Commentary Magazine

Topic: Affordable Care Act

Symbolic Repeal Puts Dems on the Record

07.11.2012 - 5:15 PM

Five Democrats broke with their party to support the bill to repeal ObamaCare, which is just two more than in 2011. House Republicans supported it unanimously, Fox News reports:

House lawmakers voted Wednesday to repeal the federal health care overhaul — the latest in a long line of anti-”ObamaCare” votes, but the first since the Supreme Court upheld the law and defined one of its key provisions as a “tax.”

The House has voted more than 30 times to scrap, defund or undercut the law since Obama signed it in March 2010. As with those bills, the repeal bill approved Wednesday on a 244-185 vote faces certain demise in the Democrat-controlled Senate.

But Republicans were looking to get lawmakers back on record on the law in the wake of the high court ruling last month. The ruling upheld most the law as constitutional, but in doing so determined that the controversial penalty on those who do not buy insurance technically qualifies as a “tax” and not a “penalty” as the administration had claimed. That definition fueled GOP criticism of the law, and put some Democrats in a politically tricky position.

The bill won’t actually go anywhere — Harry Reid would block a Senate vote on it, not that it would have a chance of passing there anyway. As a completely gratuitous precaution President Obama has also vowed to veto the bill if it miraculously ends up on his desk.

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The Collateral Damage of Obama’s Post-Modernist Presidency

07.06.2012 - 3:26 PM

In response to a recent post — in which I wrote that “Barack Obama is a thoroughly post-modern president. Words and facts have no objective standing; they are relative, socially constructed, a way to advance personal reality.” — I was criticized by a Time magazine reporter for continuing my “relentless attempts to depict Barack Obama as a despicable human being” and for employing tactics that are “not only intellectually dishonest, but cynical in the extreme.”

In fact, the point of my piece — which is that during oral arguments before the Supreme Court President Obama’s legal team referred to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) as a tax even as his administration now says it isn’t a tax and never was a tax — remains unrefuted. Indeed, this short clip validates exactly what I was arguing. It shows Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt insisting that “at no point” did any of the government’s lawyers, including Solicitor General Verrilli, refer to the ACA as a tax — followed by Solicitor General Donald Verrilli referring to the ACA as a tax.

How inconvenient.

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Obama’s Systematic Assault on the Truth

07.02.2012 - 9:19 AM

The Democratic talking points have been issued and are being followed to the letter (see here and here). And they go like this: The Affordable Care Act (ACA) is not a tax; it’s a penalty. Those who suggests it’s a tax are wrong, in error, disingenuous, and dissemblers.

Here’s the problem, though: characterizing the Affordable Care Act as a tax isn’t simply the interpretation of Chief Justice John Roberts and a majority of the Supreme Court; it’s the interpretation of the Obama administration.

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The Chief Justice’s Irresponsible Decision

06.29.2012 - 12:40 PM

I will grant that the opinion written by Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., which upheld the Affordable Care Act (ACA) as constitutional based not on the Commerce Clause but instead on Congress’ power under the Taxing Clause, was clever. Even, in some respects, ingenious.

Roberts achieved a liberal end, upholding the ACA, while also employing conservative arguments and affirming conservative premises—including imposing limits on the Commerce Clause, finding that the Necessary and Proper Clause cannot be used as a stand-alone justification for a statute that is not otherwise justified by another enumerated power, and declaring that Congress cannot use its spending power to coerce state participation in federal schemes. Something for everyone.

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Court Gives GOP Rallying Cry: Stop the Tax!

06.28.2012 - 10:27 AM

By joining the left of the Supreme Court, Chief Justice John Roberts has upheld the Affordable Care Act. This is a clear victory for President Obama, and he can now go to the people in November with his signature legislative achievement intact and say he has fulfilled his promise to pass a comprehensive health care plan. But in doing so not on the grounds that it is valid under the Commerce Clause but as a tax, the court handed the Republicans a strong issue to run on this fall.

President Obama and the Democrats claimed throughout the debate over the legislation that it was not a tax. But the GOP can go to the voters with a rallying cry to stop the tax as it pledges to repeal ObamaCare next January. The issue now is no longer just the defense of the principle of individual liberty — endangered by this expansion of federal power — but whether to entrust the government to a party that is dedicated to taxing and spending without limit.

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Barack Obama’s Awful June Just Got Worse

06.21.2012 - 4:30 PM

President Obama was already suffering one of the worst imaginable months for an incumbent president in an election year – including a dismal jobs report and declining factory orders, falling approval ratings (including in swing states), the overwhelming victory of Governor Scott Walker in Wisconsin, the president’s widely ridiculed claim the private sector is “doing fine,” Bill Clinton’s various apostasies, the realization that Obama might be outspent in this election by Mitt Romney, and a major speech in Ohio that was panned even by sympathetic liberals. (Jim Geraghty provides a nice summary and analysis here.)

But it may be that the first half of June was a walk in the park compared to the latter part of the month. Because two events – one which just happened and one that will happen next week – may turn out to be powerful, and even crippling, body blows to the president.

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New Study Blows Apart Obama’s Imaginary World

04.10.2012 - 2:45 PM

A new study by Chuck Blahous, public trustee for Medicare and Social Security, blows to smithereens the claim that the Affordable Care Act (aka ObamaCare) will cut the deficit. According to Blahous, President Obama’s health care law unambiguously worsens the nation’s already unsustainable fiscal path. Among its key findings are these:

· Even under an optimistic scenario, the health care law will add more than $1.15 trillion to federal spending over the next decade.

· The law will add more than $340 billion and as much as $530 billion to federal deficits over the same period, and increasing amounts thereafter.

· To ensure the health care law doesn’t worsen the nation’s fiscal outlook, two-thirds of the subsidies must be repealed or other fiscal offsets found before benefits begin in 2014.

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A Very Fundamental Change

03.27.2012 - 4:00 PM

In oral argument today in the Supreme Court regarding the individual mandate in the Affordable Care Act, Justice Anthony Kennedy–almost certainly the swing vote here–said the following to the Solicitor General (page 30 of the transcript, which, along with the audio, can be found here):

JUSTICE KENNEDY: But the reason, the reason this is concerning, is because it requires the individual to do an affirmative act. In the law of torts our tradition, our law, has been that you don’t have the duty to rescue someone if that person is in danger. The blind man is walking in front of a car and you do not have a duty to stop him absent some relation between you. And there is some severe moral criticisms of that rule, but that’s generally the rule.

And here the government is saying that the Federal Government has a duty to tell the individual citizen that it must act, and that is different from what we have in previous cases and that changes the relationship of the Federal Government to the individual in the very fundamental way.

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