“After losing a last-minute appeal to the Supreme Court, craft stores chain Hobby Lobby said it would defy a federal healthcare mandate requiring employers to provide their workers with insurance that covers emergency contraceptives. The Oklahoma City-based chain, owned by a conservative Christian family, had applied to the high court to block a part of the federal healthcare law ordering companies to offer insurance that covers contraceptive drugs, including the so-called morning-after pill.”
“Having failed to persuade 26 states that participating in ObamaCare is a good deal, the liberals behind the law are denouncing these dissident Governors as federalist hypocrites. A few critics on the right are chiming in and arguing that the 26 are inviting worse results once the feds swoop in. So someone ought to say a word on behalf of the people who run state governments in the real world and have examined the health insurance ‘exchange’ question in detail. They’ve seen enough to know that the choice to set up and run these insurance bureaucracies is not a choice at all.”
“President Barack Obama may have defeated opponents of his landmark health care law in the courts and at the ballot box, but the sweeping reforms still face a rocky road ahead. Advocates are concerned that the funding needed to help expand coverage to 30 million uninsured Americans could take a hit in budget negotiations as Obama battles his Republican rivals over the so-called fiscal cliff tax and austerity crisis.”
“For the first time in 12 years, a majority say it is not the federal government’s responsibility to ensure that health care coverage is provided to all Americans, according to a poll on Wednesday.
Only 44 percent believe the government should guarantee health care coverage, and 54 percent believe it has no such responsibility, according to a Gallup survey.”
“ObamaCare requires the collection of vast amounts of sensitive personal health data. Naturally its proponents swear that such information will be strictly confidential. Tax preparers are one group that knows that such government promises cannot be relied upon.”
“On Tuesday, Americans will go to the polls to choose whether or not to nationalize their health-care system. The choice for president will have numerous other consequences. But in most cases we will be choosing between tendencies shrouded in uncertainty. The candidates have staked out positions and made some explicit promises—but how these work out in practice will depend on many future contingencies, and many an earnest campaign promise has been confounded or even reversed in the past. The health-care choice is singular not only for its importance but for its certainty.”
“President Obama likes to say his campaign is about building up the middle class, but his signature initiative in office — ObamaCare — will pile thousands of dollars in new taxes and higher health costs on top of America’s middle class. How so? Through redistribution, of course. The president has made no secret of his fondness for using the government’s tax and spending powers to spread our diminished wealth around from one group of Americans to another. And ObamaCare is nothing if not a massive redistribution machine.”
“During oral arguments in the Supreme Court challenge to the individual mandate, NFIB v. Sebelius, the plaintiff’s lawyer Paul Clement warned the justices not to make the same mistake they made in the 1970s with Buckley v. Valeo. In Buckley, the Court upheld portions of the post-Watergate campaign-finance reforms while invalidating others. The result was a muddled statute that Congress and the courts would repeatedly revisit for years to come. Repeating this approach with the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, Clement cautioned, could produce similar undesirable results. It’s too soon to know how quickly Congress will revisit the PPACA, but Clement’s warning already seems to be coming true in the courts.”
“President Obama’s plan to control Medicare spending — an expert board of cost-cutters — might have trouble even coming into existence. Obama and Mitt Romney spent a lot of time during Wednesday’s debate talking about the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), a 15-member panel tasked with slowing the growth in Medicare spending.”
“The fundamental struggle in American health care is over how to allocate resources. Or, put differently, who should be in charge of allocating scarce health-care resources? The government, or consumers in a functioning marketplace?”