Free Republic

This week marks two years since of the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and if the Obama administration has chosen to all but ignore the second anniversary of Obamacare, the rest of us should pause and reflect on just what a monumental failure of policy the health-care-reform law has been. What’s more, it has been a failure on its own terms. After all, when health-care reform was passed, we were promised that it would do three things: 1) provide health-insurance coverage for all Americans; 2) reduce insurance costs for individuals, businesses, and government; and 3) increase...

When you bake a bad ingredient into a cake, no matter how nicely you decorate it, the cake will still be bad. That's the lesson to take from the controversy over Obamacare, Catholicism, and contraception. To recap, under Obamacare all employers will be required to arrange for "health insurance" for their employees. Coverage must include various disease-preventive health services and women's contraception at no charge. No premium-sharing, no copays, no deductibles — nothing.The Department of Health and Human Services, which has ominous rule-making power under Obamacare, exempted Catholic churches (as employers) from this rule because Catholicism teaches that contraception is sinful....

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA, ACA, or "Obamacare"), signed into law March 2011, in the near term creates more than 100 new health care bureaucracies, a large increase in taxes, and new government expenses of $500 billion. Most importantly, however, it will create an incentive and penalty regime for health care institutions and professionals that will compromise traditional professional medical ethics. Embedded in PPACA is a system of mandates and incentives derivative of guidelines for efficient patient care that means some rationing. An example most often raising objections in the public discussion of PPACA is the Patient...

Even if ObamaCare survives Supreme Court scrutiny next spring, its trials will be far from over. That's because the law has a major glitch that threatens its basic functioning. It's so problematic, in fact, that the Obama administration is now brazenly trying to rewrite the law without involving Congress. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act offers "premium assistance"—tax credits and subsidies—to households purchasing coverage through new health-insurance exchanges. This assistance was designed to hide a portion of the law's cost to individuals by reducing the premium hikes that individuals will face after ObamaCare goes into effect in 2014. (If...

Obamacare’s Effect on Small Business -By: Larry Walker, Jr. -“An unlimited power to tax involves, necessarily, a power to destroy; because there is a limit beyond which no institution and no property can bear taxation.” ~ Daniel Webster in M'CULLOCH v. STATE, 17 U.S. 316 (1819) -Although Barack Obama boasts of having implemented 17 tax cuts for small business during his one-term proposition, as I pointed out in Why Congress Shouldn’t Just Pass Obama’s Jobs Bill, Again, not one item on the list actually meets the definition of a tax cut. #1 on the list was the Small Employer...

You can't open a newspaper or turn on the TV these days without tax talk. Should the reduction in worker payroll taxes be continued in 2012? Should it be extended to employers? Are Americans who earn over $200,000 annually entitled to the full value of their itemized deductions? Are the rich paying their fair share? President Obama raised these questions in proposing how to pay for his $447 jobs bill. But no one seems to be talking about the $2,000 per worker tax on employers, to begin in 2014. Enacted as part of the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care...

Host: My next guest here is David Rivkin. David is joining us to talk about the 11th Circuit’s decision last week overturning the individual mandate in the Obama healthcare law . . . I should point out that David and his colleague Lee Casey argued this case at a lower court level . . . so what is the significance of this decision? David Rivkin: Well, it’s the first time the Court of Appeals has done it, point number one. Point number two, you have a bipartisan panel, I hate to engage in these types of observations, but it’s very...

Late last month, the IRS issued guidance on how employers will report the aggregate cost of employer-sponsored health coverage provided to an employee on Form W-2. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) imposed the reporting requirement, originally effective for the 2011 Form W-2s (for issuance in 2012). However, an earlier IRS Notice postponed this reporting requirement until the 2012 Form W-2s (for issuance in 2013). Calculation of Aggregate Cost. The aggregate cost of coverage provided to the employee includes amounts that both the employer and the employee pay. In addition, the aggregate cost includes any portion of the...

"The legislative cannot transfer the power of making laws to any other hands... The power of the legislative, being derived from the people... [is] only to make laws, and not to make legislators." — John Locke, “Second Treatise of Government”Here, however, is a paradox of sovereignty: The sovereign people, possessing the right to be governed as they choose, might find the exercise of that right tiresome and so might choose to be governed in perpetuity by a despot they cannot subsequently remove. Congress did something like that in passing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare. The point...

As the legal case for Obamacare makes its way up to the Supreme Court, both sides have been ferreting out their legal defense of their positions. Legal scholars have noted that the Obama Administration's defense of their massive health care plan has changed over time. Originally the government was arguing that the law was regulating the mental activity of whether or not to purchase insurance. But now the argument is that it's regulating the activity of obtaining health care. The shifting defense should raise doubts about the Obama team's confidence of winning in court. The insecurity of the defenders is...

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act — better known to Americans as ObamaCare — hinges on a single provision known as the individual mandate. This mandate is a dramatic intrusion on individual liberty that requires virtually every American to buy a government-sanctioned health insurance policy. Befitting its legacy of defending U.S. small business, entrepreneurs and the free market, the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) has challenged the constitutionality of the individual mandate. The lawsuit, which was argued Wednesday at the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, is expected to reach the Supreme Court for its ultimate resolution. Legally,...

Democrats will often get irritable when some clingy philistine refers to Obamacare as "socialized medicine." It's simply not a precise phrase for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. In any event, it's not socialized yet, you ignoramuses! Progress doesn't happen overnight. No worries, though, recent signs portend that Obamacare will give us the state-run plan we proles deserve. A new study published in McKinsey Quarterly claims that in 2014, the provisions of Obamacare will induce 3 in 10 employers to "definitely or probably" stop offering health coverage to their employees. And we can only assume the companies have had...

According to testimony at a recent hearing of the House Oversight health care subcommittee, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. Obamacare) doesn’t actually grant the Department of Health and Human Services the authority to exempt employers from the law’s annual minimum health care coverage requirements. The Daily Caller reports: Language granting HHS that power was never in the original law. Instead, through new rules and regulations, HHS gave itself the power last summer using a broad interpretation of certain parts of the law.The annual limit requirement waivers exempt recipients for one year from having to increase the amount...

Remember how excited Rep. Nancy Pelosi was after Democrats snuck the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act through the back door? Pelosi made a rambling speech that sounded like something you’d hear at a PTA fundraiser. There’s a priceless moment when amid a sprinkle of giggles, she quotes a favorite maxim of the late iconic liberal spender Tip O’Neill—“All politics is local.” Pelosi’s speech is now history, but she surely affirmed O’Neill’s saying because nearly 20 percent of new ObamaCare waivers are chic businesses located in Pelosi’s home district. The Daily Caller did the math: “Of the 204 new Obamacare...

One year later and nothing has “changed.” See how Obamaville is “celebrating” today’s milestone.

Constitutional champion David Rivkin, who led the successful multi-state lawsuit against ObamaCare in Florida, will once again debate the constitutionality of the individual mandate at a Federalist Society event held at Villanova Law School on Wednesday, March 23, 2011. Rivkin, a partner in the Washington, D.C. lawfirm Baker & Hostetler, will be arguing his position that the law is unconstitutional against Professor Rand E. Rosenblatt of Rutgers University School of Law, Camden. Rivkin is known as the first person to put forth the argument that the individual mandate is unconstitutional in a series of 2010 editorials and articles he wrote...

In a court of law, there are always clear differences between a political argument and one based on sound legal reasoning. If you need a prime example of the disconnect between the two, you should have been at the public Oxford-style debate held by the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. on March 2. The debate centered on the constitutionality of the health care law’s individual mandate—specifically arguing the ruling passed down by two federal judges already that the mandate to purchase insurance is unconstitutional. Arguing the unconstitutionality of the law was the lead outside counsel from the Florida ruling (which...

When the national health care law now known as ObamaCare passed into law on March 23, 2010, few foresaw the immediate effect it would have on the country. One who did was constitutional scholar David B. Rivkin Jr., the lawyer who led 26 state plaintiffs and the National Federation of Independent Business in a successful Florida lawsuit that found the law unconstitutional. In conjunction with the one-year anniversary of the House passing the law, the Cato Institute is holding a special half-day conference in Washington, D.C. on Monday, March 21, 2011 from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. to look at...

"As the years go by, if Obamacare is allowed to stand, tens of millions of American will become enrolled in publicly subsidized coverage." - Jim Capretta

Handing the Obama administration a legal victory, the federal judge in Florida who ruled the new healthcare law unconstitutional has cleared the way for continued implementation of the sweeping overhaul.