The Roberts Court renders all laws meaningless as written

Another prime example of why we no longer have a system of checks and balances in this country. Probably the single worst decision of G.W. Bush was appointing Roberts to SCOTUS. He’s another back stabber. This is the second time public statements as to intent backed up what was written in the law were completely ignored. The first time it was ‘penalty’, this time it was Gruber’s statements and his ties to those who wrote the bill and to the person who signed it into law. One more nail in the coffin of our Republic.

Obviously, the Doomsday Device built into Obamacare (as screwed up as it is, just IMAGINE how screwed up the effort to fix it would be) is doing its job.

The court got this right.
They decided what counted was correct interpretation of what congress (overwhelmingly D) wanted. Congress WANTED to compel all americans to buy Obamacare.
Congress wanted to BLACKMAIL the states into exchanges and medicaid expansion and was SHOCKED when the majority rejected them.
The composition of that congress reflected what the voters wanted.
The court decided THE SPIRIT of this law was more important that the words of the law (since the words were …unimpeachable). THey then made the ridic effort to get some tortuous logic around this about the word ‘state’.

But never mind.
That president was SOLIDLY elected. That congress and senate was OVERWHELMINGLY defined by party, and the law was passed without a SINGLE R vote needed.
And now…..
we are GETTING THE GOVERNMENT WE DESERVE

GOOD AND HARD

@john:

As I would expect from a leftist, truth has no meaning nor value when it obstructs the march to your collectivist dystopia. This SCOTUS ruling has set the precident for active legislating from the bench, but solely in favor of the socialist destruction of first medicine, then any and all individual liberties that the US Constitution was designed to protect.

The words of the demonically inspired obamacare CLEARLY state that states must set up state run exchanges to obtain their federal subsidies of the grossly misnamed “Affordable Care” policies. The repeated videos of Gruber confirming exactly that, showing clearly that the obamacare law was written precisely as all other leftist programs in blatant bribery attempts to the states, is even admitted in the majority opinion. SCOTUS has absolutely followed Obama’s disgusting pattern of behavior in overstepping the clear limitations devised in the separation of powers between the executive, the legislature and the judiciary. The majority admits they are legislating, not practicing judicial oversight, when they write that they ruled this way against the clear wording (and the true intent of the Gruber-devised bribery attempt that failed in the majority of states refusing to run their own state exchanges) of the democrat imposed law because handing down the correct ruling would cause harm to people living in states that were smart enough not to accept the leftist federal bribe. This is unconscionable, as it completely destroys the concept of “rule of law”. The political elite isn’t even trying to hide their contempt for the Constitution, as this brazenly unethical ruling shows a contempt for our founding charter unlike any I have ever seen.

This should be a clear signal that the so-called gay “marriage” decision will also be of heavy leftist tilt. We will see even more obscene fascist state tactics against those who falsely believe their First Amendment right to free expression of religion is worth anything other than what the memory hole stuffers will say it believes.

Time for a third party that is based on true conservative, American values. The GOP elitists are naught but progressive traitors pretending to be conservative during election run-ups. The democrats are blatant anti-American, totally amoral collectivists no better than the muslim terrorists the leftists frenetically protect.

The SCOTUS ruling has now defined that “2+2=5” when the political overlords say so. That is the bottom line. The republic is in V-fib and very close to asystole.

@john: I wonder when you cowardly, ball-less liberals will finally have the guts to fully implement the Abysmal Care Act so your useful idiots (Gruber’s Goobers) can finally feel the full sting of left wing failure and betrayal? You are always afraid of the next election… but there is ALWAYS another election?

The DOUBLE Supreme Court decision on this law puts the nail in the coffin of distinctly ‘separated’ arms of government.

The Supreme Court is NOT supposed to bend interpretation of a law or word to suit Congress’ and Admin’s malfunction and incompetence.

It should have rejected it, sent it back to be redone/rewritten.

This does not bode well.

@retire05:
Obama will guarantee the Chinese have all Americans’ private health records

@Greg:

Affordable implies nothing more than the fact that something is within one’s financial means. How something comes to be affordable is a separate question.

Only a left wing moron would think a product becomes more affordable within one’s financial means when it is funded by coercive taxation of another.

Perhaps some of us have different ideas about what sort of activities it’s most beneficial to subsidize.

Perhaps you would like to provide the portion of the U.S. Constitution that makes the services of another (health care) a right? If health care is a right, due to being a requirement some need to stay alive, then why do we not have a right to running water since it is an even greater requirement to sustain life? Try not paying your water bill, tell the water provider you have a right to that water and see how far you get.

@retire05, #17:

Only a left wing moron would think a product becomes more affordable within one’s financial means when it is funded by coercive taxation of another.

Perhaps you should read the definition of the word:

af•ford•a•ble (əˈfɔr də bəl, əˈfoʊr-)

adj.
considered to be within one’s financial means.

As I pointed out, what makes a thing affordable is a separate issue.

I have no problem with the idea that I must pay taxes to support the various things my government does. I consider myself fortunate to be affluent enough to do so. Those who are far more affluent than I am should feel the same way. They’ve benefited even more than myself from the system that makes it all possible. I don’t know why so many of them are so full of themselves that they can’t see that.

I realize that I won’t necessarily approve of everything that my government undertakes and uses my taxes for. That’s never been the case for anyone. It’s childish to think otherwise. You can’t always have everything exactly the way you want it. From what I can guess by the attitudes you sometimes express, that’s a very good thing.

In Obama’s ‘victory lap’ speech today at the very end….he said in part ” this health care law will help ….in this “New Economy”…. New Economy??
What does THAT mean?
I thought our Economy was thriving according to Obama, and his Administration – our “Government’??

If that is the case why call it a “New Economy” instead of saying ‘as we continue to grow the economy?’

This isn’t a slip of the tongue. This should perk up some ears like “Fundamentally Transform America” should have….

@Greg#19

I realize that I won’t necessarily approve of everything that my government undertakes and uses my taxes for.

Like what? Give us a thrill.

@FAITH7, #23:

I already provided an example.

@Greg:

Perhaps you should read the definition of the word:

af•ford•a•ble (əˈfɔr də bəl, əˈfoʊr-)

adj.
considered to be within one’s financial means.

As I pointed out, what makes a thing affordable is a separate issue.

Perhaps you should get a 5th grader to explain to you what “one’s” means, mean.

It is not affordable if you cannot manage the cost on your own and require a confiscation of money from others via taxation to provide it for you.

Damn, you’re an idiot.

One of the Justice’s remarks reminded me of a similar remark by a justice of the Kelo decision.
Basically, this is what we decided.
If you don’t like it, vote in different leaders.
Kelo has been overturned by most states in the country.
But it didn’t save the home of the Kelo family……it is a vacant lot to this day!
If you want more of the same, elect another Dem to the Presidency.
He/she picks SCOTUS choices.
All the Senate can do is confirm of not.

PS, Obama got caught spying on Merkle (head of Germany.)
http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/nsa-snooping/u-s-spy-scandal-triggers-outrage-paranoia-germany-n170366
Now he’s got caught spying on the head of France.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/06/24/us-france-wikileaks-idUSKBN0P32EM20150624
He has made it clear he considers Republicans worse ”enemies” than Iranians or Cubans.
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/apr/12/kerry-defends-obama-cuba-iran-foreign-policy
Think for a second he doesn’t spy on the members of the other two branches of gov’t?

@Greg:

You are out of your mind.

If obamacare is so damnably “affordable” then why do 80% of obamacare policies need to have 70-75% of the monthly premium costs paid for by taxpayers?

If obamacare is so beneficial, why has the employer mandate been postponed by unconstitutional executive fiat until after Obama leaves office?

If obamacare was designed to decrease ER usage through providing falsely portrayed “affordable” health insurance, why has ER usage INCREASED?

The CBO falsely claimed passage of obamacare would cut the cost of the average annual health insurance policy by $2500 per year. Instead, we are seeing double digit percentage cost increases, with some i surers asking for over 50% premium increases.

Can’t keep your doctor or insurance plan as Obama promised multiple times, PERIOD. Millions of people lost their pre-obamacare coverage, and obamacare has not come close to covering even half of the 45 million obamacare supporters claimed were uninsured.

The only thing obamacare has succeeded in doing is showing the criminal disdain the political class has for the rule of law.

Hi Pete,

You say:

As I have repeatedly written here, in the city where I work, none of the private pediatricians accept medicare patients, because it costs them more to see and treat the patient than the reimbursement they get months later from medicare. You can’t “make it up in volume” if you lose $10 for every medicare patient you see. Obamacare policies in California pay less than medicare rates. So what good does it do to have insurance that no one accepts?

Pediatricians don’t accept Medicare patients because Medicare provides health insurance coverage for Americans 65 and older and for a much smaller number of Americans with permanent disabilities, end stage renal failure, and ALS (the “ice bucket challenge” disease). Pediatricians take care of children. Children don’t customarily fall into the categories listed above. This is why pediatricians don’t accept Medicare patients.

– Larry Weisenthal/Huntington Beach CA

@Larry Weisenthal:

Medicaid, Larry. My bad referring to medicaid payment rates as medicare payment rates. But I am sure you knew that already. Grats on the snark points, but fail on deliberately missing the point for propaganda purposes.

Hi Pete and Vet: With regard to pediatricians accepting Medicare; there are two possibilities. Firstly, they may be members of a multidisciplinary group practice or they are employed by a clinic or hospital or health provider like Kaiser. That’s probably most of them. They aren’t seeing Medicare patients, but rather other members of their group, who do treat adult patients, provide health care for Medicare patients. Secondly, there is a specialty of pediatric renal medicine (pediatric nephrology). Very few kids get end stage renal failure, but some do, on a nation-wide basis.

With regard to the point about doctors either opting in or opting out of government supported Medicaid — the point is that this is a safety net. The point isn’t to provide Tesla-level health insurance; rather it’s basic health insurance, for people who couldn’t otherwise afford health insurance.

Participation among doctors is voluntary. So you see, it’s not some government “takeover” of Medicine! Docs can opt in, if it makes sense to them, or they can opt out. If the government is responsible with the taxpayers’ money, it won’t overpay the doctors. They want to find a sweet spot, where they have enough good doctors opting in to provide care for people who need it, but if every doctor in America were to opt in, they would be clearly overpaying.

That’s the way Medicaid has always worked . When there are “too many” docs opting in, they’ll cut back reimbursement until there are too many opt outs. I don’t know the situation with regard to Medicaid in the jurisdiction under present discussion. But I guarantee you that what will be done, if there aren’t enough pediatricians, will be to increase the reimbursement rates until they get enough pediatricians opting in to serve the population requiring these pediatric services.

– Larry Weisenthal/Huntington Beach/CA

@Larry Weisenthal: Actually, you are considering this from the viewpoint of following rules, regulations and laws. Obviously, such archaic concepts as following rules and laws no longer have any meaning or impact.

When a law is written that says “shall” or “shall not” this or that, it denotes a specific meaning. What the SCOTUS has now said is that, well, “we” are pretty sure (despite all the evidence to the contrary) that what they MEANT was…. this or that. So, why not have pediatricians giving mammograms? Why not have podiatrists performing brain surgery? Who are THEY to say what they can or cannot do? We have a GREATER GOOD that needs to be fulfilled and, in today’s world, the ends always justifies the means.

To hell with laws, f**k rules and regulations, personal freedom can kiss a$$. The government wants that $250 billion a year it was giving up by employees receiving pre-tax health care benefits, so this country, all the way up to the SCOTUS, no longer has to be a nation of laws.

@Larry Weisenthal:

Larry, please understand this, in the most respectful manner possible, when I say you are blinded by your leftist views, in the same manner that 5 year olds believe in the Tooth Fairy.

I live in a town of just under 200,000 people. There are 3 separate private pediatric groups, 2 individual private pediatricians, and one medical school that has pediatricians. I work in a hospital based practice, on salary, so I am relatively shielded from the effects of government insurance payment rates, at least for now. The outpatient pediatricians are directly affected by the outrageously low medicaid and Obamacare payment rates. Overhead costs (clinic facilities, employees, government EMR requirements, lab supplies, office supplies, government and private insurance compliance requirements) are such that just to have a patient walk in their door costs them $45-50. Medicaid pays the pediatrcian $38 for an office visit. These are real numbers from an excellent outpatient pediatrician. To add insult to injury, this pediatrician tells me medicaid is the slowest of all insurance plans to pay for services. When he finally had to opt out of medicaid 3 years ago, the government medicaid bureaucrat told him that if he chose to opt out of medicaid, all the pending reimbursements from medicaid for services the pediatrician had already provided months previously but not yet been paid for, would be cancelled. He lost tens of thousands when he opted out, beyond what he had already lost caring for patients for less than what it cost him to treat the patient.

You can keep wearing your rose-colored glasses and writing in your smiley-faced manner, telling us all how smooth the sailing trip will be, and don’t worry about those little icebergs all you want. Denial doesn’t stop reality. Socialist medicine is a disaster, and your “overpaying doctors” rhetoric reveals your disingenuous ideology.

Keep fooling yourself into believing doctors are overpaid for what we do, and see how long it takes – after you leftists impose totalitarian salary caps on doctor pay – before you start seeing the effects of an even greater physician shortage.

Hi Dr. Pete,

As you may know, I’m a physician MD, one of my daughters just completed her first year of residency in OB-GYN; my other daughter is a 3rd year medical student. So my interest in all of this is more than theoretical. I have a good friend who lives in Bath, England. He has three children. All MDs.

Let me tell you about socialist medicine. The UK has socialized medicine. The government owns the hospitals. The government owns the clinics. The doctors work as salaried employees for the government. Everyone in the UK has a right to medical care provided by the government. The so called “conservative” government just elected strongly supports continuing this truly socialized system.

According to your views, the doctors must be miserable and no one would want to ever go into medicine. Not true. Just as in the USA, there are many more young people who want to go into medicine than there are openings in British medical schools. But the people who go into medicine don’t have the expectation of becoming wealthy. If a Brit wants to become wealthy, he/she starts a business or goes to work for an investment bank. That’s the sort of thing that entrepreneurs do.

As you well know, past generations of bright young Americans did view medicine as a ticket to (at least relative) wealth, among its other attractions. But there are enormous numbers of bright young people (like my daughters, graduates of Harvard and Yale, respectively) who don’t view medicine as the road to wealth. My younger was an economics major at Yale, who had an internship and job offer with an East Coast equities research and investment firm. She hadn’t taken any of the requisite pre-med science courses. She decided that she wasn’t really motivated by pursuit of wealth; she got a job as a scheduling clerk in oncology at a Boston hospital; liked the doctors, nurses, and most of all patients, and decided that she wanted to go into medicine. So she worked for three years, while fulfilling her pre-med requirements and taking the MCATs. She’s, as stated, now a third year at an Ivy league med school. Both of my young doctor daughters know all about the changing landscape of medicine. But they agree it’s still the best job in the world (and all around the world, it’s the same great job, with many more qualified applicants than positions).

ObamaCare isn’t socialized medicine. Neither is Medicare. It’s private practice medicine with the government paying (or, in the case of ObamaCare, partially paying) what are effectively private physician contractors. It’s like saying that Lockheed-Martin and Raytheon and Boeing are “socialized,” because they are paid by the government and must bid for government contracts. Or private security contractors. Or private janitorial contractors. All of which must deal with the requirements and stipulations put in place by the government.

That’s what’s happening in Medicine. ObamaCare is no different from RomneyCare, which was built on a model first proposed by the Heritage Foundation. In 1993, this model was the “sensible conservative alternative to HillaryCare.” Today this “sensible conservative alternative” is socialized medicine. Not.

I have no doubt whatsoever that many otherwise would be doctors will be dissuaded from entering medicine because of the changing payer structure and changing model in general. But there will never be a shortage of highly qualified idealistic people who will wish to spend their lives working as doctors, in service of their patients.

With regard to Medicare, it is, by objective criteria, the best large scale health care plan in America. It has the largest provider network. It has the fewest gatekeepers through which patients must traverse in order to obtain specialist care. It has the lowest cost, adjusting for age. It has the highest consumer satisfaction. It has the lowest rate of personal bankruptcies for health care expenses. It has unsurpassed clinical outcomes. And it covers virtually everyone. No exclusions for pre-existing conditions. No cap on lifetime payouts.

If you got rid of Medicare, you’d have to replace it with something else. And that something else would cost more, cover less, and provide less consumer satisfaction.

I believe that I’d be accurate in saying that many if not most private practice doctors today have more headaches from private insurance companies than they do from Medicare, in terms of the abject crap put in the way of providing patient care.

– Larry Weisenthal/Huntington Beach CA

Dear Dr. Pete, Don’t conflate Medicaid with Medicare. As I wrote, Medicaid is bare bones, basic, safety net style medical care, for people who’d otherwise have no care at all.

Medicare is entirely different. It’s accepted at all the great medical centers in the country, with no gatekeepers, and by the vast majority of physicians. By far the largest provider network. If you’ve got Texas Blue Cross, just try going to the Cleveland Clinic — the real Cleveland Clinic, in Cleveland — to get your cardiac ablation for atrial fib. With Medicare, it’s no problem whatsoever. Medicare puts fewer obstacles in the way of doctors providing health care than does private insurance. If Medicare ever denies coverage for something, there is a formal appeals process, with independent adjudicators, including administrative law judges (for which lawyers aren’t utilized). Virtually all congressmen have a staffer who’s job it is to help constituents with any problems in the Medicare system.

With Blue Cross, both the doctors and patients are virtually at the mercy of whatever Blue Cross wants to do. Fighting them is frustrating and there is no recourse for finally denied claims beyond the civil court system, with lawyers arguing with lawyers in front of judges. The government (in the Medicare system) does a far more transparent and humane job in dealing with claims and denied claims.

I stand by everything I wrote about Medicare. If you want to trash Medicare, what are you going to replace it with which will cover everyone, with the same degree of consumer satisfaction, and all the other good things that Medicare does, without truly bankrupting the country.

The GOP politicians are turning cartwheels over the SCOTUS decision, because if ObamaCare had been trashed, they’d have been squarely on the hook to replace it, and they don’t have a clue how to start. Now they are off the hook. The GOP Presidential candidates are all huge winners because of SCOTUS. They can run against the Supreme Court, without having to come up with workable programs of their own.

– Larry Weisenthal/Huntington Beach CA

@Pete:

Your leftist talking point is as effective as a wet noodle trying to open a can of tuna…

Social Security has existed and enormously improved the later years of the majority of Americans for over 75 years. Medicare has done the same for half of a century. The provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act have already made health insurance available to some 10 million Americans who couldn’t previously buy it. Everyone who has health insurance now has protection from lifetime and annual limits that previously could deprive people of their coverage at the worst possible point. I don’t see any insurance companies going bankrupt as a result.

I don’t think you’re going to get far with most people arguing that such programs should be eliminated. Improving the lot of the average American family is the entire point of national prosperity. The point isn’t to provide the absurdly rich with improved opportunities to grow even richer, by cutting their taxes at the expense of social programs intended to benefit the poor, children, the elderly, and the middle class.

There is no Amendment that can fix this, after all, it would just be more words that are to be ignored in favor of the current ruler and his nine jesters.