Posted on 04/23/2010 11:58:03 AM PDT by tutstar
By Carol Gentry and Jim Saunders 4/23/2010 © Health News Florida Only hours after the Florida House and Senate voted to “opt out” of the new federal health law, the top U.S. health official said Thursday night that will not be permitted.
Without mentioning any particular state or going into detail, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said that state and local officials can vent all they want about a so-called “federal takeover” of health care. But they cannot deny their citizens access to its benefits or requirements, she told the Association of Health Care Journalists. Our eAlert subscribers read it first! “They may want to opt out, but they don’t get to opt out all of their citizens who want and need health care,” Sebelius said.
Florida has an estimated 4 million uninsured, most of whom will be covered when the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) takes full effect in 2014.
At least 30 states have passed state constitutional amendment legislation similar to that approved by the Florida Legislature, according to theNational Conference of State Legislatures.
Sebelius said the backlash against the ACA has been ginned up by “misinformation,” much of it deliberate. Thus HHS will be setting up an Internet site to answer frequent questions and a toll-free helpline, similar to that operated for Medicare beneficiaries. HHS staff members present at the conference said they hope to have the Internet site up by July 1 and the help desk soon after.
The opt-out measure passed in the House and Senate on Thursday, a proposed amendment to the Florida Constitution, will go before voters in the November election. The proposal says, in part, that Floridians may not be forced by law to "participate in any health-care system.''
Dividing along almost strict party lines, the House passed the proposal 74-42, and the Senate followed in a 26-11 vote. Republican supporters say the issue is a matter of freedom and preventing encroachment by the federal government.
"The fact that we have to have this debate in the United States of America is troubling and bizarre,'' said Rep. Mike Horner, R-Kissimmee.
Democrats said the proposal's supporters have spent more time trying to prevent expansion of coverage than they have on solving the state's health-care problems.
"That is the folly of this moment, and this constitutional amendment is misguided in the extreme,'' said Sen. Dan Gelber, D-Miami Beach.
The measure is primarily aimed at part of the health-reform law that will eventually require people to buy health insurance or face financial penalties --- a concept known as the "individual mandate.'' Republicans in Tallahassee and other state capitals have launched numerous efforts to allow people to opt out of the requirement since the Democrat-controlled Congress passed it last month.
At the same time, Republican Attorney General Bill McCollum has launched a separate legal battle challenging the federal law. That lawsuit is pending.
Democrats have repeatedly argued that the legislative attempts to allow Floridians to opt out of the federal law would violate the so-called "supremacy clause'' of the U.S. Constitution. That clause generally gives precedence to federal law over state law when conflicts occur.
"We should not step on the United States Constitution, and that's what you are doing now,'' Davie Democrat Martin Kiar said during the House debate today.
But supporters dispute that the supremacy clause bars the state from allowing people to avoid the individual mandate. "The supremacy clause does not say the feds control the states,'' Melbourne Republican Ritch Workman said.
Supporters also say that even if the proposal ultimately is found to violate the supremacy clause, it would remain in place to protect Floridians from future state health-care requirements. As an example, it would prevent Florida from approving coverage requirements similar to those in Massachusetts.
More broadly, however, Palm Harbor Republican Peter Nehr said it is the Legislature's duty to "step up and reassert the rights of Floridians.''
14th amendment rears its ugly head again.
Wanna bet?
And, when Real Americans re-take the House, the Senate and the White House, there won’t be!
2013 is going to be a most interesting year, and the months leading to the 2012 election will be almost as interesting!
Is it 2012 yet?
There WILL be people in Florida who petition the feds for equal protection under the 14th amendment.
Then, what do the feds do? Send in the guns?
Virginia's not asking for their permission.
“Thus HHS will be setting up an Internet site to answer frequent questions “
Will it cost $18 Million like the “porkulus” web site?
>>There shouldn’t even be a Secretary of Health and Human Services,nor an EPA,nor a Labor Department,nor a Department of Education,nor a long list of federal usurpation of state,local, and private authority.<<
Don’t forget the Department of No. As in, No nuclear, no oil, no drilling, no coal, no wind, no solar, no geotherm, etc. I wonder what those people do for 7:59 of the day after they’ve said no.
Agreed! That RINO Nixon started a lot of those usurpations around 1970.
The states ratified the Constitution that created the federal entity with the inherent understanding that if the other party, the created entity, was in breach of that contract that they’d be free to consider their “union” to be nullified.
This recourse was removed by force during a failed war for independence in 1861.
Someone correct me if I am wrong here, but those 4 million uninsured Floridians will NOT be covered when the ACA takes effect in 2014; they will be REQUIRED to PURCHASE coverage.
Mandating that everyone have something under penalty of the law is NOT the same as providing it for them.
JOHN MAY LIVES
Since when is she the United States?
When a government has ceased to protect the lives, liberty and property of the people, from whom its legitimate powers are derived, and for the advancement of whose happiness it was instituted, and so far from being a guarantee for the enjoyment of those inestimable and inalienable rights, becomes an instrument in the hands of evil rulers for their oppression.
When the Federal Republican Constitution of their country, which they have sworn to support, no longer has a substantial existence, and the whole nature of their government has been forcibly changed, without their consent, from a restricted federative republic, composed of sovereign states, to a consolidated central military despotism, in which every interest is disregarded but that of the [Obamacorps] army and the [Global Warming] priesthood, both the eternal enemies of civil liberty, the everready minions of power, and the usual instruments of tyrants.
When, long after the spirit of the constitution has departed, moderation is at length so far lost by those in power, that even the semblance of freedom is removed, and the forms themselves of the constitution discontinued, and so far from their petitions and remonstrances being regarded, the agents who bear them are thrown into dungeons, and mercenary armies sent forth to force a new government upon them at the point of the bayonet.
http://www.lsjunction.com/docs/tdoi.htm
There is no identifiable reference to an entity resembling the modern United States in any of the end times prophecies.
Unfunded mandates to beyond broke states.
Things are speedily headed for some major showowns.
Hussein 0bama is in for some major humbling. The evil bastard.
That which is not permitted is forbidden............
The very heart of American Federalism consists in the ongoing observation of, and reverence for, Constitutional limits binding upon the Federal power THIS is what the American Civil War established, and it carved this concept in blood deep into our National heart. But that was more than 150 years ago, and most now living have no grasp of that, anymore.
The States are bound, under this Federalism, to exert themselves in just such cases as this to bestir The Supreme Court to check excesses of the Federal power. The observation that the practical implications of a given Law will carry the exercise of Federal power and authority beyond its Constitutional confines is the signal to the States to take action to resist, and to excite The Court to uphold the limits of the enumerated powers, and bring the Federal power to heel. That is the mechanism under operation, here.
State legal actions whereby they seek to insist that the Federal power remain within Constitutional limits do not in any way constitute said States being “free to nullify federal laws.” That being the case, secession is not a “logical extension” of the States’ present activities. The move to secession does not arise from a single transgression of Constitutional limits by the Federal power, but from repeated, injurious transgressions in which the Federal power remains steadfastly unrepentant in a posture of ritual abuse beyond the bounds of the enumerated powers, and wherein The Supreme Court has repeatedly failed to check such injuries by adequate exercise of its own constitutional powers.
In this present case, not only are the several States NEITHER attempting to “deny access” to a Federal Law, NOR moving to secede, they are seeking to PROTECT citizens from being savaged by a Federal Law that illegitimately, and illegally (yet again) expands the Federal power beyond all Constitutional limits under the fraudulent veneer of “rights”.
This is decidedly NOT the Federalism for which we sacrificed precious blood and treasure at Gettysburg, Antietam, Manassas, and elsewhere. Those honored dead gave their last and best for a Federal power that would remain CONFINED within its Constitutional limits. We have no such thing; the Federal Government of the United States of America long ago tore asunder the Constitutional bonds designed to restrain it from raping, pillaging and plundering the lives of “We, The People, and The Supreme Court has abdicated its own authority at critical junctures.
Today, those shattered restraints are regularly scorned, if not simply ignored; the populace is generally ignorant of them, as they are of The Constitution, itself; and unless the States begin to vociferously assert otherwise in such cases as this one, there is little hope for any mitigation of increasing Federal excess short of an all-consuming, bloody Second Civil War.
That lop-eared Kenyan interloper and his kneepad-bedecked sycophants in Congress had best pray to God the States prevail in The Supreme Court, for of they do not — if the Court abdicates yet again — there WILL be RIVERS of blood, and it is only a self-blinded fool who can’t see it coming.
I fear for my country, and for my children.
You REALLY need to read the constitution, and the federalist papers. You would then see how ignorant of a statement this is!
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