Thread: Individual Mandate has been struck down

Poll: Employers insuring fewer employees


Health care reform supporters cheer after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a majority of President Obama's health care reform bill, outside of the Supreme Court on June 28, 2012 in Washington, D.C. UPI/Kevin Dietsch
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Published: July 5, 2012 at 6:16 PM

WASHINGTON, July 5 (UPI) -- The percentage of U.S. adults ages 26-64 with health insurance dropped from 56.7 percent in 2011 to 55.9 percent in June, a survey indicates.

The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index surveyed 87,521 U.S. adults April 1 to June 30 and found the percentage of 18- to 25-year-olds with employer-based insurance had increased.

The slight uptick from 2011 to 2012 in employer-based insurance among 18- to 25-year-olds came as the provision of the Affordable Care Act allowed them to stay on their parents' plans until age 26 went into effect.

The percentage of all U.S. adults with employer-based health insurance was 44.2 percent in the second quarter of 2012, a percentage that has been decreasing since the recession began in 2008.

Government-based health insurance -- Medicare, Medicaid and military/veterans' benefits -- was at 25.7 percent in the second quarter of 2012 -- much higher than it had been in 2008 or 2009, Gallup said.

The survey has a margin of error of 1 percentage point.

Read more: Poll: Employers insuring fewer employees - UPI.com




Read more: Poll: Employers insuring fewer employees - UPI.com

Poll: Employers insuring fewer employees - UPI.com




Well isn't that the plan to begin with, to get corporations out from under giving healthcare to their employees??? After all they got rid of the pensions didn't they...my opinion of course

12 Incredible Quotes About ObamaCare
Bert Atkinson Jr. July 2, 2012 5:16 pm





#1 Donald Trump

Let me get this straight . . .

We’re going to be “gifted” with a health care plan we are forced to purchase and fined if we don’t! Which purportedly covers at least ten million more people without adding a single new doctor, but provides for 16,000 new IRS agents, written by a committee whose chairman says he doesn’t understand it, passed by a Congress that didn’t read it but exempted themselves from it, and signed by a Dumbo President who smokes, with funding administered by a treasury chief who didn’t pay his taxes, for which we’ll be taxed for four years before any benefits take effect, by a government which has already bankrupted Social Security and Medicare, all to be overseen by a surgeon general who is obese , and financed by a country that’s broke!!!!!

‘What the hell could possibly go wrong?’

#2 Senior Wall Street Journal Economics Writer Stephen Moore during an interview with Fox and Friends….

“Again, whatever you want to call it Alisyn, fines, taxes, penalties, but three quarters of those costs will fall on the backs of families who make less than $120,00 a year, so it’s a big punch in the stomach to middle class families.”

#3 Dr. Elaina George of the Project 21 African-American Conservative Leadership Network

“Because of the mandate, Americans will be forced to pay for a system that will increase costs for patients, remove health care decisions from both the doctor and the patient and lead to rationing. It changes health care as we know it into a system based on one-size-fits-all, cost-controlled and conveyor belt socialized medicine”

#4 The incomparable Charlie Daniels

“The United States of America took a giant step toward a totalitarian socialist government when the Supreme Court voted to uphold Obamacare, allowing the individual mandate for the government to force American citizens to buy health insurance whether they want to or not.”

#5 Ron Paul

“This is patently obvious: the power to ‘regulate’ commerce cannot include the power to compel commerce! Those who claim otherwise simply ignore the plain meaning of the Constitution because they don’t want to limit federal power in any way. The commerce clause was intended simply to give Congress the power to regulate foreign trade, and also to prevent states from imposing tariffs on interstate goods. In Federalist Paper No. 22, Alexander Hamilton makes it clear the simple intent behind the clause was to prevent states from placing tolls or tariffs on goods as they passed through each state — a practice that had proven particularly destructive across the many principalities of the German empire.”

#6 U.S. Representative Todd Akin

“Today America is threatened with a stage three cancer of socialism, and Obamacare is exhibit 1. There are many of us here who have been fighting this for three years and we don’t really want the compassion of the IRS and the efficiency of the post office introduced in our healthcare and we are not going to rest until every single line of this bill is repealed.”

#7 The Health Ranger Mike Adams

“But even if Obama is replaced in the White House, the damage has already been done. With its decision, the U.S. Supreme Court has set a precedent of government control over private paychecks, and that precedent has fundamentally crushed economic freedom in America and opened the door to limitless taxes for everything imaginable. King George III couldn’t have done it better.”

#8 Documentary Filmmaker Michael Moore

“You better get on the train or watch your party implode – that’s my words of advice to the Republican Party”

#9 The communications director of the Tenth Amendment Center Mike Maharrey

“The states simply need to follow Thomas Jefferson’s prescription and nullify the entire act. They should just refuse to implement this monstrosity. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker has already indicated he will refuse, and other states should follow his lead.”

#10 Becky Ayers

I’ve never bought medical insurance. The only time a policy has covered me was when it came incidental to a job. The Lord has blessed me with disgustingly good health; then, too, when I was 18, my mother died of a brain tumor that had escaped diagnosis for six yearsdespite excruciating headaches and other symptoms a professor of nursing later described as “classic.” If I were bleeding and unconscious, I might wind up in the clutches of the medical establishment, but never of my own volition.

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12 Incredible Quotes About ObamaCare
Bert Atkinson Jr. July 2, 2012 5:16 pm

So I deeply and personally resent Roberts’s little parlor-trick of a word-game. Forcing me to buy medical insurance is unconstitutional if we call it a “fine” but perfectly OK if it’s a “tax.”

#11 Byron Maduska in the Leavenworth Times….

“A new survey of Doctors has been released. The results are bleak.

If Obamacare is fully implemented, 83 percent will consider leaving the practice of medicine. Sixty-one percent say it’s an affront to their ethics. Eighty-five percent say it destroys the doctor-patient relationship. Sixty-five percent say governmental involvement is the cause of the problems in medical care now. Seventy-two percent say the insurance mandate won’t result in improved access to medical care. Seventy-four percent say they’ll stop accepting Medicare patients, or leave Medicare altogether. Seventy percent say reducing governmental involvement would be the single best fix for healthcare in this country. The negatives of Obamacare went on and on in the results of the survey.”

#12 Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli

“This decision goes against the very principle that America has a federal government of limited powers; a principle that the Founding Fathers clearly wrote into the Constitution, the supreme law of the land. The Constitution was meant to restrict the power of government precisely for the purpose of protecting your liberty and mine from the overreaching hand of the federal government. This unprecedented decision says that Congress has the authority to force citizens to buy private goods or face fines – a power it has never had in American history, and a power King George III and Parliament didn’t have over us when we were mere subjects of Great Britain. Since the federal government itself could never articulate to the court a constitutional limit to this power, Congress has gained an unlimited power to force citizens to buy anything.”

So what do you think Obamacare is going to do to the healthcare system in America?

(H/T The American Dream)

In the words of a commenter below, let’s all see that these comments are SHARED and SHARED and SHARED…

12 Incredible Quotes About ObamaCare - Independent Journal Review

Health Care Reform Will Not Be Televised



Small Group Now Leads Closed-Door Reform Negotiations

By Perry Bacon Jr.
Washington Post
Sunday, October 18, 2009

Three months before he was elected president, Barack Obama vowed not only to reform health care but also to pass the legislation in an unprecedented way.

"I'm going to have all the negotiations around a big table," he said at an appearance in Chester, Va., repeating an assertion he made many times. He said the discussions would be "televised on C-SPAN, so that people can see who is making arguments on behalf of their constituents and who are making arguments on behalf of the drug companies or the insurance companies."

But now, as a Senate vote on health-care legislation nears, those negotiations are occurring in a setting that is anything but revolutionary in Washington: Three senators are working on the bill behind closed doors.

Continue reading here
Small Group Now Leads Closed-Door Reform Negotiations

With the passage of the the 'Affordable Care Act' and its
'constitutionality' being upheld by the Supreme Court jesters, the
nation is as divided as it has ever been.

Divided why?

Because most people don't even know what's in it.

Why don't they know what's in it?

Because the promise to conduct the negotiations openly and on
television was broken...

Video:

Obama Watch: Health Care Reform Will Not Be Televised

Goodman Green
- Brasscheck

P.S. Please share Brasscheck TV e-mails and
videos with friends and colleagues.

That's how we grow. Thanks.

The ‘Jedi Mind Trick’ of the Obamacare Tax

Tuesday, July 10, 2012 | Subscribe to Video Updates


When the ‘individual mandate is a tax’ concept is presented to some Democrats, they just don’t find it acceptable. So they try to use the Jedi mind trick. They simply repeat ‘it is not a tax’ on various news shows, possibly hoping it will enter the minds of viewers and the host will repeat it back convinced that the tax does not exist.

via ConservativeVideos.com



The

Obamacare Update: 'It Is Now Being Enforced & The Horror Is Unfolding' -- Michael Connelly - Constitutional Lawyer
Thursday, July 12, 2012 10:02







The first article I wrote and posted on this blog was in August 2009 and it was titled “The Truth About the Health Care Bills.” It was based on my reading of the original 1100 pages of H.R. 3299 that was the first of the proposed bills. Based on what I read in that bill and other proposals I made a number of predictions about what would happen if the bill passed. I was immediately viscously attacked by those on the left who believe freedom of speech is only allowed if you agree with them.

I received death threats, was called every name in the book, and people claimed that I was lying about being an attorney and a Constitutional Law Instructor. The group “Media Matters” funded by George Soros went berserk as did some other left wing so called “fact check” groups that never really disputed the facts I presented, but challenged my opinions.

In any case, the law that finally passed was 2700 pages long and in most respects is worse than the original. It is now being enforced and the horror is unfolding. I have therefore reposted by original article below and made comments in bold black to illustrate how, unfortunately, most of the things I predicted are now reality.


THE TRUTH ABOUT THE HEALTHCARE BILLS



Well, I have done it! I have read the entire text of proposed House Bill 3200: The Affordable Health Care Choices Act of 2009. I studied it with particular emphasis from my area of expertise, constitutional law. I was frankly concerned that parts of the proposed law that were being discussed might be unconstitutional. What I found was far worse than what I had heard or expected.

To begin with, much of what has been said about the law and its implications is in fact true, despite what the Democrats and the media are saying. The law does provide for rationing of health care, particularly where senior citizens and other classes of citizens are involved,(Various panels made up of bureaucrats appointed by the Obama administration will decide health care expenditures under Medicare, and decide what patients will receive specific types of care. They will also choose the doctors and hospitals that can be used by each patient. This is a direct interference with the doctor patient relationship and is clearly rationing.)free health care for illegal immigrants, (millions of dollars have been appropriated to set up clinics in certain states to provide free medical treatment for immigrants. However, employees of the clinics are prohibited from asking patients about their legal status.) free abortion services, and probably forced participation in abortions by members of the medical profession.(Doctors and nurses are not yet being forced to perform abortions, but religious institutions are being forced to finance free contraception, and abortion inducing morning after pills, despite the fact that this violates their religious beliefs and is a direct violation of the 1st Amendment. The next step will certainly be mandating that Catholic hospitals and others provide full abortion services.)

The Bill will also eventually force private insurance companies out of business and put everyone into a government run system. (Although the so called “public option” was removed from the final version of the health care bill it is still alive and well in the minds of most proponents of the legislation. Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and the mainstream news media all assured Americans that under Obamacare health care costs and insurance premiums would decline. The exact opposite is true. Health care costs continue to rise and so do insurance premiums. Small businesses can’t afford to provide insurance for their employees and the employees can’t afford it on their own. In addition, insurance companies are being forced to provide benefits that will ultimately force many of them to price themselves out of business.) All decisions about personal health care will ultimately be made by federal bureaucrats and most of them will not be health care professionals. Hospital admissions, payments to physicians, and allocations of necessary medical devices will be strictly controlled. (Under the provisions of Obamacare some 138 new Federal agencies or committees have been established to make many of the decisions on your health care that were previously made by you and your physician. The most heinous of the provisions in the law in this area places a tax on artificial limbs including those being provided to elderly veterans, and our troops that have wounded fighting for our nation in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Veterans Administration will not pay the tax so these heroes and their families will have to pick up the tab. The same is not true for illegal aliens. They can get them at taxpayer expense.)

However, as scary as all of that it, it just scratches the surface. In fact, I have concluded that this legislation really has no intention of providing affordable health care choices. Instead it is a convenient cover for the most massive transfer of power to the Executive Branch of government that has ever occurred, or even been contemplated. If this law or a similar one is adopted, major portions of the Constitution of the United States will effectively have been destroyed.

The first thing to go will be the masterfully crafted balance of power between the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches of the U.S. Government. The Congress will be transferring to the Obama Administration authority in a number of different areas over the lives of the American people and the businesses they own. The irony is that the Congress doesn’t have any authority to legislate in most of those areas to begin with. I defy anyone to read the text of the U.S. Constitution and find any authority granted to the members of Congress to regulate health care. (Ironically, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the individual mandate portion of the law passed by Congress was not constitutionally permissible under either the commerce clause or the necessary and proper clause of the Constitution. However, using some bizarre reasoning five Justices found it Constitutional under the taxing power of Congress. They ignored the Constitutional requirement that all tax laws must originate in the House of Representatives, while the final version of Obamacare originated in the Senate. The bottom line is that Congress passed a piece of legislation without reading it and it gave Obama and the Executive Branch the power to make over 4,000 decisions on every aspect of health care without any Congressional approval or oversight.)

This legislation also provides for access by the appointees of the Obama administration to of all of your personal healthcare information, your personal financial information, and the information of your employer, physician, and hospital. (This is all in the process of being implemented under the rules and regulations being adopted as a result of the law.) All of this is a direct violation of the specific provisions of the 4th Amendment to the Constitution protecting against unreasonable searches and seizures. You can also forget about the right to privacy. That will have been legislated into oblivion regardless of what the 3rd and 4th Amendments may provide.

If you decide not to have healthcare insurance or if you have private insurance that is not deemed “acceptable” to the “Health Choices Administrator” appointed by Obama there will be a tax imposed on you. It is called a “tax” instead of a fine because of the intent to avoid application of the due process clause of the 5th Amendment. However, that doesn’t work because since there is nothing in the law that allows you to contest or appeal the imposition of the tax, it is definitely depriving someone of property without the “due process of law. (When this original article was written the penalty for not complying with the original mandate was styled as a tax. Then to quell some of the overwhelming opposition to the proposed law, it became a penalty or a fine. Now the Supreme Court has ruled that it is in fact a tax. I personally don’t care what it is called, or what the five Justices on the Supreme Court say, it is still unconstitutional.)

So, there are three of those pesky amendments that the far left hate so much out the original ten in the Bill of Rights that are effectively nullified by this law. It doesn’t stop there though. The 9th Amendment that provides: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people;” The 10th Amendment states: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are preserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” Under the provisions of this piece of Congressional handiwork neither the people nor the states are going to have any rights or powers at all in many areas that once were theirs to control. (The only victory in the Obamacare court challenge for those who support the Constitution came when the Court ruled that the federal government could not compel the states to put millions of people on the Medicaid rolls without any way to finance it. This was a victory for the 10th Amendment, but what about we the people and our rights under the 9th and 10th Amendments? Apparently those don’t exist any longer.)

I could write many more pages about this legislation, but I think you get the idea. This is not about health care; it is about seizing power and limiting rights. Article 6 of the Constitution requires the members of both houses of Congress to “be bound by oath or affirmation” to support the Constitution. If I was a member of Congress I would not be able to vote for this legislation or anything like it without feeling I was violating that sacred oath or affirmation. If I voted for it anyway I would hope the American people would hold me accountable. (This paragraph is self explanatory and I stand by it.)

For those who might doubt the nature of this threat I suggest they consult the source. Here is a link to the Constitution: Transcript of the Constitution of the United States - Official Text

And another to the Bill of Rights: Bill of Rights Transcript Text

There you can see exactly what we are about to have taken from us.

Michael Connelly

mrobertc@hotmail.com

Home - Connelly

Home


Before It's News

IRS has no legal basis to collect Affordable Care Act tax - It's all an act!

Tuesday, July 17, 2012 by: Ethan A. Huff, staff writer



(NaturalNews) Many Americans right now are reeling in disgust over the Supreme Court's recent decision to uphold the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act. But according to a recent report by My Way News, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), which will allegedly be tasked with enforcing the new health insurance mandate in the form of a "tax" for non-compliance, does not actually have the authority or legal standing to collect penalties from individuals who choose to "opt-out" of the mandate.

As many NaturalNews readers already know, most Americans will be required under the Affordable Care Act to purchase health insurance, as well as show proof, beginning in 2014, that they purchased health insurance in accordance with the mandate. Those who decide not to purchase health insurance will be charged a penalty, also known as a "tax" according to Chief Justice John Roberts (Natural health news), which is to be collected by the IRS.

But apparently the IRS does not have the legal authority to force anyone to pay this tax, regardless of whether or not they choose to purchase health insurance. According to the law, the IRS will not be permitted to freeze the bank accounts of taxpayers who choose not to purchase health insurance, nor will the agency be allowed to garnish wages. The IRS also does not have the authority to levy interest charges on those who choose not to pay the penalties.

The only thing the IRS is permitted to do under the new law is withhold tax refunds from those that are due them, and that do not purchase health insurance. Since the majority of tax filers every year are owed refunds, the IRS hopes the threat of not receiving one will be enough to convince the American public to comply with the federal government's forced health care system.

If this does not work, the IRS is likely to simply send out threatening letters in a desperate attempt to scare people into paying the tax. According to Elizabeth Maresca, a former IRS trial attorney who now supervises the Tax & Consumer Litigation Clinic at Fordham University's Law School, most people end up paying whatever is demanded of them by the IRS when it comes in the form of a scary letter.

The fact that the IRS lacks any legal authority to collect an Affordable Care Act tax needs to be spread far and wide so that the American people know their rights. When it comes time to "pay the piper," taxpayers need to know that, legally, they have the option to refuse both mandatory health insurance and the penalties associated with non-compliance.

Sources for this article include:

My Way News - The tax man cometh to police you on health care

Reason.com

Learn more: IRS has no legal basis to collect Affordable Care Act tax - It's all an act!

Who's sorry about the Roberts ruling now?

August 21, 2012 | 8:00 pm
121Comments

Any year now, Democrats may start to ask themselves if it might have been better had John Roberts not changed his mind. If they would be better off with Obamacare out of its and our misery, a bone of contention now safely buried, and not as a bone in their throats.

For one thing, they still have the issue upon them -- the historic triumph they don't dare mention but which Republicans happily do.
Second, were Obamacare no longer the law, we might be seeing an uptick in hiring right now. Instead, that will be deferred until after November (and then possibly only if Romney's elected), and unemployment is rising in 44 states. Unemployment rising in 44 states is not what you want when just ten or so states will decide the election and unemployment has been 8 percent or higher for 41 months.
Third, had Roberts done otherwise, they might still have the issue of Medicare, which at this point they do not. When Paul Ryan was chosen to run with Mitt Romney, liberals planned to rip him to pieces over plans to trim Medicare. Somehow, they forgot that their own health care plan did much the same thing, covering 30 million new clients by draining millions from providers of Medicare. Although these cuts will not directly lead Medicare clients to pay more or lose coverage, they will end with many doctors and hospitals refusing to treat them at all.
This move on Medicare, which began as a shield for Ryan to fend off attacks on his program, turned into a sword, as it started to drag Obamacare into the argument. As Josh Kraushaar noted in National Journal, "by having a conversation about Medicare, it allows them to bring up President Barack Obama's unpopular health care law as well." Bill Kristol thinks D-Day was Aug. 14, when it suddenly dawned on the people in Boston they could link their defense of Ryan's proposals to the public disgust with the president's plan. "Obamacare's unpopularity blunts Obama's attacks on Romney-Ryan Medicare plans," said a Miami Herald headline only days later. A Rasmussen Reports poll found that by a 54 percent to 42 percent split, seniors in Florida found Obamacare more frightening than the Ryan proposals. (The split among all ages was 48 percent to 41 percent.)
The National Republican Campaign Committee polled 28 battleground states on both Ryan's plan and the Democrats' message against it, and found Ryan winning by ten points on aggregate. As Kraushaar put it, "Obama's health care law is even more unpopular than his record on the economy."
And the Republicans found a way to bring that into the argument, too. The health care reform plan, with its massive menu of regulations and tax hikes, has long been seen by everyone except Obama and his fanatical followers as an anchor dragging the down the "recoveries" that haven't been happening. It seems that then public is onto this, too. "Rather than being seen as a diversion from talking about the economy, 43 percent believe repeal [of the bill] would help the economy," says Scott Rasmussen. "Just 27 percent think it would hurt. That's one of the reasons most voters consistently support repeal. It's not a choice between repealing the health care law and focusing on the economy. They're part of the same plan."
So Medicare, which is part of the looming entitlement crisis, is now feeding Romney's plans to fix the economy. For linking the two, Romney can thank Obama's health care reform plan, given to an ungrateful nation and rescued by the Supreme Court just in time to ruin its author.
Who's thanking John Roberts now?
Examiner Columnist Noemie Emery is contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of "Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families."


http://washingtonexaminer.com/whos-s...0#.UDaAF6BSTnd