Blog and News

Texas Govenror Rick Perry announced last week that Texas would not be implementing the Medicaid expansions of ObamaCare or create an ObamaCare exchange. As D4PC has previously explained, all of the people who will gain health insurnace under ObamaCare will do so either through a government program (Medicaid) or government subsidies (the exchanges) and not through market-based, patient-centered reforms that will lower costs and make insurance more afforable.  

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Last week, after the Supreme Court decision, the media tried to make a big deal out of the fact that Republicans were calling the individual mandate a "tax." Because if it is a tax, Republicans must be agreeing with Chief Justice John Roberts that the mandate is constitututional. Or at least the media has tried to make that argument. 

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D4PC "Morning Rounds" Tuesday, June 26, 2012 

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Aetna's former CEO, Ron Williams, recently wrote in The Wall Street Journal that he no longer supports the individual mandate. Williams writes that he had a front row seat to the legislative process that produced ObamaCare but has now come to believe that as  he "studied the arguments for and against the individual mandate, it became clear [that] the legislation raises serious constitutional concerns." 

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The Galen Institute's Grace-Marie Turner's latest column at National Review Online discussed the three scenarios for how the Supreme Court will decide the multi-state lawsuit challenging ObamaCare's individual mandate and the laws burdensome Medicaid requirements. Her article also contains a very disturbing fact. 

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Welcome to D4PC "Morning Rounds", your daily review of healthcare news and information from Washington, DC and around the nation. These briefings will keep you up to date on recent developments and our effort to replace the PPACA with patient-centered reforms that protect the doctor-patient relationship and preserve individual freedom of choice.  

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Today's oral arguments at the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) focused on the individual mandate. According to National Review Online's "Bench Memo's" Justice Kennedy seemed focused on ascertaining whether any limits existed to the exercise of government power in the form of future mandates. As many commentators have pointed out, the individual mandate is an unprecedented use of government authority because the government is not merely regulating people who are already engaged in interstate commerce but compelling citizens to engage.  

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The cumulative impact of government interventions has given us the health-care system we have. Because it subsidizes third-party payership, it destroys any hope of price-value comparisons by consumers. Because it commits the cardinal economic impossibility of trying to subsidize everybody, the end result is not better health but higher costs in the form of rising prices and the provision of services of questionable value. 

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Welcome to D4PC "Morning Rounds", your daily review of healthcare news and information from Washington, DC and around the nation. These briefings will keep you up to date on recent developments and our effort to replace the PPACA with patient-centered reforms that protect the doctor-patient relationship and preserve individual freedom of choice. 

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Welcome to D4PC "Morning Rounds", your daily review of healthcare news and information from Washington, DC and around the nation. These briefings will keep you up to date on recent developments and our effort to replace the PPACA with patient-centered reforms that protect the doctor-patient relationship and preserve individual freedom of choice.  

Read More

Welcome to D4PC "Morning Rounds", your daily review of healthcare news and information from Washington, DC and around the nation. These briefings will keep you up to date on recent developments and our effort to replace the PPACA with patient-centered reforms that protect the doctor-patient relationship and preserve individual freedom of choice.  

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Dr. Hal Scherz, President of D4PC, and Sally Pipes, of the Pacific Research Institute, have teamed together to writing a very informative article about how the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is trying to impermissibly ignore the obvious language of ObamaCare, and therefore the Constitutional prerogatives of Congress, and "rewrite" the law as it sees fit. 

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According to The Washington Examiner, in testimony before a subcommittee in the House of Representives this week "Cornell University economics professor Richard Burkhauser showed that in 2014, millions of low-income Americans may be unable to get subsidized health insurance through the new health care exchanges."  The culprit: the legislative language of ObamaCare. 

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Welcome to D4PC "Morning Rounds", your daily review of healthcare news and information from Washington, DC and around the nation. These briefings will keep you up to date on recent developments and our effort to replace the PPACA with patient-centered reforms that protect the doctor-patient relationship and preserve individual freedom of choice.  

Read More

Welcome to D4PC "Morning Rounds", your daily review of healthcare news and information from Washington, DC and around the nation. These briefings will keep you up to date on recent developments and our effort to replace the PPACA with patient-centered reforms that protect the doctor-patient relationship and preserve individual freedom of choice. 

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According to Newsmax, the Obama Administration decided not to ask the full U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit to review the three-judge panel decision that found the individual mandate unconstitutional.  This decision will: "likely speed up consideration of the matter by the high court in its 2011-12 term that begins next week. A ruling could come by late June, in the middle of the presidential campaign." 

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Dr. Marc Siegel, a Fox News medical contributor, writes on National Review Online that the linchpin of ObamaCare is the individual mandate and that, if the mandate is ruled unconstitutional, the rest of ObamaCare will fall. 

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Docs4PatientCare's president, Dr. Hal Scherz, issued the following statement in response to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals decision on Friday that found that the individual mandate contained in ObamaCare unconstitutional:

"The decision Friday from the 11th Circuit court in Atlanta fell short of our hope that the mandate would be found unconstitutional AND that the entire healthcare law would need to be repealed because it could not stand without the mandate.

Practically speaking, the healthcare law will fail on its own merits without the unconstitutional mandate keeping it afloat. It will be up to the Supreme Court now to drive a stake through the heart of this monstrous law, and hopefully soon enough to prevent further damage caused already by it."

The full decision of the court can be found here.  

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Senator John Thune (SD) has written a new opinion piece in the Washington Times detailing the call by former Obama Administration official, Peter Orszag, for the government to force Americans to begin buying long-term care insurance to ensure that the CLASS Act is fully funded.  The CLASS Act is a new entitlement program that created by ObamaCare whereby the federal government is selling long-term care insurance.  Under the CLASS Act, taxpayers can voluntarily pay premiums to the government in exchange for the government's promise to cover their long-term care costs later in life. 

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David B. Rivkin, Jr. and Lee A. Casey have an excellent commentary on why the Obama Administration is having trouble in the courts. They suggest that the Administration has consistently changed their arguments defending the law as the previous argument is exposed for its constitutionally suspect nature.

They write that:

In enacting the individual mandate, Congress purported to rely on its power to regulate interstate commerce and, in the process, reach individuals who are already engaged in that commerce. But the individual mandate does not regulate commerce, interstate or otherwise. It simply decrees that all Americans, unless specially exempted, must have a congressionally prescribed level of health-insurance coverage regardless of any economic activity in which they may be engaged. Requiring individuals to act simply because they exist is the defining aspect of the general police power that Congress lacks.

The government's lawyers, recognizing this fundamental constitutional reality, have tried to rewrite the law so that it can withstand judicial scrutiny. They have claimed that the individual mandate is a tax, despite common sense, judicial precedent, and numerous statements to the contrary by the law's sponsors and President Obama. They have also argued that ObamaCare does not actually impose a mandate on inactive citizens, but rather regulates how individuals will pay for their health care. As Solicitor General Neal Katyal recently put it, the mandate is "about failure to pay, not failure to buy." This is plainly wrong. The law requires that everyone have health insurance—without regard to whether or how they buy or pay for medical services.

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Researched by Beth Haynes, MD

On Monday(4/11/11), the Democrat Missouri Attorney General filed an amicus brief to the federal appeals court addressing Florida v. HHS, but did not join the suit. Attny General Chris Koster agrees with Judges Vinson and Hudson (VA v. Sebelius) that the individual mandate to purchase health insurance exceeds Congress' constitutional powers and this provision can be severed from the rest of the legislation. A statewide referendum in Missouri last August declaring the mandate illegal was approved 3:1 by voters, while the state legislature passed nonbinding resolutions urging the Atty Gen to join the 26 other states suing the US Government over the constitutionality of the individual mandate. 

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