Gutfeld Explains Roberts' ObamaCare Switcheroo

The Five's Greg Gutfeld succinctly analyzes the John Roberts epic fail:

Thinking About That Supreme Court ObamaCare Decision Sure is Taxing

It was bad enough that the Miami Heat won the NBA championship, and now the bureaucratic monstrosity known as ObamaCare is the law of the land. Could anything be more depressing or disillusioning or disheartening?

We haven't blogged about it up until know because we kept hoping that there would be a follow-up announcement from the Supreme Court to the effect that "hey, we were just messing with you, America...of course ObamaCare is unconstitutional and null and void." But it is not to be.

Although ruling that the law imposing socialized medicine on the U.S.was unconstitutional under the Commerce Clause, Chief Justice Roberts inexplicably upheld the law by a 5-4 vote based on Congress' taxing powers in the decision released on Thursday morning.

Up until the Arizona immigration law decision, Roberts was in general doing a fine job on the court, but here he let American down in a massive way.

Regardless of all the hype, despite the Obama administration's empty promises, virtually everyone's insurance premiums will go up along with their taxes. And, government-run healthcare means government-rationed healthcare, which leads to, yes, death panels.

ObamaCare Supreme Court Prediction

Prediction time--Blogger Ben Hart thinks that Justice Ginsberg inadvertently spilled the beans, or the broccoli, that the high court has thrown out the individual mandate in ObamaCare, a.k.a. the absurdly named Affordable Care Act:

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg did not mean to, but she appears to have said that the Supreme Court has, at a minimum, ruled that the individual mandate in ObamaCare is unconstitutional.

As reported by POLITICO, the liberal Justice told the American Constitutional Society on Friday, June 15 that the one remaining ObamaCare question the Court must decide is is whether the whole law must fall if the individual mandate is unconstitutional — “or may the mandate be chopped, like a head of broccoli, from the rest of it?”

But they would not need to decide this question if they had already ruled that the individual mandate passes Constitutional muster.

This suggests, at a minimum, that the individual mandate is gone.  But it may well be that the court has ruled that the entire ObamaCare law is, therefore, null and void because there is no severability clause...

The High Court's decision, regardlesss of how it goes, is expected to be released next week.

In the meantime, if you want to stay healthy, eat your broccoli.

Added: Per Intrade, there is almost an 80% chance that the individual mandate gets ruled unconstitutional.

Liberals Were For Judicial Activism Before They Were Against It

After ObamaCare fared poorly in last week's Supreme Court hearing, the sanctimonious left-wing media echo chamber is campaigning to intimidate the Supreme Court into going along with the unconstitutional, one-size-fits-all individual mandate.

(Separately, while no one knows how the Court will rule, some liberals are putting out the pathetic nonsense that the individual mandate's demise would help Obama's reelection.)

The left is even sounding a lot like Newt Gingrich, astutely observes The Wall Street Journal:

After last week's Supreme Court argument on ObamaCare, the political left seems to be suffering a nervous breakdown...The High Court's very "legitimacy" will be in question, as one editorial put it—a view repeated across the liberal commentariat...

Overturn any part of the law, the Justices are being told, and your reputations will be trashed. The invitations from Harvard and other precincts of the liberal establishment will dry up. And, by the way, you'll show you hate sick people—as if the Court's job is to determine health-care policy.

This is the left's echo of Newt Gingrich's threat earlier in the primary season to haul judges before Congress when it dislikes their rulings. Remember the political outrage over that one?

No doubt the Justices will ignore this transparent attempt at political intimidation, but someone should defend them against the claim that overturning the law would be "judicial activism." It's more accurate to say that failing to overturn the mandate would be dodging their duty to uphold core constitutional principles.

Gingrich took a lot of flak from both sides when he floated the idea of compelling judges by subpoena to explain some of their off-the-wall decisions. But what's wrong with that? Shouldn't judges be accountable--at least to the extent of public testimony?

To some degree, we have the same question about sports officials. Why can't a coach or player criticize a referee or umpire's call without getting hit with hefty fines? After all, there is no shortage of incompetent, outcome--effecting officiating in the pro leagues.It's the officiating, not the comments, that go to the heart of the integrity of the game.

What's more, why do sports broadcasters--including outspoken former players--rush to to pronounce every action by an official as a "good call." Do these broadcasters sign a blood oath of some sort to alibi for the "zebras"?

CNN: ObamaCare Train Wreck is Now a Plane Wreck

Following Day 3 of the U.S. Supreme Court hearing on ObamaCare, CNN's liberal--er, legal--analyst Jeffery Toobin once again says that the individual mandate is doomed.




 

Obama Was Against the Individual Mandate Before He Was For it

Remember all the hope-and-change malarkey from the 2008 campaign? Exhibit A: the health reform individual mandate:



In this video, the libertarians at Reason TV provide three additional bullet points for opposing socialized medicine:



 

It's ObamCare's Birthday--And You Can Cry If You Want To

                 photo credit: Pink Sherbet Photography via photopin cc

What if you gave a birthday party and no one came?

Even this grandstanding White House avoided any "celebration" of the two-year anniversary of the perversely called Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. ObamaCare.

Affordable? The Congressional Budget Office now finds the Obama health bill will cost a staggering $1.76 trillion (not $940 billion--which has hideous enough--according to the agency's earlier estimate) over 10 years.

Politico claims it knows why the public overwhelmingly opposes the left's version of health reform:

At the two-year mark Friday, nearly everything that Democrats believed about the politics of health care has turned out to be false. And the cost of those miscalculations has been huge. They have haunted Obama’s presidency, soured business as usual at the Capitol and upended the conventional wisdom peddled by political strategists, who have rarely been so wrong about something so big.

Are you still wondering what is ObamaCare?

National Review's Yuval Levin expounds on ObamCare's unhappy birthday that goes beyond merely the imposition of the individual mandate:

This law is horrendously bad health-care policy, it rips at the fabric of our constitutional order and our economic order, it makes a joke of any notion of limited government, and it involves a faith in centralized expert management that is utterly disconnected from the realities of modern life. It is the culmination of the liberal welfare state in every respect, and it was enacted just as the failures of that welfare state were becoming most plainly and painfully apparent. It stands to exacerbate and accelerate all of those failures, and so to make the crisis our country faces far more urgent and grave...

What’s wrong with Obamacare begins with the basic vision of government and of American life that underlies it, and is evident in every provision, every new unrestrained regulatory power, every new agency and subagency, every assault on individual liberty, basic economics, and simple common sense in the law. Very little of it bears much relation (or could really, given the nature of our health-care system) to anything any state has done.

Levin's article also cites a law school professor who claims that "Millions of people (e.g., those who make 401% of the poverty line – $43,000 for a single person) will be forced to pay up to $18,000 a year for health insurance without any tax credits or cost-reduction payments."

If this is accurate, affordable care is going to make a lot of people sick.

The U.S. Supreme Court hears oral arguments on the constitutionality of the one-size-fits-all individual mandate next week.

San Antonio Express-News columnist Jonathan Gurwitz sums it up well: "Our health-care system is deeply in need of reform. Obamacare is a cure, however, that is far worse than the disease. Stopping this exercise in constitutional malpractice now rests with the Supreme Court."

Birth Control Mandate is Just the Beginning

You could be a stone-cold atheist or a fervent pro-choice secularist with low opinion of organized religion and still be outraged about the Obama administration's latest effort to trample on religious liberty guaranteed by the First Amendment. Now comes reports that the administration may revamp its birth control mandate policy after the uproar.

In an excellent editorial Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal warns Americans to get used to such  ObamaCare dictates that will be imposed by U.S. Department of Health and Human Services bureaucrats:

The country is being exposed to the raw political control that is the core of the Obama health-care plan, and Americans are seeing clearly for the first time how this will violate pluralism and liberty....

Practicing this kind of compulsion is routine and noncontroversial within [HHS Secretary] Sebelius's ministry. That may explain why her staff didn't notice that the birth-control rule abridges the First Amendment's protections for religious freedom. Then again, maybe HHS thought the public had become inured to such edicts, which have arrived every few weeks since the Affordable Care Act passed...

HS tried to sell it as a compromise when it was announced, and in any case HHS would revive this coercion whenever it is politically convenient some time in Mr. Obama's second term. Religious liberty won't be protected from the entitlement state until ObamaCare is repealed.

 The Journal also notes that "The Catholic left was one of ObamaCare's great enablers."

Here is Next Media Animation's take on the controversy:



Regardless of your opinion of sometimes erratic Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann, the former GOP presidential candidate, she was right on target when she said that government control of healthcare is the crown jewel of socialism.

Added: Heritage Foundation video "Religious Liberty: Obamacare's First Casualty."

Washington Bureaucrats Coming After Your Health Supplements

[Image Credit: Ragesoss]

Imagine going to your local health food store or supermarket and finding the shelves normally containing your favorite vitamin and nutritional supplements completely bare.

There is still time to sign an online petition opposing the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's draconian supplement regulations that threatens access to dietary supplements. It wouldn't hurt to contact your member of Congress too.

As Citizens for Health explains...

[The FDA] is attempting to drastically change existing law by saying that finished product manufacturers must make a submission for every product that contains a [New Dietary Ingredient--NID] or whenever a formula is changed, if an NDI is present. If this guidance is not withdrawn and its misinterpretation of law is backed by the FDA's own policy, review and enforcement powers, it would cause major disruption in the dietary supplement market; force a significant number of products off the shelves; and result in revenue losses of over a billion dollars and the unemployment of over 100,000 Americans. Neither American consumers nor the dietary supplement industry should stand for this unconscionable attempt by the FDA to, via various NDI-related side doors, effectively re-write [the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994], maim the health-food industry and drastically reduce consumer choice.

While supplements by themselves aren't always a complete panacea (and some products are hyped up or lack quality ingredients), FDA bureaucrats who routinely allow toxic pharmaceutical drugs into the marketplace seem hell-bent on getting their hooks into the supplement industry. Supplements can and do form one part of an overall healthy lifestyle.

If Obamacare is not repealed, and rationing and death panels become the norm (as has occurred everywhere where socialized medicine has been tried), health freedom and taking charge of our own health with more natural approaches will become even more important.

As one of the comments on the Citizens for Health website indicates: "No one has the right to tell us what supplements and vitamins we can have. That isn't protecting us, it's restraint of trade and is big pharma's way of growing even more powerful and corrupt."

Have you noticed how the same lapdog "pro choice" mainstream news media that seems to accept virtually every job- and freedom-killing Obama administration initiative at face value also regularly helps to demonize generally safe supplements at the behest of Washington bureaucrats and "Big Pharma"? Along these lines, responding to a recent widely publicized American Medical Association study of questionable methodology that sought to discredit vitamins, Mike Adams of NaturalNews.com wrote in part:

Caught yet again, the mainstream media has been exposed pulling off a juvenile, simplistic hoax that attempts to scare people away from good nutrition. To accomplish this hoax, they took a poorly-constructed "scientific" study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine which was itself based on erroneous conclusions...and then blatantly misreported what the study data actually showed.

Finally: A Democrat Who Supports Voter ID

What's more bogus in contemporary politics--made-up stories about Tea Party transgressions or the delusional reasons that the Democrats and the ACLU types use to justify their opposition to reasonable requirements for showing a photo ID before voting?

Former Congressman Artur Davis, a Democrat who unsuccessfully ran for Alabama governor, no longer buys into the left-wing mythology (which is just a smokescreen for voter fraud) about the latter according to this opinion piece in a Montgomery newspaper:

I've changed my mind on voter ID laws -- I think Alabama did the right thing in passing one -- and I wish I had gotten it right when I was in political office.

When I was a congressman, I took the path of least resistance on this subject for an African American politician. Without any evidence to back it up, I lapsed into the rhetoric of various partisans and activists who contend that requiring photo identification to vote is a suppression tactic aimed at thwarting black voter participation.

The truth is that the most aggressive contemporary voter suppression in the African American community, at least in Alabama, is the wholesale manufacture of ballots, at the polls and absentee, in parts of the Black Belt.

Voting the names of the dead, and the nonexistent, and the too-mentally-impaired to function, cancels out the votes of citizens who are exercising their rights -- that's suppression by any light. If you doubt it exists, I don't; I've heard the peddlers of these ballots brag about it, I've been asked to provide the funds for it, and I am confident it has changed at least a few close local election results.

To his further credit, Davis apparently was the only black Democrat to vote against Obamacare.

Fail: Long-Term Obamacare

CLASS dismissed.

When analysts who weren't blinded by ideology warned that the long-term care provision of Obamacare--which is called the Community Living Assistance Services (CLASS) Act--was fiscally unsustainable, they were just steamrolled in the mad rush to get the dreadful bill passed. A Democrat senator even called it a Bernie Madoff-style "Ponzi scheme" (terminology that later got Rick Perry in hot water in connection with Social Security), yet voted for it anyway.

But it turns out the the administration is abandoning the program:

The Obama administration cut a major planned benefit from the 2010 health-care law on Friday, announcing that a program to offer Americans insurance for long-term care was simply unworkable.

Although the program had been dogged from the start by doubts about its feasibility, its elimination marks the first time the administration has backed away from a key piece of President Obama’s signature legislative achievement.

Byron York of the Washington Examiner explains:

Democrats structured the program to collect premiums for years before beginning to pay out benefits -- thus, it appeared to reduce the deficit when it would in fact greatly increase the deficit once it began making payments. As a voluntary program, it would become acutely unworkable if, as expected, only those in need of long term care signed up for it.

At National Review Online, Yuval Levin points out that "the the administration’s own [Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services] actuary said it would never work."

Levin adds that this is just one provision of the overall law that must be replaced by market-based insurance reforms:

This confirmation that Obamacare cannot in fact defy the laws of mathematics and accounting should serve as a warning regarding the implementation of the broader law, most of which would begin in 2014 if it is not repealed by then. The other major provisions of the statute are also grossly ill-designed. If it is permitted to take effect in full, the law will cause premiums to rise rapidly in the individual market and create major dislocation in the employer market, driving people into vastly overregulated exchanges that would push premiums higher still, and then initiate a program of subsidies whose only real answer to the mounting costs of coverage will be to pay them with public dollars and so inflate them further. It aims to spend a trillion dollars on subsidies to large insurance companies and the expansion of an unreformed Medicaid system, to micromanage the insurance industry in ways likely to make it even less efficient, to cut Medicare benefits without using the money to shore up the program or reduce the deficit, and to raise taxes on employment, investment, and medical research. CBO does not expect it to make a real dent in the inflation of health-care costs or to avert the fiscal implosion of Medicare. Instead, it will double down on price controls and centralized administration and make a real reform of our system much more difficult.

Again, can anyone explain why any rational lawmaker operating in good faith could have voted for this bureaucratic monstrosity?

HotAir.com elaborates that the Democrats knew all along that the CLASS Act was a financial disaster but "no one on the Democratic side was willing to halt it before the bill passed because their fiction about 'bending the cost curve' was too precious to ObamaCare salesmanship."

Surprise: Sarah Palin was Correct about Obamacare Death Panels

Conventional, western medicine tends to rely too much on expensive surgery and pharmaceutical drugs. With that said, in a free society no government bureaucrat should ever interfere with the relationship between doctor and patient, which is the likely outcome of government-run healthcare. Private insurance companies are hard enough to deal with, aren't they?

With that in mind, remember how Sarah Palin was ridiculed for raising the possibility of “death panels” in connection with Obamacare despite that fact that rationing is the likely outcome of socialized medicine.

But as the mainstream media has reported last week, the former Alaska governor has essentially been vindicated:

The National Academy of Sciences said Thursday that the federal government should explicitly consider cost as a factor in deciding what health benefits must be provided by insurance plans under President Obama’s health care overhaul, and it said the cost of any new benefits should be “offset by savings” elsewhere in the health care system.

Moreover, it said, in defining “essential health benefits,” the government should try to guarantee that the average premium would not exceed benchmarks that would be set by the secretary of health and human services. [New York Times]

---

An advisory panel of experts on Thursday recommended that the Obama administration emphasize affordability over breadth of coverage when it comes to implementing a key insurance provision of the 2010 health-care law.

Obama officials charged with stipulating what “essential benefits” many health plans will have to cover should make it a priority to keep premiums reasonable, even if that means allowing plans to be less comprehensive, counseled the committee of the National Academy of Science’s Institute of Medicine (IOM). [Washington Post]

Socialized medicine is in effect in the U.K. in the form of the failing, near-bankrupt National Health Service. Readers of the British press know that the equivalent of death panels have already been implemented there. This is what we have to look forward to if the Supreme Court and/or Congress allows Obamacare to fully become implemented.

Added: British physician Lesley Kirkpatrick describes in the Daily Mail the lengths to which she had to fight through the NHS bureaucracy to obtain treatment options after she herself was diagnosed with cancer.

I’d worked in the NHS all my life — and yes, I felt guilty. But being a patient made me see things differently. I felt alone, uncared for, and forced to make things happen myself....

I should be dead, but here I am still running 40 miles a week. and it’s all because I fought every step of the way. But I’m struck by the thought — what happens to patients who don’t have my medical training and determination?

NHS rationing is hurting the patients who need it, and the wrong areas are being cut. We have management and ethnicity surveys, while patients are denied proper scanning and fast responses.

And according to the London Telegraph, "The number of patients who waited longer than the recommended 18 weeks for NHS hospital treatment has risen by almost 50 per cent over the past year."

Obamacare Headed to Supreme Court Sooner Rather than Later

In what could be a risky political and legal strategy, the Obama administration has decided against requesting an en banc hearing at the Eleventh Circuit that would have reconsidered a ruling that earlier declared healthcare reform, so called, unconstitutional. This is a departure from the delaying tactics that the administration previously employed.

The constitutionality of the 2010 health care law could be determined by the Supreme Court this term, with a decision coming next summer in the thick of the 2012 presidential campaign. The Justice Department said Monday that it had decided not to ask the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Atlanta to take up the case. A three-member panel of the court decided 2-1 last month that Congress overstepped its authority in passing the Affordable Care Act, which requires virtually all Americans to obtain health insurance.

The vast majority of the American people oppose socialized medicine in the guise of Obamacare. The legal machinery often moves slowly, but a High Court decision (which will probably go 5-4 either way) that upholds Obamacare before the 2012 election could bring out even more voters opposed to the one-size-fits-all mandate. It's also hard to see how a loss at the Court would help the president's reelection prospects either.

Last week, in declaring the law unconstitutional, U.S. District Judge Christopher Connor of Pennsylvania (a Bush appointee) determined that Congress exceeded its authority under the Commerce Clause in enacting Obamacare. "Conner concluded that Congress cannot compel individual citizens to buy health insurance as a condition of citizenship. He reasoned that the authority to regulate interstate commerce does not list the ability to order a lifetime financial commitment to buy health insurance." Recently, a three-judge panel at the Fourth Circuit (three of whom were Democrats, two appointed by Obama) dismissed an Obamacare challenge for technical reasons, but without ruling on the merits of the case.

Regardless of how the Supreme Court resolves the conflicting decisions, Obamacare has already failed in its stated mission to bring down costs as Investors Business Daily reports:

Until now, many of the fears about ObamaCare have been theoretical. But this year's 9% spike in premiums is concrete evidence of the substantial harm it's already doing to our health care system.As soon as the Kaiser Family Foundation's annual report on insurance premiums was released, ObamaCare defenders dismissed its most troubling finding: Insurance premiums for family coverage shot up an average $1,482 this year.

As far as the effect on the upcoming general election, Prof. Jacobson of Legal Insurrection echoes (but much more eloquently) our feelings stated above:

If the Supreme Court finds the mandate to be unconstitutional, it will deflate Obama’s presidency. In one fell swoop, the entirety of Obama’s agenda will come crashing down. It will be a political and personal humiliation.

If the Supreme Court upholds the mandate, Obama will be able to crow a little, but such a decision will leave the majority of people who hate the law with but one alternative: Throw Obama and Senate Democrats out in November 2012.

A pro-Obamacare ruling prior to the election will motivate the Republican base like nothing else, and will bring the independents along. If you thought the summer of 2009 was hot, just wait until the summer of 2012 if the only way for the nation to get out from under Obamacare is at the ballot box in November.

Atlanta Appeals Court Finds Obamacare Unconstitutional

Another setback for socialized medicine:

The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday ruled that the health care reform law’s requirement that nearly all Americans buy insurance is unconstitutional, a striking blow to the legislation that increases the odds the Supreme Court will choose to review the law.

The suit was brought by 26 states — nearly all led by Republican governors and attorneys general — and the National Federation of Independent Business. The Department of Justice is expected to appeal.

The 2-1 ruling marks the first time a judge appointed by a Democrat has voted to strike down the mandate. Judge Frank Hull, who was nominated by former President Bill Clinton, joined Chief Judge Joel Dubina, who was appointed by George H.W. Bush, to strike down the mandate.

Since the original legislation has no severability clause (i.e., that would allow some parts of it to go forward but not others), the Supreme Court will ultimately have to decide whether the law can indeed stand without the individual mandate.

One practical issue apart from the constitutional questions (that is sometimes lost in the shuffle) is that the individual mandate would be one-size-fits-all (effectively prohibiting high deductible or cafeteria plans), thereby resulting in increased premiums for everyone.

Separately, the administration lost another round in federal court in connection with oil exploration rules:

A judge on Friday threw out Obama administration rules that sought to slow down expedited environmental review of oil and gas drilling on federal land. U.S. District Judge Nancy Freudenthal ruled in favor of a petroleum industry group, the Western Energy Alliance, in its lawsuit against the federal government, including Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. The ruling reinstates Bush-era expedited oil and gas drilling under provisions called categorical exclusions on federal lands nationwide, Freudenthal said.

Did Obama "Dream" Of His Mother's Health Insurance Woes?

Well, it wouldn't be the first time that proponents of socialized medicine made up insurance horror stories that didn't hold up under scrutiny.

Was it an urban myth that President Obama's other was denied cancer treatment coverage? Politico suggests that this might be the case:

President Barack Obama’s mother had no major problems with her health insurance coverage at the time she was dying of ovarian cancer in 1995, a new book about her life claims, raising questions about the accuracy of a story that Obama often told on the campaign trail in 2008.

New York Times reporter Janny Scott’s “A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother” says that Ann Dunham’s health insurance covered most of the costs of her medical treatment, leaving her to pay the deductible and any uncovered expenses. Those came to several hundred dollars a month.

On her blog, Michelle Malkin described it as the "Expanding Catalogue of Obamacare Fables":

Personal anecdotes of dying family members battling evil insurance execs deflect attention from the cost, constitutionality and liberty-curtailing consequences of the law. The president’s Dunham sham-ecdote is just the latest entry in an ever-expanding catalogue of Obamacare fables...

Since Obamacare passed, the amount workers pay in health care premiums has soared an average of nearly 14 percent; thousands of businesses have sought waivers in search of relief from the law’s onerous mandates; medical device makers have slashed jobs and research; and the private individual health insurance market is in critical condition.

Again, in general dealing with an insurance company can be enough to make you sick even on a good day, but does anyone really believe that a featherbedding government bureaucracy will be an improvement?

Socialized Medicine: It is What it Is

As the entire right-of-center blogosphere has repeatedly warned, government intervention into the healthcare insurance system (with all its faults) will only make things far worse. Just look at the decrepit nature of the British national health service. The Washington Post notes that while Obama repeatedly insisted that Americans who like their current coverage would be able to keep it, this is apparently untrue even under the administrations own estimates. Investor's Business Daily explains:

Internal administration documents reveal that up to 51% of employers may have to relinquish their current health care coverage because of ObamaCare.

Small firms will be even likelier to lose existing plans.

The "midrange estimate is that 66% of small employer plans and 45% of large employer plans will relinquish their grandfathered status by the end of 2013," according to the document.

In the worst-case scenario, 69% of employers — 80% of smaller firms — would lose that status, exposing them to far more provisions under the new health law. ..

Draft copies of the document were reportedly leaked to House Republicans during the week and began circulating Friday morning. Rep. Bill Posey, R-Fla., posted it on his Web site Friday afternoon...

In a statement, Posey said the document showed that the arguments in favor of ObamaCare were a "bait and switch."

The White House plans to spend $125 million on a propaganda campaign to convince properly skeptical Americans about the alleged benefits of heathcare reform, so called, "amid growing signs Democrats are failing to get political traction on the issue."

Florida Doctor Sends Patients A Message

Whether the attorneys' general lawsuit challenging the healthcare "reform" individual mandate is successful or not under the Commerce Clause, one physician has already engaged in what the law sometimes call's "self help":

A doctor who considers the national health-care overhaul to be bad medicine for the country posted a sign on his office door telling patients who voted for President Barack Obama to seek care "elsewhere."

"I'm not turning anybody away — that would be unethical," Dr. Jack Cassell, 56, a Mount Dora [Florida] urologist and a registered Republican opposed to the health plan, told the Orlando Sentinel on Thursday. "But if they read the sign and turn the other way, so be it."

The legal challenge about the recently enacted healthcare legislation will probably result in a 5-4 decision either way at the Supreme Court. Again, it just reaffirms how David Souter was such an incredibly poor choice for the high court. All these 5-4 decisions would likely be 6-3 had even a garden-variety moderate to conservative been appointed instead of Souter, and who retired early to make matters even worse.

Scott Brown: Just Say No To Political Chicanery

U.S. Senator Scott Brown disappointed many of his followers in voting for the so-called jobs bill with its $15 billion price tag, but this CNBC clip shows that the new senator is not wavering in his opposition to socialized medicine:



Please visit the PoliticalLore.com blog for our three related posts on this subject:
All Politics is Vocal?
After the Special Election: Lighten Up!
Don't Be Happy--Worry!

Here are some highlights of Brown's January 19th victory speech in which he set forth his commitments to the voters: