Posted on 12/20/2009 6:39:26 AM PST by PJ-Comix
Can ObamaCare (if passed) subsequently be undone by legislation passed later? After all, it doesn't go into effect until 2014 although the public will be heavily taxed for it much earlier. The Prohibition Amendment was later undone by a later Amendment and this is legislation we are talking about.
I recently read that the WORST thing that could happen for the Democrats is to pass ObamaCare. This is sure to be an issue in the 2012 election. Could another president, along with a conservative congress, undo ObamaCare?
The Declaration of Independence is the legal document which explains the means by which legislation enacted by a destructive government is overturned.
As was pointed out on another thread, spending originates in the Congress. If you fail to fund a program each year the program dies.
Here is my latest post on Healthcare reform on RedCounty.com.
I hope that this is an eye-opener:
http://www.redcounty.com/healthcare-reform-reich-way/34934?taxonomy=29
Ben Nelson is still on the “fence” and was quoted as saying that “he is not of the belief that anything is better than nothing.” That is good news. But keep him honest by calling his office. The WH has denied, but rumors are abound, that if Ben Nelson does not shape up, that they will close a stragetic military base in NE. It’s Chicago Bribe Style Politics and he is probably already receiving schools of dead fish from Rahm Emmanuel. Here is the latest on that rumor from Townhall Blogger Meredith Jessup:
According to a Senate aide, the White House is now threatening to put Nebraska’s Offutt Air Force Base on the BRAC list if Nelson doesn’t fall into line.
Offutt Air Force Base employs some 10,000 military and federal employees in Southeastern Nebraska. As our source put it, this is a “naked effort by Rahm Emanuel and the White House to extort Nelson’s vote.” They are “threatening to close a base vital to national security for what?” asked the Senate staffer.
Indeed, Offutt is the headquarters for US Strategic Command, the successor to Strategic Air Command, and not by accident. STRATCOM was located in the middle of the country for strategic reasons. Its closure would be a massive blow to the economy of the state of Nebraska, but it would also be another example of this administration playing politics with our national security.
I’m hoping for the country’s sake that this report is false, but will keep you posted as new details emerge... As Glenn Beck noted on his morning radio program, if this report is true, there is much more at stake here than just health care.
Update: Sen. Nelson is denying the report; Weekly Standard is reporting their source is strong and is not backing down from the claim.
Update II: Local news is reporting that Senator Nelson has told the AP, “My vote is not for sale - period.” Both Nelson and the White House are saying the “rumor” is “completely false.” This local news story also claims the source of the rumor is conservative columnist Michelle Malkin—a claim that is false to my knowledge since the story originated from the Weekly Standard.
Update III: The Weekly Standard continues to stick by its source—and now apparently 2 more. Michael Goldfarb says not only is his original source in this story strong, but two others have come forward with information to confirm the story. Stay tuned...
It is hard to believe that this is true. I hope it is not.
However, we are winning the fight as the bill and the democratic party continues to fall apart. Republicans finally showed their GRIT yesterday by employing the LAW and parliamentary action by READING the Sanders amendment that would add a single payer system into the healthcare bill. Please keep in mind that Sanders is not only a liberal, but an admitted Socialist.
This is what we are up against folks, so if you have any time, call Senator Ben Nelson’s office Tel: 1-202-224-6551 Fax: 1-202-228-0012 and tell him that he will have your support, even from afar. And, if you have time, call Senator Coburn, 202-224-5754 and thank him for his action that ensure that the amendment was read. It was by this action, that the amendment died.
Now, we have just 2000 more pages to send to the graveyard.
Best,
Megan Barth
Irvine
President Palin (or whoever the conservative president will be) can start with tort reform. We’ll break it down as much as possible.
HOW OBAMACARE WILL HURT YOUNG PEOPLE
By DICK MORRIS & EILEEN MCGANN
Published on DickMorris.com on December 17, 2009
A detailed analysis of the Obama health care program now before the Senate indicates that it will force big premium increases for all families especially for those under 30 years of age.
The study, by the consulting firm of Oliver Wyman, concludes that premiums for individuals will rise by $1,576 and $3,341 for families by under the bill. Young people will be hit the hardest. The study predicted that premiums for new health insurance policies purchased by the youngest third of the population would rise by 35% under the bill.
These increases will stem from the bill’s provisions that bar insurance companies from raising rates on sick people and from excluding people based on pre-existing conditions. Both of these mandates will mean higher costs for the younger and healthier population. This bill is, in effect, a tax on the young.
Nor will subsidies do much to mitigate the impact. To get a subsidy under the bill you have to earn less than about $80,000 a year (combined household income) and have spent between 2 and 10 percent of your income on premiums.
So a couple making a combined income of $40,000 would have to pay about 5% of their income: $2,000 before they could get subsidies. Those making $60,000 would have to pay about 8% of their income — $4800 - before they could get a subsidy. And those making $80,000 would have to chip in 10% of their income — $8,000 - before they would get a subsidy.
These are hefty bills for young families to bear.
So most won’t do it. The fine for failing to have health insurance is only $750. So most young people will just pay the fine and be done with it. When they get sick, they’ll get covered and the insurance company can’t charge them a higher premium than it would have charged when they were healthy. And it can’t turn them away.
So this bill is not a measure for full national health insurance coverage. At best, it’s a bill that will insure you when you are sick and make the rest of us pay the bill. And, in the meantime, you’ll have to chip in $750 a year for the privilege.
Employers, too, will find it much cheaper to pay the $750 per employee than to buy insurance.
Ironically, there is a good chance that this bill will actually increase the number of uninsured. Its ban on letting insurers raise rates on sick people will force premiums so high that many people will drop their insurance. After all, when they get sick, they can and will easily get their insurance back.
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I have no doubts it will become a very popular and acceptable challenge to a federal intrusion upon our lifestyle, people will without any organization resist paying for this, many will meekly accept it as something too overwhelming for them to challenge.
Yes it can be starved, yes we can find ways to avoid it.
It will be Obamas Waterloo, I cannot say what the time frame will be but I would say that the next 30 days will create some very interesting backlash soon. Secession talks will obviously escalate, rumors of detention camps will spark furor and expanded distrust of public officials, any enforcement will further conflate the firestorm into unspeakable furies across the nation.
HEALTH BILL HAS NO CLOTHES
By DICK MORRIS
Published on TheHill.com on December 15, 2009
Due to pressure from enraged Americans, the most pernicious features of Obama’s healthcare legislation have, for now at least, been stripped from his bill. This is no time for complacency, however, since the liberals are trying to push back and get the provisions back in.
As the bill now stands, it doesn’t have any teeth.
* Without the public option, the government does not have the financial clout to enforce the decisions of the new secretary of Health about the protocols of care to be followed. The left had hoped that the federal public option insurance company would put the private firms out of business and leave a single governmental payer in place. This single payer could slice reimbursements to providers at will and bring them into line offering low costs, long waiting lists and rationed medical care. But with no expansion of Medicare to those over 55 and no federal public option, the secretary of Health won’t have the power to force bad medical care down the throats of the American people.
* Relatively few new people will get health insurance. The costs of coverage are too high, the subsidies too shallow and the punitive fines too low to force people to buy policies they don’t want and think they don’t need. What young, childless couple is going to pay 8 to 12 percent of their income for Insurance rather than just pay the $1,000 fine for not having coverage? Oddly, this bill is really just a tax on the uninsured.
* Without the feared flood of new patients into the system, the rationing that threatened may not be as bad as it once seemed. With only a few newly insured people, the long waiting lists and shortages of medical personnel Massachusetts is experiencing under Romney-Care may not happen nationally.
* The Medicare cuts are to be proposed by a special commission in the executive branch akin to the federal commission that decides which military bases to shutter. But then they will have to be approved each year by Congress. A former secretary of Health and Human Services under a Republican president told me recently he expects the cuts will be vetoed by Congress each year and never really take effect. He says that the savings won’t materialize and the additional costs of Obama’s program will just be financed through even more deficit spending. He cites, for example, Congress’s refusal for each of the past five years to approve the automatic 6 percent cut in physicians’ fees.
What’s left is a bill that expands Medicaid to cover more of the poor and working poor. It requires that all states cover everyone making 150 percent or less of the poverty level. This will end the practice of many states of restricting Medicaid, in effect, to the elderly in nursing homes.
Arkansas, for example, only covers up to 17 percent of the poverty level (about $4,000 of income). Under the new law, anyone in the state whose income is less than about $27,000 will have to be covered. This provision will, of course, mean much higher state taxes throughout the South and in Texas, California, Pennsylvania and Florida, states with low Medicaid thresholds.
The rest of the bill is essentially a consumer-protection statute that bars insurers from denying coverage to anyone and stops them from charging more for those who are sick. Both the expansion of Medicaid and this reform of insurance-company practices could have been achieved in considerably less than the 2,000 pages of dead trees this bill consumed.
There are still bad parts of the legislation:
* Medicare Advantage, an important program for 10 million elderly, will be gutted and replaced by Medigap insurance, which is more limited in coverage, higher in cost and more profitable to the AARP.
* Medical devices — from pacemakers to automated wheelchairs — will still be taxed, and sick people will be forced to pay higher taxes and deduct fewer of their medical costs.
* Reimbursements under Medicare are likely to continue to drop, forcing more and more providers to refuse to treat patients under the program.
Obama is left with the symbol of a victory but not much substance. He will still sign the bill — if it ever passes — with great fanfare, but its substance will be painfully thin.
We haven’t dodged the bullet yet. The left is still to be heard from. But the momentum against the bill and the focus on its worst provisions is paying off. Keep up the pressure!
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Ok, but I keep hearing that we cannot do this because it has never been done before. With that logic, our country’s founders should not have started the U.S.
We must fight . . . because we have to. I still think it’s a HUGE mistake (on their part) to tax us without getting anything back. People will feel the pain. It IS our opportunity. It really is.
Can it be reversed??? Name the last piece of major legislation that has ever been reversed.
There is you answer...
30 million now, 60 million the next time.
The truth is no one in government knows how many people are here illegally. It’s like trying to count how many gallons of water are filling your basement while the worst flash flood in history is happening.
A 2nd American Revolution. That’s the only way to overthrow this healthcare debacle and, I might add, to save the nation from a complete socialist takeover.
I think we have a window where we can act to undo this, I just don’t know how much time we have.
I hope it doesn’t come to this. However, when they start to arrest people in the name of any crisis, it will be time to take careful aim and do away with the instigators of tyranny!
This is about the survival of the USA and our constitution! Be alert.
When they start, we finish.
Long live the constitution!
Death to any who would destroy it!
It shouldn't cost small business anything. We're in a recession, people want to keep their jobs, owners aren't worried about keeping good employees because there are thousands of them out there looking for work.
Healthcare is a benefit that can go away any time business decides to let it go. That might happen right after this bill is passed. That's what these moron unions and politicians don't understand. They smugly sit there and think they're taken care of because of their gold plated health plans, but when the insurance companies go away, their only hope of insurance is the government program.
Oh, I should add to that if government “requires” busidness to pay the premiums, business only has to lower the amount of money they pay for a position. As a matter of fact, if they were smart, they would show the amount they would have been paid without the insurance on EVERY SINGLE CHECK
For starters, Republicans can gain control of the House and/or Senate and prevent funding.
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