The federal government responded to the lawsuit brought jointly by 20 state attorneys general who argue that ObamaCare is unconstitutional. In addition to claiming that the states lack the standing to sue and that ObamaCare is a valid regulation of interstate commerce, the Department of Justice argued that the individual mandate is part of Congress’s broad power to tax. This directly contradicts frequent claims, but Congressional Democrat leadership as well as President Obama, that suggestions that the individual mandate was a tax were misleading and disingenuous fear-mongering.
New surveys of doctors are showing the number of physicians who are refusing to accept new Medicare patients is at an all time high. Low reimbursement rates for the government-run insurance program are prompting doctors to focus on more profitable patients with other payment methods. ObamaCare’s $500 billion in across-the-board Medicare cuts will cause the problem to worsen significantly.
When selling Obama Care, the president “absolutely reject[ed]” the claim that the individual mandate is a tax, largely because the individual mandate heavily affects the middle class, and the president promised in the campaign not to raise any taxes on them. Now that the bill has passed, the Obama Administration is arguing that the individual mandate is Constitutional because Congress is empowered to levy taxes by the Constitution, contradicting his earlier position.
Ohio’s state government came out with a new estimate of the effects ObamaCare will have on it’s Medicaid program. The massive expansion will cost taxpayers $1.45 billion in the first 5 years after it starts, in 2014. Given that Medicaid is currently a budget-busting problem for most states, this huge new cost will crowd out other spending, or force tax increases.
The Obama Administration has filed its response to the 20 state lawsuit challenging the Constitutionality of ObamaCare. Among the Justice Department’s arguments is a claim that forcing Americans to buy health insurance or pay a tax is a power granted to Congress just like the power to levy any other tax. This flatly contradicts Obama’s earlier insistence that the individual mandate was not a tax, but merely a responsibility fee. “Put another way, the administration is now arguing in federal court that Obama signed a massive middle-class tax increase, in violation of his campaign pledge.”
Despite promises that ObamaCare would be fully paid for and reduce the budget deficit, many of the savings will not materialize when the time comes. Firstly, it is extremely difficult from a technical perspective to correctly assess costs so far in the future. Secondly, many of the promised cuts are scheduled to take place far in the future in order to delay the political consequences of unpopular provisions, but future Congresses might not be willing to pay the political price for those cuts.
While ObamaCare doesn’t explicitly declare that it would fund abortions with taxpayer dollars, its end run around Hyde Amendment protections would provide that result — which is why Planned Parenthood is declaring “victory” in the wake of ObamaCare’s passage.
Gov. Daniels gave a presentation demonstrating how ObamaCare would hurt state budgets and undo many innovative and successful state reforms already in place. Under ObamaCare, the Healthy Indianans Program, which covers the uninsured, will be replaced with a forced expansion of the state’s Medicaid program, which will provide inferior care and reduce flexibility for consumers.
ObamaCare’s preferential treatment of unions, both in the law’s textual language and in the Obama administration’s rulings in implementing it, is further evidence of how ObamaCare would politicize medicine.
The Democrats promised to include a “doc fix” in ObamaCare to prevent doctors’ payments under Medicare from being cut, then pulled the “doc fix” to make ObamaCare’s financial projections look better, and now — with ObamaCare already using every obvious offset — can’t come up with the funds for something that would otherwise have had wide bipartisan support.