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.
Day 2 of oral arguments in the ObamaCare case at the U.S. Supreme Court was a "train wreck" for the Obama administration according to CNN liberal, er, legal, analyst Jeffrey Toobin:
If Toobin is correct that the the court will declare the law unconstitutional, will the Justices merely block the individual mandate or throw out the entire 2,000+ page ObamaCare monstrosity ridiculously known as the Affordable Care Act given that the legislation has no severability clause?
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."
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.
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.
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."
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."
In what could be a risky political and legal strategy, the Obama administration has decided against requesting an en banchearing 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.
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?
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."
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.
Whether you supported or opposed the Bush administration (and many of us on the right disagreed with a number of his policies as well as his curious inability not to respond to irresponsible accusations), the left spent eight years vilifying and caricaturing President Bush and his appointees and officials in the most offensive way. But the "Democrat-Media complex" barely said a word.
In fact, the media celebrated this so-called exercise of free speech and dissent as patriotism. Now apparently it is a horrible, disgusting hate crime if you in good faith oppose the policies of the Obama administration and its legislative water-carriers on Capitol Hill, especially the loathesome effort that rammed through the healthcare bill against the wishes of the majority of the American people. If you peacefully assemble--e.g., everyday, often non-ideological Americans participating in the Tea Party movement--you are demonized and marginalized. You are part of a mob engaging in "hate speech." Any criticism of the administration's march towards socialism apparently also means you are also a racist, sexist, and homophobe. C'mon; in the year 2010, isn't this lame propaganda getting a little tedious? Ironically, about the only people that still pay attention to it, unfortunately, are those in the mainstream (i.e., lamestream) media who feel comfortable in their own parallel universe.
Michelle Malkin just wrote an excellent column addressing the left's "faking the hate":
...the Left never takes a break from falsely accusing the Right of fomenting hatred and violence through political speech. The MSM never takes a break from whitewashing leftist intolerance, death threats, and extremism — and engaging in selective reporting (or rather, non-reporting) of the long history of leftists’ manufacturing of hatred for political gain...Then, as now, being a Democrat Party official means never having to say you’re sorry for smearing conservative dissent.
So, some of these recent allegations of threats against Democrats reported in the media appear to be a hoax. But that aside, any kind of violence or threatening behavior is complete unacceptable. It's disgusting. Among fringe elements on the left and right, there are some isolated violent tendencies, but did the media give headline coverage to the African-American man at a Tea Party who was beaten by SEIU thugs in St. Louis last year, or the Republican headquarters in Milwaukee that was vandalized during the November 2008 election cycle?
And by the way, some very vile things were said by the left/liberals about Secretary of State Condi Rice, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, or GOP Chair Michael Steele when he ran for the U.S. Senate, and many others. Again, the media hardly made a peep.
People who engage in these tactics are the enemies of our constitution, and that hardly describes in any way, shape, or form the Tea Party movement or other concerned citizens.
Andrew Breitbart has offered a $10,000 reward for proof that racial epithets were shouted during the March 20 Tea Party protest in Washington. So far, no one has claimed it.
And here's Kevin Jackson schooling a clueless MSNBC "reporter" about these phony, race-baiting accusations:
George Orwell said this about left-wing "journalists" and intellectuals of his day:
Do remember that dishonesty and cowardice always have to be paid for. Don't imagine for years on end you can make yourself the boot-licking propagandist of the Soviet regime, and suddenly return to mental decency. Once a whore, always a whore.
More on the Tea Party movement and the media here.
Remember Susan Powter, the hyper-aggressive fitness and diet guru from back in the day? Her signature catchphrase was "stop the insanity!" Well, U.S. Senator Scott Brown says, "stop the chicanery."
In the GOP weekly radio address captured on Youtube below, Sen. Brown says that the healthcare powergrab--i.e, ramming through the health-care bill, "whatever it takes, whatever the cost"--is defying the will of the American people. The president and his supporters still haven't gotten the message that the people do not want the government to seize control of the medical delivery system, the senator says.
Say what you will about the alternatively misanthropic and entertaining Michael Savage, but he made a very perceptive point the other night. Politicians have always been corrupt, he said, but they occupied a parallel universe and pretty much left the rest of us alone--until now. With their sick (no pun intended) obsession with socialized medicine among other things, the Democrats now want to intrude in every aspect of our life. But Americans value personal freedom above all else.
The only comic relief in the otherwise grim, yearlong ObamaCare saga has been the spectacle of progressive pundits scratching their heads to explain the bill's nose-diving popularity...
In fact, the real reason why ObamaCare is so unpopular is that it is proposing a giant expansion of the entitlement state precisely when this state everywhere is coming apart: here and abroad; at the federal level and the state; in the public sector and the private. Suggesting a giant government takeover of a sixth of the economy can't be a popular selling point in a country whose DNA has a programmed hostility to Big Government.
Even before President Obama rammed through his trillion-dollar-plus stimulus/bailout packages last year, there was a growing sentiment that the country's top priority ought to be tackling the entitlement programs whose liabilities are like a swelling aneurysm in the brain of the body politic waiting to rupture...
But why don't progressives get that this is terrible economic timing? Because this is the moment they have been waiting for since Lyndon Johnson enacted Medicare...There is no tactic too low to deploy--and no cause too sacred to abandon. If Americans are unenthused about universal coverage, screw 'em. If it is necessary to use reconciliation--meant strictly for budgetary matters--to ram the bill through Congress on a strictly partisan vote, then so be it. If filibuster rules that Democrats themselves restored in 1975 are now coming in the way, get rid of them....
But egged on by the progressive punditocracy, Democrats are behaving as if, once they jam ObamaCare through, nothing else matters. It's like they'll never have to worry about being the minority party in need of constitutional checks and balances.
Similarly, in the pages of the Washington Post, Democrat pollsters Patrick Caddell and Douglas Schoen tell their party that it needs to snap out of their delusion and wake up to the political reality:
Their blind persistence in the face of reality threatens to turn this political march of folly into an electoral rout in November....First, the battle for public opinion has been lost. Comprehensive health care has been lost. If it fails, as appears possible, Democrats will face the brunt of the electorate's reaction. If it passes, however, Democrats will face a far greater calamitous reaction at the polls. Wishing, praying or pretending will not change these outcomes.
Nothing has been more disconcerting than to watch Democratic politicians and their media supporters deceive themselves into believing that the public favors the Democrats' current health-care plan. Yes, most Americans believe, as we do, that real health-care reform is needed. And yes, certain proposals in the plan are supported by the public.
However, a solid majority of Americans opposes the massive health-reform plan. Four-fifths of those who oppose the plan strongly oppose it, according to Rasmussen polling this week, while only half of those who support the plan do so strongly. Many more Americans believe the legislation will worsen their health care, cost them more personally and add significantly to the national deficit. Never in our experience as pollsters can we recall such self-deluding misconstruction of survey data...
Second, the country is moving away from big government, with distrust growing more generally toward the role of government in our lives...
Voters are hardly enthralled with the GOP, but the Democrats are pursuing policies that are out of step with the way ordinary Americans think and feel about politics and government. Barring some change of approach, they will be punished severely at the polls.
Now, we vigorously opposed Republican efforts in the Bush administration to employ the "nuclear option" in judicial confirmations. We are similarly concerned by Democrats' efforts to manipulate passage of a health-care bill. Doing so in the face of constant majority opposition invites a backlash against the party at every level -- and at a time when it already faces the prospect of losing 30 or more House seats and eight or more Senate seats. For Democrats to begin turning around their political fortunes there has to be a frank acknowledgement that the comprehensive health-care initiative is a failure, regardless of whether it passes. There are enough Republican and Democratic proposals -- such as purchasing insurance across state lines, malpractice reform, incrementally increasing coverage, initiatives to hold down costs, covering preexisting conditions and ensuring portability -- that can win bipartisan support.
And in a new Gallup poll, unemployment and the economy in general (not healthcare) are the primary issues that Americans are worried about.
We often wondered why the socialist-oriented, big government interventionists seem to think that they will be immune from the affects of their policies--as if they live in a space station orbiting the Earth rather than down here with the rest of us. In her latest online column, Professor Camille Paglia, a self-avowed Obama and Pelosi supporter, nails it:
As for the actual content of the House healthcare bill, horrors! Where to begin? That there are serious deficiencies and injustices in the U.S. healthcare system has been obvious for decades. To bring the poor and vulnerable into the fold has been a high ideal and an urgent goal for most Democrats. But this rigid, intrusive and grotesquely expensive bill is a nightmare. Holy Hygeia, why can't my fellow Democrats see that the creation of another huge, inefficient federal bureaucracy would slow and disrupt the delivery of basic healthcare and subject us all to a labyrinthine mass of incompetent, unaccountable petty dictators? Massively expanding the number of healthcare consumers without making due provision for the production of more healthcare providers means that we're hurtling toward a staggering logjam of de facto rationing. Steel yourself for the deafening screams from the careerist professional class of limousine liberals when they get stranded for hours in the jammed, jostling anterooms of doctors' offices. They'll probably try to hire Caribbean nannies as ringers to do the waiting for them.
A second issue souring me on this bill is its failure to include the most common-sense clause to increase competition and drive down prices: portability of health insurance across state lines. What covert business interests is the Democratic leadership protecting by stopping consumers from shopping for policies nationwide? Finally, no healthcare bill is worth the paper it's printed on when the authors ostentatiously exempt themselves from its rules. The solipsistic members of Congress want us peons to be ground up in the communal machine, while they themselves gambol on in the flowering meadow of their own lavish federal health plan. Hypocrites!
And why are we even considering so gargantuan a social experiment when the nation is struggling to emerge from a severe recession? It's as if liberals are starry-eyed dreamers lacking the elementary ability to project or predict the chaotic and destabilizing practical consequences of their utopian fantasies.
Eliminating defensive medicine could save upwards of $200 billion in health-care costs annually, according to estimates by the American Medical Association and others. The cure is a reliable medical malpractice system that patients, doctors and the general public can trust.
But this is the one reform Washington will not seriously consider. That's because the trial lawyers, among the largest contributors to the Democratic Party, thrive on the unreliable justice system we have now...
The upshot is simple: A few thousand trial lawyers are blocking reform that would benefit 300 million Americans. This is not just your normal special-interest politics. It's a scandal—it is as if international-trade policy was being crafted in order to get fees for customs agents...
An effective justice system must reliably distinguish between good care and bad care. But trial lawyers trade on the unreliability of justice. It doesn't matter much whether the doctor did anything wrong—a lawyer can always come up with a theory of what might have been done differently. What matters most is the extent of the tragedy and that a case holds potential for pulling on a jury's heartstrings...
Unreliable justice is like pouring acid over the culture of health care.
According to Howard, 54 cents of each malpractice dollar goes to lawyers and administrative costs.
And further on the "you mislead" front, this just in from TheHill.com:
Senate Finance Committee Democrats rejected a proposed a requirement that immigrants prove their identity with photo identification when signing up for federal healthcare programs.
Finance Committee ranking member Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said that current law and the healthcare bill under consideration are too lax and leave the door open to illegal immigrants defrauding the government using false or stolen identities to obtain benefits.
Grassley's amendment was beaten back 10-13 on a party-line vote.
Over the years, but especially recently, one phenomenon that has become profoundly obvious is that left-of-center polemicists tend to accuse right-of-center writers, bloggers and other counterparts of "lying."
But this trend has emerged a classic case of projection, because it is in general those on the left who engage in half-truths, distortions, disinformation or lack of information, taking things out of context, and perhaps what's worse, incuriously accepting at face value virtually any pronouncement from this administration.
We hesitate to use the word lie because that word has been thrown around so much in so many different quarters that it is almost devoid of meaning. [Even Judge Milian too often seems to accuse a litigant of lying when it might be just an instance where two individuals simply have a good-faith difference in perception.]
In her latest Salon essay primarily about the "sick" obsession of this administration, Congress, and what she calls the "liberal lemmings" of the mainstream media, to impose socialism on the medical delivery system, self-described Obama supporter (and Republican critic) Camille Paglia makes reference to the same trend:
Why did it take so long for Democrats to realize that this year's tea party and town hall uprisings were a genuine barometer of widespread public discontent and not simply a staged scenario by kooks and conspirators? First of all, too many political analysts still think that network and cable TV chat shows are the central forums of national debate. But the truly transformative political energy is coming from talk radio and the Web -- both of which Democrat-sponsored proposals have threatened to stifle, in defiance of freedom of speech guarantees in the Bill of Rights. I rarely watch TV anymore except for cooking shows, history and science documentaries, old movies and football. Hence I was blissfully free from the retching overkill that followed the deaths of Michael Jackson and Ted Kennedy -- I never saw a single minute of any of it. It was on talk radio, which I have resumed monitoring around the clock because of the healthcare fiasco, that I heard the passionate voices of callers coming directly from the town hall meetings. Hence I was alerted to the depth and intensity of national sentiment long before others who were simply watching staged, manipulated TV shows.
Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers (one reason for the hypocritical absence of tort reform in the healthcare bills). Weirdly, given their worship of highly individualistic, secularized self-actualization, such professionals are as a whole amazingly credulous these days about big-government solutions to every social problem. They see no danger in expanding government authority and intrusive, wasteful bureaucracy. This is, I submit, a stunning turn away from the anti-authority and anti-establishment principles of authentic 1960s leftism...
But affluent middle-class Democrats now seem to be complacently servile toward authority and automatically believe everything party leaders tell them. Why? Is it because the new professional class is a glossy product of generically institutionalized learning? Independent thought and logical analysis of argument are no longer taught. Elite education in the U.S. has become a frenetic assembly line of competitive college application to schools where ideological brainwashing is so pandemic that it's invisible....
Throughout this fractious summer, I was dismayed not just at the self-defeating silence of Democrats at the gaping holes or evasions in the healthcare bills but also at the fogginess or insipidity of articles and Op-Eds about the controversy emanating from liberal mainstream media and Web sources. By a proportion of something like 10-to-1, negative articles by conservatives were vastly more detailed, specific and practical about the proposals than were supportive articles by Democrats, which often made gestures rather than arguments and brimmed with emotion and sneers. There was a glaring inability in most Democratic commentary to think ahead and forecast what would or could be the actual snarled consequences -- in terms of delays, denial of services, errors, miscommunications and gross invasions of privacy -- of a massive single-payer overhaul of the healthcare system in a nation as large and populous as ours. It was as if Democrats live in a utopian dream world, divorced from the daily demands and realities of organization and management.
By the way, tonight would be a good night to rent a DVD, check-in with the Dog Whisperer or Animal Cops if they're on, or engage in recreational reading, or participate in any "healthy" activity other than watching yet another tedious, narcissistic presidential address.
Besides, the lemmings in the mainstream media have already decided for you that this is the greatest speech ever delivered in recorded history.
