You can’t make up how dumb these talking heads are.
Obamacare didn’t have any text permitting a Federal healthcare exchange (as opposed to states) – but it was their intent to do so. They just ran out of time.
Obamacare passed without a single Republican vote
Whoever could have imagined that there would still be so much political opposition to Obamacare?
Yesterday on NPR they had a Dem Congressman:
Republicans simply don’t want people to have health care
The smoking guns are here: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB20001424052702304297104580049582737794398?mg=reno64-wsj
Especially womens.
I think “They just ran out of Time” would make a good headline.
—-Years in the making, several thousand pages and —- they just ran out of time. Incredulous!!!
One of the most monumental changes ever proposed, and they just ran out of time.
I do not have the words for the magnitude of incompetence.
And don’t forget ‘you have to pass it to see what’s in it’ was applied to it…
And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to computer models or cults or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-science sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
An enlightening article in the WSJ this morning.
http://online.wsj.com/articles/kim-strassel-the-obamacare-irs-nexus-1406244677?cb=logged0.6666296806652099
The IRS warned the administration the ACA didn’t give it the authority to subsidize anyone in the federal exchange. The administration tells the IRS to ignore the law and dole out the subsidies. A few weeks later the IRS obliges.
Excerpt:
… Democrats needed those subsidies. The party had assumed that dangling subsidies before the states would induce them to set up exchanges. When dozens instead refused, the White House was faced with the prospect that citizens in 36 states—two-thirds of the country—would be exposed to the full cost of ObamaCare’s overpriced insurance. The backlash would have been horrific, potentially forcing Democrats to reopen the law, or even costing President Obama re-election. …
Yet in March 2011, Emily McMahon, the acting assistant secretary for tax policy at the Treasury Department (a political hire), saw a news article that noted a growing legal focus on the meaning of that text. She forwarded it to the working group, which in turn decided to elevate the issue—according to Congress’s report—to “senior IRS and Treasury officials.” The office of the IRS chief counsel—one of two positions appointed by the president—drafted a memo telling the group that it should read the text to mean that everyone, in every exchange, got subsidies. At some point between March 10 and March 15, 2011, the reference to “Exchanges established by the State” disappeared from the draft rule.
Emails viewed by congressional investigators nonetheless showed that Treasury and the IRS remained worried they were breaking the law. An email exchange between Treasury employees in the spring of 2011 expressed concern that they had no statutory authority to deem a federally run exchange the equivalent of a state-run exchange.
Yet rather than engage in a basic legal analysis—a core duty of an agency charged with tax laws—the IRS instead set about obtaining cover for its predetermined political goal. A March 27, 2011, email has IRS employees asking HHS political hires to cover the tax agency’s backside by issuing its own rule deeming HHS-run exchanges to be state-run exchanges. HHS did so in July 2011. One month later the IRS rushed out its own rule—providing subsidies for all….
…Administration officials will continue to use the IRS to try to improve its political fortunes. The subsidy shenanigans are merely one example. Add Democrats’ hijacking of the agency to target and silence political opponents. What you begin to see are the makings of a Washington agency—a body with the power to harass, to collect, to fine, to imprison—working on behalf of one political party. Richard Nixon, eat your heart out.
Reversing the argument. Obamacare has taken health INSURANCE (it does nothing for care) away from more than it has enabled to get it.
Recently I read that the PPACA subsidizes health care insurance by an average of 76%. There is simply no way for this to be sustained.
According to the latest CBO estimate, 10 year spending on ObamaCare subsidies and Medicaid expansion will cost $1.84 trillion. CBO also calculates that the bill raises a whopping $456 billion in new revenue to pay for all that.
The rest is coming out of the Medicare trust fund. The infamous $716 billion has ballooned to $1.4 trillion over the next decade.
The message has been loud and clear from the democrats for a long time: capitulate.
They are the ‘Borg’ and want to assimilate any and all opposition.
“Become one with us.”
“Now.’
.
The language in question appeared in any number of drafts, so it was always in there that way. The left wing nut blogoshere was arguing Wednesday that it was a ‘typo’. The government never raised that as an issue at trial, or on appeal, they knew full well the language was always the same in all the drafts.
My looking further at this says that there is no severability clause in the Act. So if this ever winds up in SCOTUS, John Roberts will have the opportunity to make up for his error in 2012 and throw the entire farce out as he should have in 2012.
It is not required that severability language be included in a bill. Removing the subsidy from the customers of federal exchanges doesn’t make the bill unworkable, just more expensive.
“My plan will necessarily make healthcare prices skyrocket”
Don’t you mean electricity prices?
I do get your point though.
Tony please put a sarc tag on posts like this for the “special” readers of this blog 😉
Don’t count on it. When Roberts deemed the penalty a tax, he should have been impeached on the spot. That item originated in the Senate, and as a tax is unconstitutional; all taxes originate in the House. But, when brought to their attention, Congress and the courts punted. Now, anybody can tax us. Ain’t it wunnerful?
I’m a bit rusty on civics, but impeachment of Justices is not possible. The way that branch is made a co-equal branch is that the legislative or executive branches can not interfere with it, other than in the nomination and consent. Hence the lifetime appointment so there’s no issue with having to come up for appointment again if there were set terms.
Also they have historically not taken up any issues of how the legislative branch passes bills, so when Reid gutted a completely unrelated bill that had been passed by the House and put Obamacare in it instead, they stayed out of that.
It is a tax, however, the ruling should have been that the law was invalid as the tax can not be used to do something Unconstitutional. So where tax deductions for home loan interest encourage something, there is no tax penalty for not owning a home. People can voluntarily not take the income tax deductions that they are entitled to, but can not voluntarily not pay the penalty.
I would argue that there could not be a tax on people who didn’t own a Bible, even though Congress is free to pass taxes, as Robert’s noted. It is the tax to force something Unconstitutional (mandating that people do something) that is the issue in my view. If there were a tax deduction or credit for having insurance, that would be fine to me. Then people could voluntarily do what they want.
Need to read the story of Samuel Chase, the only U.S. Supreme Court justice to have been impeached.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Chase
.
Here’s a video of one of the big architects of Obamacare saying it was their intention to not provide subsidies to states that didn’t set up their own exchanges. Of course they will now lie and say he wasn’t that important or he didn’t understand. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtnEmPXEpr0&t=31m38s
Unprompted, too. He wasn’t asked about whether or not subsidies were restricted to states. He was asked generally about the state exchanges, and he brought up this policy as a brilliant feature designed to coerce reluctant states to get on board.
It is an Unconstitutional bill rammed through both the House and Senate against the will of the people. It is designed to kill people who need to have Medical Care for any reason, along the lines of the VA. It is also a way to get a data base on all of the people in the country in order to control every single person and their every, itty-bitty last shred of freedom. Thanks Npr:Taxpayer funded Propaganda for the Starbucks and I phone crowd. Livin large in Falls Church.
Driving a Volt too ’cause science is settled.
They ran out of time? They were discussing this in Spring 2009. Obama spent the entire summer schmoozing every health care special interest in the back rooms of the White House. He got every single special interest on board, by protecting all of their profits.
The trial lawyers were on board, because Obama promised to keep tort reform out. The Rx companies were on board because Obama vowed that he would keep out any reforms to allow Medicare to directly negotiate Rx prices, and Rx re-importation out too. Even the health insurance companies that were supposedly the target of the law were on board, thanks to the individual mandate and promises to keep out any public option.
Then the Democrats spent the entire fall hashing out the details, while telling everyone that we had to wait to get the bill passed before we could see what was in it. They had time to put in special favors for the Louisiana Purchase, the Cornhusker Kickback, and new hospitals in the states of key Democrats.
After Scott Brown was elected, they had all the time in the world to slow down and work on a bipartisan reform plan that could get at least 1 Republican vote. Instead they rammed it through on a party line vote with Deem ‘N Pass in the House.
Then in the years afterward, they were out talking about how this policy that restricted subsidies to state exchanges was a great FEATURE of the bill that would coerce reluctant states to implement exchanges. They actually cited the federal government’s slow and inadequate progress on setting up the federal exchange as part of the same strategy to coerce states to set up exchanges.
By their own statements, the bungled rollout of the federal exchange is proof that this policy was intended as an important feature, not a ‘typo’.
FYI, Medicare *does* ‘negotiate’ prices. They tell suppliers what they’ll pay and under what circumstances. Medicare can retroactively deny payment *and* prosecute you for ‘filing a false claim’. Medicare *never* pays retail and neither does any ‘insurance’ company I know of. They pay their ‘negotiated’ rates, which are “This is what we’ll pay. Take it or leave it.’ and at least the ‘insurance’ companies do have to compete some, so the suppliers do get a bit of a better payment and usually faster than the Tricare/Medicare/Medicaid oligopoly.
True enough, there are ‘cost of living’ adjustments made to ‘account’ for inflation, but they never do. What suppliers do is mark up the ‘retail’ prices high enough to make sure that they when they do get ‘paid’, the cash flow is sufficient to make ends meet. Sometimes that doesn’t happen and suppliers go bankrupt. The bigger ones get bought, the smaller ones disappear.
Anyway, someone has to pay for R & D, if you want medical care to continue to improve. You can pay up front, or you can pay via your taxes, or you can pay via someone else’s taxes; but you are going to pay. I would not be surprised to find out that pharmaceutical R & D is among the most expensive to conduct, period.
It’s not dumb; it’s propaganda, plain and simple. Unfortunately, you and I pay for this 24/7 disinformation campaign.