Do you want to know why?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRgB2eeHZEw
SIRIUS XM SATELLITE RADIO FORUM
Do you want to know why?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRgB2eeHZEw
Carville: A Supreme Court loss will help Democrats
Posted by
CNN Political Unit
(CNN) - While the Obama administration fights to protect the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, Democratic strategist and CNN contributor James Carville said a Supreme Court overruling may not be such a bad thing for the president, politically.
"I think this will be the best thing that has ever happened to the Democratic Party," Carville said Tuesday on CNN's "The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer."
He added: "You know, what the Democrats are going to say, and it is completely justified, 'We tried, we did something, go see a 5-4 Supreme Court majority'."
Carville, who gained fame working on Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign, predicted health care costs will only increase in the future, in which case Republicans will be to blame for leading the drive to expel a federal program designed to help Americans cover those costs.
"Then the Republican Party will own the healthcare system for the foreseeable future. And I really believe that. That is not spin," Carville said.
Republican and RedState.com editor Erik Erikson, meanwhile argued that an overruling would represent more mainstream sentiments than not.
"Both sides, not just the Democrat side, even if the laws were upheld or struck down, there is a 5-4 conservative majority, and historically you see Republicans picking justices who have a greater propensity to gravitate to the left than you see Democrat judges propensity to gravitate to the right," Erikson, also a CNN contributor, said. "This will be an undercurrent issue for both sides, though."
3/28/12 at 12:16 PM 122Comments
Frank Rich on the National Circus: Why the Supreme Court Can Only Help Obama
By Frank Rich
If the Supreme Court overturns Obamacare, how does Obama respond?
Just keep moving. The decision is scheduled to come down in June. The election will be more than four months away — an eternity in politics.
But everyone says the Affordable Care Act is Obama’s signature achievement so far. How can he just walk away?
He can take credit for the provisions that Americans love: coverage for the young up to age 26 on their parents’ policies; lowered drug costs for the elderly; and, most of all, the ban on insurance companies either raising premiums or denying coverage to those with preexisting conditions. He can also point out that the Romney-Ryan budget will maim Medicare, another hugely popular health-care provision created by Democrats.
The popular parts of the health-care law could be unsustainable if the Court strikes down the mandate, however. Premiums will skyrocket.
By then it will be 2014, and, as James Carville correctly pointed out this week, the GOP “will own the healthcare system for the foreseeable future.” The Democrats can heap the blame for rising costs and every other health-care ill on the Republicans, who to this day have not offered a plausible alternative to Obamacare. Indeed, Carville argues that a court decision against Obama “will be the best thing that has ever happened to the Democratic Party.” That’s hyperbole, but he’s onto something.
Then where does that leave Romney? Can he Etch A Sketch away from his own support of an individual mandate?
Rick Santorum is right about at least one thing: Romney is the worst possible Republican candidate to debate Obama about health care. If the mandate survives in court, and the GOP base goes ballistic, the Democrats can keep reminding voters that Romney was “the godfather” of the mandate (as David Plouffe put it last weekend) in Massachusetts and can keep replaying that “I like mandates” Romney clip from that 2008 GOP debate. But it gets even worse for Mitt. He revealed (in a Tuesday night interview with Jay Leno, yet) that he is even against the Obamacare provision favored by 85 percent of the public, according to a recent poll — the requirement that insurance companies cover those who are already sick. Here’s how Romney put it to Jay: “If they are 45 years old and they show up and say I want insurance because I have heart disease, it's like, hey guys — we can't play the game like that.” Turns out he has no more empathy for that middle-aged man with heart disease than he does for the workers he shredded in his lucrative games at Bain.
So who would a repeal of Obamacare hurt most?
The biggest victims will be the some 30 million Americans who have no health insurance. The rest of us, who one way or another will keep picking up the bill for their medical care, will also pay a price. In the political arena, the court’s decision, up or down, is a win-win for Obama and a lose-lose for Romney, who at this late date hasn’t figured out how to answer health-care questions on the Tonight Show, let alone in a debate with the president.
The Obama administration pushed to get this case on the docket before the election. Are they going to regret that?
For all the reasons above, no. It was a shrewd move. Whatever happens, it diffuses the issue well before November 6.
A hot mike caught Obama telling Russian president Dmitri Medvedev that he would have "more flexibility" to negotiate missile defense after the elections. Can the Romney camp make political hay out of that?
Karl Rove is already on record saying that this supposed gaffe could have “a big negative impact on Mr. Obama’s reelection.” But the impact, if there was any, has already dissipated because (a) what Obama said to Medvedev had the virtue of being actually true; (b) America’s nuclear strategy with Russia, though a 24/7 obsession to the neocons Rove pals around with, is no more determinative an issue in the 2012 election than any other foreign policy matter, the war in Afghanistan included; (c) Romney has already muffed his response, by vilifying not only Obama but Russia — in hysterical terms more appropriate to the Khrushchev era. Memo to Mitt: The Cold War is over. Few Americans care that the Pope is currently frolicking with the Castro brothers in Havana.
Until this week's polls, Santorum had been trouncing Romney in Wisconsin. Now Romney is ahead. Is the GOP nomination battle over?
You betcha. And the big winner remains Obama, who is ahead in the three battleground states of Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania in the new Quinnipiac poll out this week, thanks to the wholesale desertion of women from the GOP. A new national Washington Post-ABC News poll finds Obama’s approval rating at 53, Romney’s at 34.
Americans are evenly divided on the overall law, with 47 percent supporting it, according to Pew Research. And a New York Times/CBS News poll finds that many of the law's key provisions are backed by large majorities: the law's popular features include the requirement that insurance companies cover people with pre-existing conditions (85 percent), letting children stay on parents' policies until age 26 (68 percent) and cutting the cost of prescription drugs for seniors (77 percent).
Here's a breakdown of what is at stake if the Supreme Court strikes down the law:
BENEFITS ALREADY IN PLACE: Although key benefits of the ACA won't be implemented until 2014, significant changes are already in place. For example, 2.5 million young adults age 19 to 25 are now covered on their parents' policies. For Medicare, the first steps to close the gap in prescription drug coverage -- the notorious "donut hole" -- saved $2.1 billion for nearly 3.6 million seniors last year, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
STATE EXCHANGES: State insurance exchanges, which are being set up now and will fully launch in 2014, will open up access to insurance for anyone who can't access group healthcare coverage through the workplace -- a crucial, growing problem in an economy characterized by volatility and stubbornly high levels of structural unemployment.
For example, nine million Americans age 50 to 64 were uninsured as of 2010 -- up from 5.3 million in 2002, according to The Commonwealth Fund. Too young for Medicare, their only option now is the individual insurance market, where premium prices are high, coverage is partial and many can't buy policies at all due to pre-existing conditions. Nine million individuals were turned down for coverage in the individual market over the past three years due to pre-existing conditions, Commonwealth says.
Starting in 2014, the law will ban charging higher premiums or denying coverage based on health or age, and insurance companies will no longer be permitted to disqualify applicants based on pre-existing conditions. And applicants will be eligible for federal subsidies on the cost of coverage if they make less than 400 percent of the federally defined poverty level -- currently $92,000 for a family of four. For this group, the subsidy uses a sliding scale to hold costs as a share of income between 2 percent and 9.5 percent.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that 23 million Americans will gain coverage through the state exchanges by 2019. "That's a very sweeping change for people who need to retire early, are unemployed, or have a job that doesn't offer health care benefits," says Sara Collins, vice president for affordable insurance at The Commonwealth Fund.
The process will start with an application for insurance submitted to your state exchange; depending on your income, you'll be eligible to buy a policy in the exchange -- or receive coverage under Medicaid.
MEDICAID EXPANSION: Medicaid primarily serves parents with very low incomes, and few states cover adults who do not have children. The ACA provides federal funding for a dramatic expansion of Medicaid. The new program will serve all households that are living around the federal poverty level -- about $30,000 in annual income for a family of four. Fifty-seven percent of adults in that income range were uninsured for at least part of 2011, and 41 percent were uninsured for one year or longer.
So that's what's at stake if the healthcare reform law is struck down by the Supreme Court. All told, 31 million Americans who otherwise would have health insurance won't be covered at the end of this decade, and we'll be back to the drawing board on healthcare reform.
(Editing by Beth Pinsker Gladstone and Andrea Evans)
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/whats-...133908100.html
So Obama will look good if the Supreme Court strikes down his "landmark" legislation? Great spin. The Supreme Court strikes it down and the Republicans now own it? Carville, he's a funny guy.
Frank Rich is funny too? lol. I quess we will know in the not too distant future how this will turn out for both President Obama and the Republican Party. There will be lots of objective evidence so we will know whether Mr. Carville or Mr. SeriouslyWrong is the more accurate.
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2...nt.php?ref=fpa
Conservatives Struggle With Key Anti ‘Obamacare’ Argument
Justice Antonin Scalia
BRIAN BEUTLER MARCH 30, 2012, 5:02 AM 8997 60
For the challengers’ constitutional attack against the individual mandate in President Obama’s health care law to withstand scrutiny, they need to maintain two key questionable arguments.
The first is the plaintiffs’ claim that the law’s mandate and the penalty enacted to enforce the mandate are fully distinct. Their challenge depends on the court viewing the mandate as a command, and not part of a more general incentive.
Relatedly, they claim that the command itself is meant to draw non-participants into a market they may not want to enter. For this to fly, they have to contend that the market the government is regulating — or that Congress intended to regulate — is the market for health insurance and not the much broader market for health care services.
This has become a central point of contention, and it could be an issue on which the court’s decision turns. And yet squaring the challenger’s argument with the history and purpose of the health care law presents opponents of the law with a question they’ve had a very hard time answering.
“The commerce is not the health insurance market,” former Reagan Solicitor General Charles Fried told the Washington Post. “The commerce is the health-care market, as Verrilli said a million times. And it’s very hard to deny that.”
Paul Clement — the challengers’ attorney — tried his best. But this was one line of argument he, and his conservative fellow travelers on the Supreme Court bench, had a hard time sustaining.
“This statute undeniably operates in the health insurance market,” he told the court Tuesday. “And the government can’t say that everybody is in that market. The whole problem is that everybody is not in that market, and they want to make everybody get into that market.”
Enter Justice Elena Kagan with the obvious counterpoint. “Well, doesn’t that seem a
little bit, Mr. Clement, cutting the baloney thin?” she asked rhetorically. “I mean, health insurance exists only for the purpose of financing health care. The two are inextricably interlinked. We don’t get insurance so that we can stare at our insurance certificate. We get it so that we can go and access health care.”
Here’s Clement’s attempt to break that link.
“Well, Justice Kagan, I’m not sure that’s right. I think what health insurance does and what all insurance does is it allows you to diversify risk. And so it’s not just a matter of I’m paying now instead of paying later. That’s credit. Insurance is different than credit. Insurance guarantees you an up-front, locked-in payment, and you won’t have to pay any more than that even if you incur much great expenses. And in every other market that I know of for insurance, we let people basically make the decision whether they are relatively risk averse, whether they are relatively non-risk averse, and they can make the judgment.”
His argument, though, drew him directly into the analogy that conservatives like to avoid: car insurance. State governments mandate that car owners carry insurance. There’s little doubt the federal government could issue a similar mandate if needed.
Here’s his exchange with Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: But we don’t in car insurance, meaning we tell people, buy car — not we, the states do, although you’re going to — I’ll ask you the question, do you think that if some States decided not to impose an insurance requirement, that the federal government would be without power to legislate and require every individual to buy car insurance?
MR. CLEMENT: Well, Justice Sotomayor, let me say this, which is to say — you’re right in the first point to say that it’s the states that do it, which makes it different right there. But it’s also -*
JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: Well, that goes back to the substantive due process question. Is this a Lochner era argument that only the States can do this, even though it affects commerce? Cars indisputably affect commerce. So are you arguing that because the states have done it all along, the federal government is no
longer permitted to legislate in this area?
MR. CLEMENT: No. I think you might make a different argument about cars than you would make about health insurance, unless you tried to say — but, you know, we’re -*
JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: Health insurance — I mean, I’ve never gotten into an accident, thankfully, and I hope never. The vast majority of people have never gotten into an accident where they have injured others; yet, we pay for it dutifully every year on the possibility that at some point, we might get into that accident.
MR. CLEMENT: But, Justice Sotomayor, what I think is different is there is lots of people in Manhattan, for example, that don’t have car insurance because they don’t have cars. And so they have the option of withdrawing from that market. It’s not a direct imposition from the government. So even the car market is different from this market, where there is no way to get outside of the regulatory web. And that’s, I think, one of the real problems with this because, I mean, we take as a given -*
JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: But you’re — but the given is that virtually everyone, absent some intervention from above, meaning that someone’s life will be cut short in a fatal way, virtually everyone will use health care.
MR. CLEMENT: At some point, that’s right.
It breaks down pretty quickly. But that doesn’t mean conservative justices aren’t sympathetic to the argument anyhow.
“I don’t agree with you that the relevant market here is health care,” said Justice Antonin Scalia. “You’re not regulating health care. You’re regulating insurance.”
Chief Justice John Roberts tried a different tack. “You say health insurance is not purchased for its own sake, like a car or broccoli; it is a means of financing health care consumption and covering universal risks,” he noted. “Well, a car or broccoli aren’t purchased for their own sake, either. They’re purchased for the sake of transportation or, in broccoli, covering the need for food. I don’t understand that distinction.”
“The difference, Mr. Chief Justice, is that health insurance is the means of payment for health care, and broccoli is not the means of payment for anything else,” objected Solicitor General Donald Verrilli Jr.
“It’s the means of satisfying a basic human need,” Roberts rebutted. “[J]ust as insurance is the means of satisfying [a basic human need].”
......Another $17 trillion surprise found in Obamacare
By Neil Munro - The Daily Caller | The Daily Caller – Fri, Mar 30, 2012
Senate Republican staffers continue to look though the 2010 Obamacare law to see what’s in it, and their latest discovery is a massive $17 trillion funding gap.
“The more we learn about the bill, the more we learn it is even more unaffordable than was suspected,” said Ala. Sen. Jeff Sessions, the Republican’s budget chief in the Senate.
“The bill has to be removed from the books because we don’t have the money,” he said.
The hidden shortfall between new Obamacare spending and new Obamacare taxes was revealed just after Supreme Court judges grilled the law’s supporters about its compliance with the constitution’s limits on government activity. If the judges don’t strike down the law, Obamacare will force taxpayers find another $17 trillion to pay for Obamacare’s spending.
The $17 trillion in extra promises was revealed by an analysis of the law’s long-term requirements. The additional obligations, when combined with existing Medicare and Medicaid funding shortfalls, leaves taxpayers on the hook for an extra $82 trillion over the next 75 years.
The federal government already owes $15 trillion in debt, including $5 trillion in funds borrowed during Obama’s term.
That $82 billion in unfunded future expenses is more more than five years of wealth generated by the United States, which now produces just over $15 trillion of value per year.
The $82 trillion funding gap is equal to 28 years of the the current federal budget, which was $3.36 trillion for 2011.
The new $17 trillion funding gap is five times the current federal budget.
Currently, the Social Security system is $7 trillion in debt over the next 65 years. Medicare will eat up $38 trillion in future taxes, and Medicaid will consume another $2o trillion of the taxpayer’s wealth, according to estimates prepared by the actuarial office at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
The short-term cost of the Obamacare law is $2.6 trillion, almost triple the $900 billion cost promised by Obama and his Democratic allies, said Sessions.
The extra $17 billion gap was discovered by applying standard CMMS estimates and models to the law’s spending obligations, Sessions said.
http://news.yahoo.com/another-17-tri...133210667.html
Just remember this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hV-05TLiiLU
http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/04/0...re-reform.html
Uphold healthcare reform
OUR OPINION: A workable solution for a pressing national problem
BY THE MIAMI HERALD EDITORIAL
HERALDED@MIAMIHERALD.COM
Something has to be done about healthcare in the United States. As the president of Blue Cross (now Florida Blue) told The Herald’s Editorial Board last week: “The costs are rising at a rate the private market won’t accept, and which the public sector — the government — can’t pay for.”
The indispensable need for change — to cut costs, provide universal coverage, increase efficiency and eliminate waste and unfair practices — will exist regardless of whether the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that Congress passed two years ago is upheld.
Last week’s three-day debate over the merits of the act before the Supreme Court gave the nation a valuable civics lesson. Lawyers for both sides engaged in a passionately argued yet respectful debate, and the justices eagerly jumped in with pointed questions and observations that steered the argument toward the most pressing issues.
The court should uphold the law. But whatever decision it makes, there can be no denying that reform in one form or another is coming our way because healthcare is too important to ignore.
In many ways, reform is already here. The linchpin of the Affordable Care Act is the so-called “individual mandate,” requiring everyone to buy healthcare insurance or pay a penalty in order to make universal coverage a fiscally sound reality. Ironically, that was the focus of much of the debate the justices heard, yet it doesn’t kick in until 2014, whereas many other provisions already have.
Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, some 2.5 million young people can stay on their parents’ insurance — today — until they reach 26. At least 250,000 small businesses have been able to claim a tax deduction to cover the healthcare of their employees. Prescription-drug discounts have saved seniors an estimated $3.2 billion. No one today can be turned down for insurance because of a pre-existing condition and insurance companies must devote at least 80 percent of premiums to medical care instead of profits or administrative costs.
In short, thanks to ACA, American healthcare is changing for the better. If the “individual mandate” survives the Supreme Court test, as it should, it will enshrine a basic principle of insurance, casting the net wide enough so that healthy patients balance those who are ill. But even if it doesn’t, other parts of the law are worth keeping — and must be paid for with a formula that allows insurance providers to offer services without going bankrupt.
Questions during last week’s debate made it clear that some judges are aware of this reality.
• If they deny the individual mandate, but keep the rest of the law, an uproar will ensue as insurance companies demand to know how they’re supposed to comply with the remaining provisions without an expanded premium base. The justices rightly seemed concerned about the consequences of going down this road.
• If the entire act is thrown out, the court will have upended a law whose beneficial effects are self-evident and which was enacted to remedy an intolerable situation — a broken healthcare system that excluded nearly 50 million Americans from insurance and whose costs were soaring out of control.
There is another fundamental reality that the court cannot ignore. The Obama administration devised an imperfect but workable and comprehensive solution to a pressing national problem. The Republicans offered none. Unless the court has a solution of its own, it should not turn back the clock.
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/04/0...#storylink=cpy
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