emphasis.
That means if your company normally makes $100 million in sales, you owe $2.3 million in taxes. If you end up just breaking even, with no profit for your company after your expenses, salaries, and production costs for the year, you end up still owing $2.3 million in taxes.
Pretend you’re a household that makes $50,000 per year, and you already pay taxes, so you’re making about $40,000/year. After the year ends, with costs of housing, insurance, utilities, food, gas, medical bills and everything else, you end up straight up breaking even for the year. Then the government says “you owe another $1,150″, because that’s 2.3% of your gross income.
A few positive points to be made about Chief Justice Roberts opinion:
Official 2005 photo of Chief Justice John G. Roberts (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Concerning the Individual Mandate:
Given its expansive scope, it is no surprise that Congress has employed the commerce power in a wide variety of ways to address the pressing needs of the time. But Congress has never attempted to rely on that power to compel individuals not engaged in commerce to purchase an unwanted product…. The language of the Constitution reflects the natural understanding that the power to regulate assumes there is already something to be regulated…. As expansive as our cases construing the scope of the commerce power have been, they all have one thing in common: They uniformly describe the power as reaching “activity….”The individual mandate, however, does not regulate existing commercial activity. It instead compels individuals to become active in commerce by purchasing a product, on the ground that their failure to do so affects interstate commerce. Construing the Commerce Clause to permit Congress to regulate individuals precisely because they are doing nothing would open a new and potentially vast domain to congressional authority…. Allowing Congress to justify federal regulation by pointing to the effect of inaction on commerce would bring countless decisions an individual could potentially make within the scope of federal regulation, and—under the Government’s theory—empower Congress to make those decisions for him…. The proposition that Congress may dictate the conduct of an individual today because of prophesied future activity finds no support in our precedent.”
Indeed it would and I agree with the Chief Justice on this issue specifically. Congress does NOT need to be involved in any citizen’s decision to buy anything or for that matter to not buy anything. The above reasoning is sound and leads me to believe that the Chief Justice isn’t totally insane for upholding this monstrosity of a law.
Chief Justice Roberts now has this to say concerning the government’s argument that Obamacare is constitutional due to the application of the “necessary and proper clause:”
The Government next contends that Congress has the power under the Necessary and Proper Clause to enact the individual mandate because the mandate is an “integral part of a comprehensive scheme of economic regulation…. As our jurisprudence under the Necessary and Proper Clause has developed, we have been very deferential to Congress’s determination that a regulation is “necessary.” We have thus upheld laws that are “‘convenient, or useful’ or ‘conducive’ to the authority’s ‘beneficial exercise.’” But we have also carried out our responsibility to declare unconstitutional those laws that undermine the structure of government established by the Constitution…. Applying these principles, the individual mandate cannot be sustained under the Necessary and Proper Clause as an essential component of the insurance reforms. Each of our prior cases upholding laws under that Clause involved exercises of authority derivative of, and in service to, a granted power. The individual mandate, by contrast, vests Congress with the extraordinary ability to create the necessary predicate to the exercise of an enumerated power. This is in no way an authority that is “narrow in scope….” Rather, such a conception of the Necessary and Proper Clause would work a substantial expansion of federal authority. No longer would Congress be limited to regulating under the Commerce Clause those who by some preexisting activity bring themselves within the sphere of federal regulation. Instead, Congress could reach beyond the natural limit of its authority and draw within its regulatory scope those who otherwise would be outside of it. Even if the individual mandate is “necessary” to the Act’s insurance reforms, such an expansion of federal power is not a “proper” means for making those reforms effective.
What the Chief Justice is saying here again echoes his previous comments concerning the “commerce clause.” That if the government had its way and the court had gone with both the commerce clause and the necessary and proper clause as justifications for the constitutionality of Obamacare that, in short, the federal government could literally come in and regulate any and all decisions an individual can make in their lifetime which sounds just like the Life of Julia. I don’t want government deciding any life issues for me nor do I desire the “Cradle to grave ” help”from the federal government.
Now the Chief Justice handles the governments last defense of the individual mandate:
Because the Commerce Clause does not support the individual mandate, it is necessary to turn to the Government’s second argument: that the mandate may be upheld as within Congress’s enumerated power to “lay and collect Taxes.”
There it is, the word we have all been waiting for…. Taxes. Remember this:
The President himself rejects the notion that the “fee” that must be paid to the government is not a tax. Now back to Chief Justice Roberts:
The Government does not claim that the taxing power allows Congress to issue such a command. Instead, the Government asks us to read the mandate not as ordering individuals to buy insurance, but rather as imposing a tax on those who do not buy that product.”
Who is the government again? The President, the Congress, The Supreme Court. Which branch was responsible for defending Obamacare in front of the Supreme Court. The answer is the Presidency and last I checked Barack Hussein Obama was President, his own solicitor general from the Department of Justice defended the law. The President says via interview that the individual mandate is not a tax, but his solicitor general argues that it is? Which is it Mr. President? Did you lie to us? I am guessing yes.
Cheif Justice Robert goes on to say that it is ok to tax a person based on behavior. I do not think it is correct to tax a citizen based on his behavior (owning or not owning a commodity). The question should be asked now, “What else can the federal government tax?”
Well it’s official, the justices have lost their ever-loving minds. It is now considered, “Constitutional” (I am about to start using the term very loosely) for your Federal Government to tell you what you must purchase and how much of it you must purchase. 10th amendment be damned I guess. After today a citizen of these United States now has less liberty than they had yesterday.
I’d like to leave everyone with this quote:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness – that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men deriving their powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the RIGHT of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new government….”
ShortTimer
JBH
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