Tag: ObamaCare

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media and media people national politics & policies political challengers

The A-Word

The n-word got dropped on MSNBC’s The Cycle this week. The show’s co-host [No First Name] Touré called Mitt Romney’s use of the word “angry” to describe some of the rhetoric coming out of the White House as “the ‘niggerization’ of Obama”:

“You are not one of us, you are like the scary black man who we’ve been trained to fear.”

Naturally this led to a battle between Touré and conservative co-host S.E. Cupp. She took particular issue with the fact that Touré admitted that VP Joe Biden‘s “chains” comments were divisive, but is now calling Romney a “racist” for saying the Obama campaign is “angry.”

“Do you see how dishonest that is?” she asked.

Good question. But here’s a better one: Doesn’t talk of race and code-words obscure the real issue here, anger?

Romney shouldn’t be calling for the Obama administration to be less angry. He should be angry himself, and castigating the president and his crew for being angry at the wrong things.

We should be angry at the continuation of wars, foreign (the Middle East) and domestic (on psychoactive drug use), to the detriment of fiscal stability as well as our civil liberties.

We should be angry that the nation’s pension system has been systematically stripped of its surpluses for 77 years — by politicians in Washington.

We should be angry that federal (along with state) policy has interfered with medicine to such an extent that the most idiotic ideas around — nationalization/socialization — almost seemed plausible to a sizable minority of Americans.

We should be angry that the Democrats pushed through yet another expensive entitlement, “Obamacare,” while the rest of the federal government sunk further into insolvency.

And yes, we should be angry that our leaders can’t stick to decent issues.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets national politics & policies too much government

A Fraudulent Pill to Swallow

If you’re like me, you often rub up against common opinion and find little sense in it — or, as I like to put it, popular opinion with the common sense bled out of it.

On Monday I reported on an anti-Obamacare lawsuit against the federal government for mandating the purchase of medical insurance that included “free” contraceptive drugs (including “morning after pills”). I took on the obvious problems, but neglected to mention that it’s not insurance.

I guess you can call turnips “rainbows” and politicians “angels,” but, based on accepted meanings of terms, it is not “insurance” when benefits include regular maintenance or common preventive (“prophylactic”) products.

One doesn’t insure against dandruff by buying a policy that provides you with “free” shampoo or against sunburn by purchasing a policy that offers free SPF50 sunscreen. One doesn’t insure against obesity with insurance that provides “free” healthy foods according to This Diet or That Diet.

For instance, it would be absurd to have an insurance policy to pay for one’s vitamins.

In a sense, the vitamins are the insurance. Think of them as a separate, medicinal form of insurance, which you pay for at purchase.

Same for contraception.

One buys insurance for unexpected and irregular needs. Calling Obamacare’s “contraception benefit” mandate “insurance” is a fib.

Much of what we think of as insurance actually amounts to confused (and confusing) methods of savings (at best) or a confidence game to get some people to pay for the regular goods and services other folks use (at worst). By force and fraud.

The force is the government mandate. The fraud is calling this whole program “insurance.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
First Amendment rights Ninth Amendment rights too much government

The First Isn’t Enough

The First Amendment isn’t enough.

Because its provisions have stronger teeth than most other amendments in the Bill of Rights, it gets put into service quite a lot, to bolster other freedoms. It’s a pity there’s no general “right to freedom” — or even “freedom of contract” — amendment.

A Western Pennsylvania Christian higher education outfit, Geneva College, joined by Seneca Hardware Lumber Co. in Cranberry, has sued the federal government over the new “Obamacare” requirement to provide morning-after “contraception” to employees, saying that the provision violates their religious freedom. The Justice Department argues that the case should be thrown out, on grounds that public entities like the college and the lumber company do not possess the legal right to “impose” their religious values on others.

As noted at reason.com, this is a weird misreading of the crucial negative right/positive right distinction: Under the “negative right” to freedom, an employer not providing a benefit to employees imposes nothing. Quite literally. The imposition lies entirely with the government forcing its way into contracts between businesses and employees.

One could construe a positive right to contraception, I guess, but that positive right would also be an imposition. “Imposition” belongs to the language of positive rights.

The government’s lawyers also object to the hardware company seeking sanctuary (so to speak) in the First Amendment to oppose the contraception mandate. If just anyone can appeal to the First Amendment’s freedom of religious exercise clause, then the government could hardly enforce conformity.

Well, yes.

That’s the idea of limited government. The problem, today, is that we citizens don’t have enough legal oomph to protect ourselves (either as employers or employees) from the federal government’s vast overreach.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies

The Realpolitik of Illusion

It’s a race against time. Obamacare is going into effect, piece by piece, link by link, yard by yard.

The idea when legislating big programs such as this is to push up as many benefits as possible early in the timeline, and shove the burdens as far down the road as possible. The strategy depends on enough voters noticing the benefits before the extravagant costs become clear. (And the full costs never become clear.) Once the program has been around long enough, the benefits will turn enough voters into special interests, and the costs will remain dispersed enough to discourage over-burdened taxpayers from fighting the inertial mass of the program.null

About the only thing that can go wrong is that the costs become all-too-clear all-too-soon.

That’s Nancy Pelosi’s realpolitik, as she honestly explained in her proud defense of “the health care law” (as if there were only one!):

We think the more people know about this legislation, you see it has changed even in the past week, the support for it has increased and as people understand what we all heard here today — how it affects their lives directly — that will even grow. So as I’ve said before, the politics be damned. . . .

That line, “the politics be damned,” is disingenuous in the extreme. The politics, here, is everything. And the Democrats have big government’s “home court” advantage, the illusions of interest-group cost-benefit analysis.

And against them? A Republican presidential candidate who had previously supported the same kind of law, supported by the same kind of illusions.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
judiciary Tenth Amendment federalism too much government

Resistance Still Possible

According to a majority on the Supreme Court, Obamacare’s penalty for not buying medical insurance is constitutional because it’s a “tax,” not a “penalty.” Hmmm. All taxes may penalize, and penalties sure can be “taxing,” but this similarity doesn’t give us license to swap one for the other.

Chief Justice John Roberts reportedly flip-flopped about whether the Obamacare mandate is unconstitutional — perhaps in fear of left-leaning politicians and pundits. (“We’re not going to like you if you hinder our tyrannical medical regime by applying constitutional principles!”)John Roberts, flip/flop

The chief’s formal opinion states that under the Constitution the wisdom of legislation is a “judgment . . . reserved to the people.” Whoa. Hasn’t Marbury been decided? Doesn’t the courts’ power of judicial review help ensure that constitutional restraints on government power continue to restrain?

Well, just because the Roberts Court refuses to do its job doesn’t mean we must twiddle our thumbs in response. We can fight for an anti-Obamacare majority in Congress and the White House in November.

We can also urge our state governments to decline to cooperate with Obamacare right now. As wretched as it is, the court’s ruling at least overrules the new law’s attempt to force states to massively expand Medicaid. Almost immediately after the ruling, Florida Governor Rick Scott, who had refused to cooperate with other aspects of the law, announced that Florida will not expand Medicaid eligibility. A dozen or so other governors have made similar commitments.

What about your governor? Do you need to make a phone call?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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video

Video: Randy Barnett on the Obamacare Case

This is fascinating:

Categories
ideological culture national politics & policies

War and Broccoli

The art of polling is similar to almost any effort where interpretation is required: Context is important.

The Reason-Rupe pollsters seem to get this. Their recent survey covers not only a lot of ground (the president’s job performance, possible candidates in the upcoming elections, health care, morality and war) but goes into some depth on a number of the issues covered. For instance, each of Obama’s major challengers is put in the context of several competitive scenarios — Obama vs. Romney, Obama vs. Santorum (the poll was conducted before Santorum dropping out), Obama vs. Gingrich, Obama vs. Paul, etc.— with even possible third-party runs brought in. All very interesting.

The biggest section of the poll concerned health care. These questions also probed alternatives, eliciting opinions explicitly in the context of possible options and outcomes. But the results regarding Iran’s nuclear capabilities were especially provocative. Nearly half of Americans tend to favor military action against the country were we to discover that the Iranian government was developing nuclear weaponry. But, when the conflict was considered as a long, dragged-out affair — of the same variety as happened in Iraq — support dwindled, and the numbers opposed to intervention went well over half.

Not shocking. Costs matter. Context matters.

The most amusing element of context in the poll emerged in one pair of questions regarding Obamacare. Is the federal requirement to carry medical insurance unconstitutional? Over 60 percent said yes. But switch that mandate to requiring Americans to buy broccoli and other healthy foods, and those crying “unconstitutional” shot up to 87 percent.

Now that’s Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets national politics & policies too much government

The $820 Billion Oops

Getting good estimates is not easy. Anyone who’s hired a contractor knows to make sure the estimates are sound by insisting that bidders stick to their estimates.

This is not what happens in government, though. Projects almost always start out with a whopping figure for an estimate . . . and then as the project gears up the costs shoot higher and higher — it soon becomes clear that the high initial cost estimate was a low-ball figure after all.

My “favorite” recent example of this has been California’s high-speed rail project, which soared by the billions before even breaking ground.

But move over, transit. Here’s medicine — 2008’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, better known as “Obamacare,” has just received an estimate upgrade. When passed, the legislation’s enthusiasts boasted a ten-year cost estimate of “only” $940 billion. Now, the Congressional Budget Office has revised the decade’s cost tally up to $1.76 trillion.

According to Philip Klein in the Washington Examiner, the CBO says that weakness in the economy leads to more people “obtaining insurance through Medicaid than it estimated a year ago at a greater cost to the government . . . fewer people will be getting insurance through their employers or the health care law’s new subsidized insurance exchanges.”

I “daringly” predict that this estimate, too, will turn out to be woefully below the actual figure . . . unless something novel happens, like Americans rallying around a “throw the bums out” campaign to elect a Congress and a President that will surgically remove Obamacare from the body politic. Before it kills us.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture

Into Each Life, a Little Romney Falls

Some things I just “don’t get.”

How can either pro-lifers or Obamacare opponents trust Mitt Romney? Sure, he says he’s pro-life and he pledges to repeal the Democrats’ health care reform package. But for years he said he was for abortion rights; he switched in what’s been called a “flip-flop-flip” while governor of Massachusetts. Further, he signed into law the state’s health care program that served as Obamacare’s blueprint.

Not exactly a resumé upon which to build trust.

It’s tough to change the status quo. Perhaps that very fact drives many to such improbable avatars as Mitt.

But it’s even tougher to change the weather, and that’s also in the news.

Pat Robertson says that if we’d pray more, we’d be hit with fewer tornadoes.

I understand that prayer can have healing powers; I recognize that the theory of Divine influence on natural phenomena has a long, august history. But I learned, long ago, that rain (along with other natural occurrences) falls upon both the just and the unjust.

I read that somewhere.

But then, proponents of anthropogenic global warming think driving cars, burning coal and raising cows causes harsher storm weather, too — and that if we’d all just ride bicycles to work, we’d have Robertson’s promised “fewer tornadoes” — so perhaps implausible-to-me meteorological causation has a fairly universal appeal.

When left and right converge on the weather, it’s time to return to subjects I know more about. (Stay tuned. I’ll be here.)

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
First Amendment rights ideological culture national politics & policies

Contra Mandated Contraception Coverage

Regulators spawned by “Obamacare” have mandated that employer-provided medical insurance plans provide contraception as a benefit. 

The problem, as currently reported and debated, is that only churches are exempted — church-run or -affiliated hospitals, for example, are not. And so Catholic hospitals, along with other religious-based charitable endeavors, must conform, despite their commitment to age-old ideas about the sanctity of life, which they say contraception and abortifacients, especially (some contraceptive methods are de facto abortion-inducing), abridge.

Many conservatives argue that the mandate thus runs afoul of the First Amendment. But it turns out that many Republican politicians have supported similar mandates in several states.

Mike Huckabee signed one such mandate into law in Arkansas.

No big news that GOP politicians are often just as bad as Democrats, of course. But forget, if you can, the First Amendment angle. The mandate runs afoul of something even more fundamental: common sense.

Adding an umpteenth mandate to the list of regulations government places on contracts amongst employers, employees, and insurance companies hardly passes the smell test. The more benefits that government insists you contract for, the higher your insurance rates. The higher the rates, fewer are those who would willingly buy, thus scuttling the whole point of “health care reform.”

We ostensibly want more people to purchase major medical insurance. Not fewer.

It’s possible that some reformers seek precisely that, to put insurance companies out of business, leaving only government to take up the slack, as a “single payer.”

In the case of Republican reformers, however, is there a hidden agenda or just mere foolishness?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.