Fix Health Care Policy

A Legal Victory on the Road to Repeal

On October 23, 2009, a reporter asked Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA): “Madam Speaker, where specifically does the Constitution grant Congress the authority to enact an individual health insurance mandate?” Speaker Pelosi shook her head dismissing the question: “Are you serious? Are you serious?” Pressed for a more substantive response later, Pelosi’s press spokesman admonished the reporter: “You can put this on the record. That is not a serious question. That is not a serious question.”

Yesterday, Roger Vinson, senior federal judge of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Florida, found it to be a very serious question indeed. Judge Vinson characterized the Obama Justice Department’s motion to dismiss the constitutional challenge to Obamacare brought by 16 state attorneys general, four governors, two private citizens and the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) as “not even a close call.” Addressing the Obama administration’s claim that Congress had the authority to enact Obamacare pursuant to the Commerce Clause, Judge Vinson wrote:

“The individual mandate applies across the board. People have no choice and there is no way to avoid it. Those who fall under the individual mandate either comply with it, or they are penalized. It is not based on an activity that they make the choice to undertake. Rather, it is based solely on citizenship and on being alive. As the nonpartisan CBO concluded sixteen years ago (when the individual mandate was considered, but not pursued during the 1994 national healthcare reform efforts): ‘A mandate requiring all individuals to purchase health insurance would be an unprecedented form of federal action. The government has never required people to buy any good or service as a condition of lawful residence in the United States.’”

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Tags: Commerce Clause, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Individual Mandate, Intolerable Act, repeal Obamacare, states' lawsuit

House Breaks Vacation Plans to Spend More Money

One week ago, Members of the House of Representatives stopped spending taxpayer money and began a six-week vacation. Unfortunately, they came back five weeks early.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has summoned Members back to Washington to debate an extension of Medicaid and education bailouts. The House will vote today to extend these bailouts enacted in the stimulus bill last year. If passed, the bill—which overcame a filibuster in the Senate last week—will then go to the President for his signature. (more…)

Tags: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Medicaid bailout, New York, Texas

Oh What a Tangled Web Obamacare Weaves!

Want to see what Obamacare really looks like? Take a gander at this dazzlingly complex chart mapping out America’s new health care system (the chart was developed by the House Joint Economic Committee).

It’s no wonder that Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) in March said of Obamacare, “But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of controversy.” Well, the health care monstrosity passed and we’re left with a confusing fog of new government agencies, regulations and mandates. (more…)

Tags: health care chart, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, ObamaCare

Battle Over Health Care Reform Has Only Just Begun

Before passage of the president’s health care legislation in March, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) infamously exclaimed that “we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.” It has now been months since the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act became law, and as Heritage expert Stuart Butler explains in a recent paper, the consequences of the bill remain to be determined. Moreover, the ambiguity of the legislation and the amount of decision-making left to administrators means that several controversial questions surrounding the legislation remain unanswered.

Butler highlights the following areas as those in which Americans may find that critical future decisions could drastically change the direction of the health care overhaul: (more…)

Tags: employer-sponsored insurance, health care debate, health exchanges, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, ObamaCare, public option, repeal, start over

The Road to Repeal is Well Under Way

“We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) told us just weeks before Congress passed President Barack Obama’s health care plan. Well, the nation’s post-passage Obamacare education continued yesterday when the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) confirmed that the federal government will have to spend an additional $115 billion implementing the law, bringing the total estimated cost to over $1 trillion. The estimate had been requested before passage of the bill by Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA), but the CBO was too overwhelmed with the Democrats’ other constant revisions to the law to get back to Lewis before the final vote.

This is by far not the only nasty little surprise that has come back to bite Obamacare after passage. Shortly after it became law, U.S. employers began reporting hundreds of millions if dollars in losses thanks to tax changes in the bill. AT&T and Verizon alone pegged their Obamacare tax losses at around $1 billion each. At first, Democrats in Congress were outraged by the announcements and threatened to hold hearings persecuting these companies. But then the Democrats not only found out the companies were obligated by law to report their Obamacare related losses, but that the losses were a signal these companies might have to dump their employees’ and retirees’ health care coverage all together.

Then the Obama administration’s own Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) released its final cost projections for Obamacare, finding that, contrary to White House claims, the legislation will increase national health care spending by $311 billion over the next decade. The CMS report also revealed that: 1) 18 million Americans will pay $33 billion in penalties for failing to comply with Obamacare’s individual mandate and still receive no health care; 2) U.S. employers will pay $87 billion in employer mandate penalties; 3) 14 million Americans will lose their current employer-based health coverage; 4) 7.4 million seniors will lose their current Medicare Advantage benefits; 5) 15% of all Medicare providers will be made unprofitable, thus “jeopardizing access to care for beneficiaries.”

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Tags: "tangible benefits", $1 trillion, higher insurance premiums, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Medicare Advantage cuts, ObamaCare, President Barack Obama, taxes

Obamacare Spells Disaster for Americans

Now that Obamacare passed, the Left is calling it a truly historic achievement, chalking it up as a victory for health care reformers everywhere. With the enactment of the House-Senate reconciliation bill, the so-called “fix” to the Senate bill, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) remarked that the bill did “something very important for the American people, very significant to their daily lives.” Well, Congressional liberals are correct about one thing. It’s historic. It is an unprecedented takeover of Americans’ health care now equal to one-sixth of the entire US economy. It is historic for its partisan backroom deals and controversial parliamentary tactics. And it is historic for its apparent disregard for the strongly held opinion of the majority of the American people. But it will long be remembered for its catastrophic side effects- in record spending and its disruption- on the lives of millions of Americans.

Recent research by Heritage’s Kathryn Nix looks at some of the major consequences of Obamacare. The paper outlines the ten ways in which liberals’ health care agenda will be a disaster for Americans. They include: (more…)

Tags: Caterpillar Inc., entitlements, federal deficit, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, John Deere & Co., ObamaCare, reconciliation bill

We Have to Increase Medicare Spending Before We Can Cut It

From day one we have been highly skeptical of Congress’ ability to cut Medicare as necessitated to fund Obamacare’s $2.5 trillion in new spending. The top down cuts-by-committee-of-experts approach is far too susceptible to typical Washington deal making. Now we learn that in order to secure votes in the final days before passage, the House has already proved Obamacare will only increase, not decrease, Medicare spending. Kaiser Health News reports:

“A last-minute deal to win votes for the health care overhaul underscores the political dilemma for Congress as it tries to reduce health care costs.” (more…)

Tags: $2.5 trillion new spending, access issues, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, manager's amendment, Medicare cuts, ObamaCare

Reconciliation Bill Tosses New York a Fiscal Hand Grenade

The pending health care legislation would cover the uninsured mainly by dumping most of them into the federal/state Medicaid program. Not surprisingly, many states have objected to the additional costs that such a Medicaid expansion would impose on their taxpayers. Indeed, that was the motivation behind the infamous “Cornhusker Kickback” in the Senate bill, under which the Federal government would pick up all of Nebraska’s Medicaid expansion costs in perpetuity.

In response to complaints from governors and state lawmakers, coupled with public outrage over the “Cornhusker Kickback,” section 1201 of Speaker Pelosi’s reconciliation bill amends the Senate bill to have the federal government cover all of the extra Medicaid benefit costs for all states in the first three years (2014-2016) with the federal share then declining so that from 2020 onward the Federal government would pay 90 percent of the costs with state taxpayers covering the remaining 10 percent. (more…)

Tags: Cornhusker Kickback, House reconciliation bill, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Medicaid, Senate Health Bill

Forget Doctors’ Support for the Health Care Bill

Earlier this month, President Obama held a press conference at the White House with white coated physicians in his push for a government overhaul of the nation’s health care system. Though the presence of physicians in support of the Democrats’ plans for health care “reform” created the illusion that the medical profession is in strong support of the legislation, it remained just that—an illusion. Recent reports show that the health care legislation does not have the broad support among physicians.

A poll by The Medicus Firm posted in the New England Journal of Medicine‘s CareerCenter shows that, on virtually every count, physicians understand and don’t like the congressional legislation. 62.7 percent of physicians feel that health reform is needed but should be implemented in a more targeted, gradual way; just the opposite of the sweeping overhaul embodied in the massive congressional legislation. Indeed, 46.3 percent of primary care physicians feel that “the passing of health reform will either force them out of medicine or make them want to leave medicine.” (more…)

Tags: doctors, health choices commissioner, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, ObamaCare, President's proposal

Obamacare Slaughter Rule is without Precedent

Yesterday, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) endorsed the rumored Slaughter Rule to send the Senate passed Obamacare bill to the President without a direct up-or-down vote in the House. Don’t believe those on the left who are trying to argue that because Republicans used deeming resolutions when they were in power, it is ok for Democrats to use a similar tactic to pass legislation without a vote.

Under this procedure, the House would vote on a rule setting up debate. The House would then skip a vote on the Senate passed version of Obamacare and move directly to a vote on reconciliation amendments to that Senate passed bill. If reconciliation passes, then the House will deem the Senate bill to have passed the House without a direct vote. As Michael McConnell wrote yesterday in the Wall Street Journal, this is yet another reason Obamacare would be unconstitutional.

Pelosi explained the need for this procedure yesterday: “I like it, because people don’t have to vote on the Senate bill.” Many Democrats could vote for the rule and claim that they are against the Senate bill.

A Wall Street Journal Op Ed today, points out that this procedure is unprecedented because never before has Congress passed a comprehensive reform bill using this tactic: (more…)

Tags: deeming, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, ObamaCare, Senate Health Bill, skip actual vote, Slaughter Rule