Gov. Elect Haley Asks Obama To Scrap Health Care

What amazed me about the FLA case was that Eric Holder and Kathleen Sebelius trotted out that old, well-refuted phony analogy; that mandatory health insurance is just like mandatory auto insurance!

In their editorial they say:

Everyone wants health care to be affordable and available when they need it. But we have to stop imposing extra costs on people who carry insurance, and that means everyone who can afford coverage needs to carry minimum health coverage starting in 2014.

If we want to prevent insurers from denying coverage to people with preexisting conditions, it’s essential that everyone have coverage.

Imagine what would happen if everyone waited to buy car insurance until after they got in an accident.

Premiums would skyrocket, coverage would be unaffordable, and responsible drivers would be priced out of the market.

The same is true for health insurance.

Without an individual responsibility provision, controlling costs and ending discrimination against people with preexisting conditions doesn’t work.

Bad analogy…..still.

1.) Drivers carry required insurance to cover damage done to others, not themselves.
2.) States impose the insurance requirement, not the federal government, because states license drivers and vehicles.
3.) Driving is a voluntary activity.
4.) Only driving on PUBLIC roads requires being insured.
5.) Drivers only file claims when significant damage to their own car or others occurs.
6.) Auto insurance doesn’t pay for routine maintenance, like oil changes, lube jobs, and tire rotation.
7.) Auto insurance is priced according to risk factors. (ObamaCare removes all incentive to reduce risk because the federal government is preventing insurers from risk-pricing health insurance to impose government-approved fairness.)

Mata —

Ha ha ha ha! You guys are too busy to comment on the ONLY Obamacare case your side actually won? No time to comment on a case deciding that Obamacare was, in part, unconstitutional, using a laughably weak legal argument to undercut the one plank that was most publicly despised from an otherwise popular statutory scheme? Good one!

Look, I admire the restraint. Because after the libertarians at The Volohk Conspiracy pantsed that judge’s decision, there was not much left to work with, now was there? I would love to see if any other cons actually trumpet this decision, given the fatal flaw in the judge’s “reasoning”.

Nan G. —

A few responses:

1.) Drivers carry required insurance to cover damage done to others, not themselves.

Not entirely true and missing in focus. First, policies will also cover your physical and automobile damages if you are hit by an uninsured motorist. Second, insurance policies do not cover “damage” in the physical sense; rather, they provide financial coverage for the damages (physical and automobile) caused in an accident. Stated differently, auto insurance is all about providing a bucket of cash after an accident if you cased it or if you are hit by an uninsured person.

2.) States impose the insurance requirement, not the federal government, because states license drivers and vehicles.

There is no rational argument that the feds could not mandate auto insurance if the states had not already established a regime addressing the issue. This is especially true given that (a) a significant percentage of the most serious, big dollar damage accidents occur on federally funded roads or highways; and (b) uninsured driving obviously impacts interstate commerce. So the auto insurance regime may not be the best analogy, but NOT for the reasons you propose.

3.) Driving is a voluntary activity.

So is causing an accident in your car and so is seeking medical care; but in both cases, you have no idea WHEN you are going to cause an accident or when you are going to need emergency care. Which is one reason why you should be required to have the coverage BEFORE others incur the expenses associated with your unplanned voluntary activity. In addition, the reason we compel people to have auto insurance is to establish FINANCIAL RESPONSIBILITY for your damage; ditto health insurance. If you are insured, the rest of us do not have to pay your health care bills indirectly if you get sick or injured and a hospital has to provide uncompensated care to you.

4.) Only driving on PUBLIC roads requires being insured.

Not true. In my state, for example, everyone with a license has to show financial responsibility and every owner of a vehicle has to show it, too. And the mandate has nothing to do with WHERE you drive, because you could be driving down a shared driveway, or in a parking lot, and hit another car. You STILL need insurance because the damage is the same whether you are on a public road or on private property.

7.) Auto insurance is priced according to risk factors. (ObamaCare removes all incentive to reduce risk because the federal government is preventing insurers from risk-pricing health insurance to impose government-approved fairness.)

Not true. First of all, not all health insurance policies have such risk analysis built into the pricing because some of them apply the “risk analysis” when they decide what claims are compensable or not (due to pre-existing condition exclusions). In addition, the insurance companies are happy to get rid of the pre-existing condition aspect of the risk analysis PROVIDED everyone is put into the risk pool. THAT is why your claim that “Obamacare removes all incentive to reduce risk” is inaccurate: the risk analysis is simply shifted to the entire pool because no one insurance company risks “holding the bag” for pre-existing conditions. In addition, since Obamacare includes incentives to do preventative medicine, you will alleviate big dollar conditions by early detection and early treatment. THAT alters the risk analysis, too, because diabetes is diagnosed in 2010 instead of 2012, so you won’t lose a leg in 2015 as you would with a later diagnosis.

Health Care/Insurance Regulation is the VENUE of the STATES, not the Feds.
READ the 10th Amendment. The Constitution as WRITTEN made that Clear.

@ Curt, I posted on His subject on Open Thread yesterday. He can go check it.
Catering to those that make the most smoke & noise is an unrewarding task.
He seems to be reading impaired anyway. Poor Fella….. 😛

Billy Bob can find it there.

>>“Then give us our money back,” she told Obama.

“He said that he would have [Energy] Secretary Chu call me.”>>

Hey…maybe she should talk to Chris Christie….understand Secretary Chu is trying to collect money paid for that tunnel Christie isn’t going to build…like _THIS_ month. Surely Nikkie should be able to get her states funds back equally quickly…don’t you think??? Maybe Christie could pay Nikki instead…

>>Why don’t people sek coverage BEFORE there is a problem like reasonable people do?>>

It’s a problem if the person has a condition that is covered by one insurance company, then loses their job and has to be insured by a different company when they get a new job, and the different company turns them down because of the pre-existing condition. They can’t insure with company 1 due to change in employment, and can’t insure with company 2 (or perhaps any other company) because of the pre-existing condition. What we need is an insurance pool like they have for otherwise uninsurable drivers.

Breaking: Federal judge rules ObamaCare mandate unconstitutional; Update: Bill argues Congressional power without “logical limitation”

http://hotair.com/archives/2010/12/13/breaking-federal-judge-rules-obamacare-unconstitutional/

CNN has a breaking alert on a ruling by a federal judge in Virginia that rejects ObamaCare as unconstitutional:

A federal judge in Virginia has ruled parts of the sweeping health care reform effort led by President Obama to be unconstitutional. This is the first federal court to strike down the law, contradicting other recent rulings the law was permissible. The key issue of contention was the “individual mandate” requirement that most Americans purchase health insurance by 2014.

This case (Virginia v Sebelius) was the lawsuit brought by the states against ObamaCare. This is the test case that had the best chance of overturning the law, and the states have apparently won an important finding in the district court.

According to Dan Foster at NRO, the judge ruled that Congress “exceeded its authority” by imposing an individual mandate to purchase insurance.

Update: Actually, this suit was brought by Virginia alone. The other case brought by 20 other states in one suit is still pending.

Update II: Still waiting for more data from the opinion, but several commenters have mentioned the lack of a severability clause in ObamaCare to argue that this decision would invalidate the entire bill. Not so fast, wrote David Catron at American Spectator last week:

This is probably why the White House has made so much of recent rulings by U.S. District Judges George Steeh and Norman Moon, Clinton appointees who dismissed relatively inconsequential anti-PPACA lawsuits. The administration knows, of course, that the Virginia case presents a far more serious threat than either of these cases. It has already survived a motion to dismiss and it was heard in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, the famous “rocket docket” from which important cases are expeditiously launched to the U.S. Court of Appeals and beyond. As Judge Hudson put it during the October hearing, “[T]his is only one brief stop on the way to the United States Supreme Court.” Nonetheless, if he rules in favor of Virginia, the administration will no doubt claim it is ahead two-to-one.

The jumpiness of the White House notwithstanding, it is not a given that Judge Hudson will strike down the entire law. He has shown skepticism about the mandate, but that issue is relatively straightforward compared to the severability question. On the mandate, he can follow the example of Judges Steeh and Moon, who held that the decision notto engage in economic activity somehow constitutes “commerce” as the word is used in the Constitution, or he can rule that such reasoning does too much violence to the intent of the founders. On severability, Hudson’s choices are more numerous and the legal precedents are less auspicious. In fact, the Supreme Court recently invalidated an important part of the Sarbanes-Oxley accounting law, which contains no severability clause, while leaving the rest of its provisions in place.

It’s also a given that the Supreme Court will wind up deciding this, so any talk of severability at this point is academic.

Update III: Fox News is now reporting that Judge Hudson won’t issue an injunction against the entire ObamaCare law, which means that he’s seeing a de facto severability in it. Without the mandate, though, the system won’t work at all, which gives Congress a big opening to dismantle the rest.

Update IV: Gabe Malor has begun perusing the opinion and finds the heart of Hudson’s decision on page 24:

Judge Hudson (pg 24): mandate “exceeds the Commerce Clause powers vested in Congress under Article I”

Hudson also rejected the administration’s argument that this was permissible under taxation authority by noting that the administration had publicly disputed that it was a tax, and Congress had rejected that argument as well when passing the bill (pages 33-36). Instead, Hudson found it to be a “penalty,” and unconnected to any enumerated power (page 36).

Update V: Hudson hits the nail on the head with this:

Hudson rejected the government’s argument that it has the power under the Constitution to require individuals to buy health insurance, a provision that was set to take effect in 2014.

“Of course, the same reasoning could apply to transportation, housing or nutritional decisions,” Hudson wrote. “This broad definition of the economic activity subject to congressional regulation lacks logical limitation” and is unsupported by previous legal cases around the Commerce Clause of the Constitution.

Hudson — perhaps not inadvertently — just described the progressive agenda in a single sentence, and why the Constitution forbids it.

Stand by — more to come….

OK, There Ya Go… 😛

I love this Nikki gal! She’s the type of woman Republicans need at the top of the ticket.
As you can see by this late poll, Palin’s unfavorables are way to high to ever translate into political clout.

Poll: 57 Percent View Palin Unfavorably By Jeremy P. Jacobs
December 13, 2010 | 11:03 AM
Share Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin continues to be a highly polarizing figure, with a whopping 57 percent viewing her unfavorably according to a new poll.

The Bloomberg poll was conducted Dec. 4 to 7, surveyed 1,000 U.S. adults and had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percent.

So yeah, let’s hear three-cheers for Nikki!!!!

Hard Right —

When your only response is “why don’t you go to another site”, it tends to show the weakness and vapidity of your position. But I am used to that from you cons: you are so much more comfortable regurgitating non-sensical talking points than actually analyzing the facts, putting together a rational policy approach to solving a problem, discussing the positives and negatives of a particular policy approach, or actually EXECUTING something.

I remember some blogger once wrote “A conservative cannot govern for the same reason a vegetarian cannot make a good boeuf bourguignon: their heart is just not in it.” Seems to me the same can be said for rational discussion with Flopping Ace-sters: when it comes to the whole thinking and discussing thing, you cons are so bad at it because your heart is just not in it . . . .