I have not read the opinion and may not do so but it appears C.J Roberts engaged in a political machination to make his decision appear Constitutional.
Stop and think where America has come from and where it is heading.
Politicians, at the Federal level, are elected to protect the well being of our nation and to decide its direction in furtherance of protecting America. Over the years, politicians have decided to expand the power and reach of the Federal government's invisible hand and thus they need to raise more and more money through taxation.
They have done this under the guise of various legislative rulings buttressed by the 16th Amendment allowing for taxing the sweat and blood of American productivity.
What we now have is a Federal Government that taxes us in order to direct where progressives believe we should be heading, mostly away from the Constitutional moorings of our Founders. Then these same politicians redistribute part of the money back to the states as long as the states use it in accordance with their wishes and restrictions and these same politicians retain enough of the taxed largess to expand the Federal bureaucracy and the power and scope of government..
Chief Justice Roberts seems to have upheld the government's authority to do what it wishes as long as it is called a tax thus causing mild heartburn for politicians who do not like the word tax.
However, I doubt Roberts' decision will result in less government, less debt and less erosion of our personal freedoms.
Therefore, it is a bad decision if you believe the Founders were on the right track and a good one if you and the 'Obamaites' want to continue careening our nation off the track.
I have no doubt the cost of health care will rise, the quality received will decline and the public will fall in line as the feckless dolts Americans have come to be.
Whenever government engages in something the cost rises and the quality declines. There is enough empirical evidence to support that fact.
In essence and in the final analysis Roberts told Americans it is your responsibility to have the government you want. (See 1 below.)
---
Henninger nails it - who has given any thought to the fact that 'Obamascare' is going to turn doctors into bookkeepers! (See 2 below)
---
Timidity, a confused staff and listening to too many advisers instead of your own heart and head - a prescription for how to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. (See 3 below.)
---
Granddaughter Stella plays Uncle Sam in wishing you a bubbly bath and sudsy Happy Fourth!
Many others are worried about the government budget too, especially the “fiscal cliff” of huge tax increases and spending cuts that will begin next year if Congress doesn’t act.
“It is critical to remove the uncertainty created by the 'fiscal cliff' as well as promptly raise the debt ceiling, pursuing a pace of deficit reduction that does not sap the economic recovery," the IMF says in a new report.
© 2012 Moneynews. All rights reserved.
1a)IMF’s Lagarde: US Must Address ‘Fiscal Cliff’ Now to Avoid Disaster
By Forrest Jones
The U.S. economy is growing, albeit tepidly, and can continue to improve provided lawmakers address the fast-approaching “fiscal cliff” sooner rather than later, says Christine Lagarde, managing director at the International Monetary Fund, a multilateral lending institution.
The fiscal cliff will hit at the last day of the year, when Bush-era tax cuts and other tax holidays expire right when automatic spending cuts designated under the 2011 debt ceiling agreement kick in.
The combination of tax hikes and spending cuts at the same time could siphon billions out of the economy next year alone and derail recovery.
"If those risks materialize, or if the threat of it grows, that could really, Number one, erode confidence and Number two, if they were to materialize, it could contract the U.S. economy that we see growing in 2012 at about 2 percent and 2.3 percent in 2013," Lagarde tells CNBC.
"But if these risks were to materialize, it would reduce that growth to almost nothing. The second downside risk is the risk coming from the outside. That is the eurozone. Deterioration of the situation in the eurozone area would be a risk to the U.S. recovery."
The sooner the government gets busy the better and that goes beyond temporary measures taken by the government.
"It would be far better, far better that it is addressed early on and before we get close to the risk. We think that the debt ceiling risk is likely to materialize very early in 2013, and I'm sure the Treasury Department can use certain tools and mechanism to push the deficit cliff a little bit into 2013," Lagarde says.
"If there was an agreement early on, it would be a serious confidence booster for the U.S. economy."
Some lawmakers are suggesting allowing the fiscal cliff to occur on January 1, 2013.
The logic, however, would be that after November's elections, a new government could quickly tackle the problem, as neither party wants the damage from the fiscal cliff to occur, and with the government flush in fresh tax revenues at the beginning of the year, a quick decision on adjusting tax hikes and spending cuts would cause only minimal damage, even if tax cuts, for example, were retroactive.
"My preference would not be to accept a lesser solution than you could get in February and March just to say that you got it done before the end of the year," say Senator Roy Blunt, a member of Republican leadership and congressional liaison to Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, according to Reuters.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2)Henninger: ObamaCare's Lost Tribe: Doctors
The practice of medicine is the Obama health-care law's biggest loser
Back at the at the dawn of ObamaCare in June 2009, speaking to the American Medical Association's annual meeting, President Obama said: "No matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise: If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. Period."
But will your doctor be able to keep you? Or will your doctor even want to keep you, rather than quit medicine?
For the longest time now, since day one of the Affordable Care Act, we have been having arguments over the mandate to purchase health-care insurance, requirements that insurance companies accept policyholders regardless of health, and price discrimination in insurance policies.
![[image]](http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/OB-TQ162_wl0705_D_20120704181024.jpg)
Corbis
And of course this past week, the Supreme Court—or something resembling the Supreme Court—outputted a decision on the tax status of the insurance-purchase mandate, the states' obligation to pay for Medicaid and as a bonus, the Commerce Clause.
Have you noticed what got lost in this historic rumble? Doctors. Remember them?
ObamaCare has been a war over the processing of insurance claims. It has been fought by institutional interests representing insurance, hospital and pharmaceutical firms. The doctor-patient relationship, or what used to be called "the practice of medicine," has sunk beneath these waves.
Barack Obama, a savvy pol, understood from the start that rationalizing payments claims through the maw of these private and public bureaucracies was not what the average person thinks of as "health care." To any normal person, health care means that when you or yours get really sick, the doctors and nurses who attend to you will push all else aside to give you medical help.
Thus, the constant Obama chorus that you can "keep your own doctor." No one knows better than Barack Obama that his law sends the nation's doctors on a voyage into an uncharted health-care world in which they are just along for the ride with their patients.
A Wall Street Journal story the day after the Supreme Court ruling examined in detail its impact across the "health sector." The words "doctor," "physician" and "nurse" appeared nowhere in this report. The piece, however, did cite the view of one CEO who runs a chain of hospitals, explaining how they'd deal with the law's expected $155 billion in compensation cuts. "We will make it up in volume," he said.
Volume? Would that be another word for human beings? It is now. At Obama Memorial, docs won't be treating patients. They'll be processing "volume." And then, with what time and energy remains in the day, they'll be inputting medical data to comply with the law's new Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS), lodged in the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid.
Here's the Centers' own description of what PQRS does: "The program provides an incentive payment to practices with eligible professionals (identified on claims by their individual National Provider Identifier [NPI] and Tax Identification Number [TIN]) who satisfactorily report data on quality measures for covered Physician Fee Schedule (PFS) services furnished to Medicare Part B Fee-for-Service (FFS)."
We're all pressed for thinking time these days, but the one group we should make sure has time to focus on what's in front of them is doctors treating patients. Instead, they'll also be doing mandated data dumps for far-off panels of experts.
Doubts, even among believers, have begun to emerge about what ObamaCare could do to the practice of medicine. A remarkable and important piece by Drs. Christine K. Cassel and Sachin H. Jain in the June 27 Journal of the American Medical Association directly asks: "Does Measurement Suppress Motivation?"
The question raised by the article is whether imposing pay-for-performance measurements on individual physicians does more harm than good: "[C]lose attention must be given to whether and how these initiatives motivate physicians and not turn physicians into pawns working only toward specific measurable outcomes, losing the complex problem-solving and diagnostic capabilities essential to their role in quality of patient care, and diminish their sense of professional responsibility by making it a market commodity."
This is an important piece, because Dr. Cassel is part of the intellectual foundation for the measured-directives movement. The saying that comes to mind reading these misgivings is that it's better late than never to notice that the core relationship between doctor and patient is being eroded. Except that in the wake of Chief Justice Roberts's upholding of the Affordable Care Act, it's too late and we're beyond never.
Mitt Romney needs a way to talk about health care in America. This isn't just a fight over insurance companies. It's about the people at the center of health care—doctors. The Affordable Care Act will damage that most crucial of all life relationships, that between an ill person and his physician. Barack Obama's assertion that we all can keep our doctors is false. You could line up practicing physicians from here to Boston to explain to Mr. Romney why that is so.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
3)Romney's Tax Confusion
The candidate's response on the ObamaCare mandate reveals larger campaign problems.
If Mitt Romney loses his run for the White House, a turning point will have been his decision Monday to absolve President Obama of raising taxes on the middle class. He is managing to turn the only possible silver lining in Chief Justice John Roberts's ObamaCare salvage operation—that the mandate to buy insurance or pay a penalty is really a tax—into a second political defeat.
Appearing on MSNBC, close Romney adviser Eric Fehrnstrom was asked by host Chuck Todd if Mr. Romney "agrees with the president" and "believes that you shouldn't call the tax penalty a tax, you should call it a penalty or a fee or a fine?"
"That's correct," Mr. Fehrnstrom replied, before attempting some hapless spin suggesting that Mr. Obama must be "held accountable" for his own "contradictory" statements on whether it is a penalty or tax. Predictably, the Obama campaign and the media blew past Mr. Fehrnstrom's point, jumped on the tax-policy concession, and declared the health-care tax debate closed.
Assistant editorial page editor James Freeman on the GOP's muddled message over whether the individual mandate constitutes a tax. Photo: Associated Press
For conservative optimists who think Mr. Fehrnstrom misspoke or is merely dense, his tax absolution gift to Mr. Obama was confirmed by campaign spokeswoman Andrea Saul, who tried the same lame jujitsu spin. In any event, Mr. Fehrnstrom is part of the Boston coterie who are closest to Mr. Romney, and he wouldn't say such a thing without the candidate's approval.
In a stroke, the Romney campaign contradicted Republicans throughout the country who had used the Chief Justice's opinion to declare accurately that Mr. Obama had raised taxes on the middle class. Three-quarters of those who will pay the mandate tax will make less than $120,000 a year, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The Romney high command has muddied the tax issue in a way that will help Mr. Obama's claims that he is merely taxing rich folks like Mr. Romney. And it has made it that much harder for Republicans to again turn ObamaCare into the winning issue it was in 2010.
Why make such an unforced error? Because it fits with Mr. Romney's fear of being labeled a flip-flopper, as if that is worse than confusing voters about the tax and health-care issues. Mr. Romney favored the individual mandate as part of his reform in Massachusetts, and as we've said from the beginning of his candidacy his failure to admit that mistake makes him less able to carry the anti-ObamaCare case to voters.
Mr. Romney should use the Supreme Court opinion as an opening to say that now that the mandate is defined as a tax for the purposes of the law, he will work to repeal it. This would let Mr. Romney show voters that Mr. Obama's spending ambitions are so vast that they can't be financed solely by the wealthy but will inevitably hit the middle class.
Democrats would point to the Massachusetts record, but Mr. Romney could reply that was before the Supreme Court had spoken, that he had promised Bay Staters not to raise taxes, and so now the right policy is to repeal the tax along with the rest of ObamaCare. The tragedy is that for the sake of not abandoning his faulty health-care legacy in Massachusetts, Mr. Romney is jeopardizing his chance at becoming President.
Associated Press
Perhaps Mr. Romney is slowly figuring this out, because in a July 4 interview he stated himself that the penalty now is a "tax" after all. But he offered no elaboration, and so the campaign looks confused in addition to being politically dumb.
This latest mistake is of a piece with the campaign's insular staff and strategy that are slowly squandering an historic opportunity. Mr. Obama is being hurt by an economic recovery that is weakening for the third time in three years. But Mr. Romney hasn't been able to take advantage, and if anything he is losing ground.
The Romney campaign thinks it can play it safe and coast to the White House by saying the economy stinks and it's Mr. Obama's fault. We're on its email list and the main daily message from the campaign is that "Obama isn't working." Thanks, guys, but Americans already know that. What they want to hear from the challenger is some understanding of why the President's policies aren't working and how Mr. Romney's policies will do better.
Meanwhile, the Obama campaign is assailing Mr. Romney as an out-of-touch rich man, and the rich man obliged by vacationing this week at his lake-side home with a jet-ski cameo. Team Obama is pounding him for Bain Capital, and until a recent ad in Ohio the Romney campaign has been slow to respond.
Team Obama is now opening up a new assault on Mr. Romney as a job outsourcer with foreign bank accounts, and if the Boston boys let that one go unanswered, they ought to be fired for malpractice.
***
All of these attacks were predictable, in particular because they go to the heart of Mr. Romney's main campaign theme—that he can create jobs as President because he is a successful businessman and manager. But candidates who live by biography typically lose by it. See President John Kerry.
The biography that voters care about is their own, and they want to know how a candidate is going to improve their future. That means offering a larger economic narrative and vision than Mr. Romney has so far provided. It means pointing out the differences with specificity on higher taxes, government-run health care, punitive regulation, and the waste of politically-driven government spending.
Mr. Romney promised Republicans he was the best man to make the case against President Obama, whom they desperately want to defeat. So far Mr. Romney is letting them down.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
No comments:
Post a Comment