Lawsuit Could Derail Obamacare in Non-Participating States

What our “conservative” politicians failed to accomplish, others are trying to obtain in the courts.  Individuals, think tanks, small businesses, and states are trying to stop this disaster that is Obamacare.  Oklahoma is the better known case, but there are others.  Carolina Journal reported the following:

CEI in early May filed the lawsuit now known as Halbig et al. v. Sebelius et al. The plaintiffs are individuals from Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia, a medical practice in Missouri, a restaurant group in Texas, and a community bank in Kansas. 

None of those states has a state-run health insurance exchange. 

The suit says Congress wrote the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, as Obamacare is formally known, with carrots for states that run their own exchanges — start-up grants and premium-assistance subsidies in the form of tax credit refunds to reduce insurance purchase costs for low- and moderate-income individuals.

Congress intended those carrots to be matched with sticks — no start-up grants, no subsidies, and a federally operated exchange — for those states that did not set up their own exchanges, according to the plaintiffs’ suit. 

“Notwithstanding express statutory language limiting premium-assistance subsidies to exchanges established by states, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has promulgated a regulation … purporting to authorize subsidies even in states with only federally established exchanges,” the suit states. 

That “squarely contravenes the express text of the ACA, ignoring the clear limitations that Congress imposed on the availability of the federal subsidies,” the suit states.

The IRS regulation at issue, handed down in May 2012, stated that taxes can be collected for policies purchased on the federal exchanges. Critics of the lawsuits have suggested the apparent discrepancy between the law and the IRS rule was little more than a “drafting error,” and the clear intent of the law was to allow subsidies through state and federal exchanges.

I don’t have much faith in the federal courts.  After all, it was Chief Justice Roberts who rewrote the law and foisted Obamacare onto the country.  And even if the courts do rule in favor of the plaintiffs, who is to say that the Obama regime will follow the law.  If the past is any indication they won’t.

Source:  http://www.carolinajournal.com/exclusives/display_exclusive.html?id=10583

Charlotte Observer Sings the Praises of Chief Justice Roberts

Last Thursdays ruling by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court – and I do mean HIS ruling – on Obamacare has the cockroaches dancing and singing his praises. Here is an example by the Charlotte Observer:

Conservatives were dismayed by the Supreme Court’s ruling on health care reform Thursday. But in fact, Chief Justice John Roberts, the swing vote, was the court’s only member to act in truly conservative fashion.

He did this in at least two ways: He followed the conservative call for justices to demonstrate judicial restraint, looking for ways to let laws passed by democratically elected representatives stand if possible. At the same time, he delivered a blow to liberals’ broadening of the Constitution’s Commerce Clause over the years, taking away one of the primary vehicles for the federal government’s expansion.

How in the hell is that judicial restraint? The man rewrote the law! This is the worst form of judicial activism committed by a Supreme Court justice in recent memory. And the Disturber calls this act a truly conservative fashion? Do they even know what conservative means? If Roberts were acting like a conservative, he would have voted with the other “conservative” justices and struck down the individual mandate as unconstitutional. Instead, he commanded from on high that it was a tax. That is anything but conservative.

The Disturber wasn’t through with its myopic distortion of Obamacare.

Stymied by the nation’s highest court, Mitt Romney and Republican congressional leaders reiterated Thursday that repealing the Affordable Care Act will be their first order of business. So Americans have a clear choice in November: Whether to give Republicans control of the House, the Senate and the Oval Office and thus ensure the death of health care reform.

That’s a question that forces voters to decide whether they want to go back to a system that leaves 50 million people uninsured in the world’s richest country. A system that denies insurance coverage to – or even drops coverage from – the very people who need it most. A system that enriches insurance and pharmaceutical companies at the expense of regular folks. A system in which if you lose your job, you lose your insurance, and could be on the road to bankruptcy. A system that allows insurance companies to limit how much they will pay in benefits over a customer’s lifetime

And let’s not forget this little gem:

Critics plan to build support for repeal by labeling the Affordable Care Act as a giant tax increase on the American people. In fact, it will only be an increase for the 4 million or so people (out of 311 million) who can afford health insurance but choose to risk not having it. And they are merely being forced to pay into a system that they will eventually need, rather than foisting their costs on to the rest of us. (Which is the rationale, incidentally, that prompted conservatives to create and for years support the idea of an individual mandate before President Obama adopted it as a compromise.)

What the statist at the Charlotte Observer really wants is social insurance – not health insurance. They want to control and redistribute the wealth. The editors at this paper will distort the truth in order to achieve their goals. They would have everyone believe that there are no safety nets or charitable programs available for the very sick and indigent. I wonder if the Disturber even bothered to ask themselves who make up the uninsured. The Cato Institute reported the following:




What is revealing is that four states make up 40% of the uninsured: Texas, Florida, California, and New York. I wonder why that is. Can anyone guess? Hmmm…

Another Disturber lie is the insurance and pharmaceutical industries were enriching themselves at the expense of the populace, and that Obamacare would put a stop to that. I would say the opposite is true. These industries were given huge incentives, one of them being the individual mandate. How is that not “profiting” off the system?


And let’s not forget the lie that the insured pay for the uninsured. Are we to believe that the uninsured don’t get a bill? Please…

Watch the Cato Institute video to the very end. They’ll despoil the health care myth spread by dishonest papers like the Charlotte Observer.

Source: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2012/06/28/3349198/supreme-court-makes-right-call.html#storylink=cpy

http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/27/6/w533.full

http://www.cato.org/event.php?eventid=6366/

Mark Levin Addresses the Affliction called SCOTUS Potomac Fever

Mark Levin addresses the disease that seems to afflict only republican appointed Supreme Court justices. SCOTUS Potomac Fever is a contagion that turns conservative judges into limp wristed liberals.

No one seems to know the origination of this debilitating mental illness. But many speculate that the D.C. cocktail party circuit has something to do with it. Maybe a government funded study is warranted.

OMG! Could it be spreading?

Chief Justice John Roberts Re-Writes Obamacare Law in Order to Pass It

Chief Justice John Roberts and his liberal confederates used extra-constitutional means to push through Obamacare. Where the law was purported and passed as a mandate, the majority on the Supreme Court rewrote as a tax.

Barack Obama and the democrats were adamant that the individual mandate was not a tax. The Constitution specifically states that all bills of revenue must originate in the House of Representatives; not the Supreme Court.



This is the worst form of judicial activism we’ve witnessed in a long time. The dissenting justices are correct in their summation:

“[T]o say that the Individual Mandate merely imposes a tax is not to interpret the statute but to rewrite it,” the dissenters — Justices Scalia, Thomas, Alito, and Kennedy — wrote, adding that “legislators must weigh the need for the tax against the terrible price they might pay at their next election.” He then suggested that Congress intentionally avoided passing the mandate as a tax in an effort to avoid that election disaster. “We have no doubt that Congress knew precisely what it was doing when it rejected an earlier version of this legislation that imposed a tax instead of a requirement-with-penalty.”

The Chief Justice acted like a super-legislator. I’m sure the D.C. cocktail circuit will sing his praises.

Source: http://washingtonexaminer.com/dissenters-obamacare-ruling-is-a-rewrite-of-the-law/article/2500869

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/304266/mandate-tax-john-hood