Obamacare

Of glamor and glitches

Featured image President Biden welcomed President Obama back to the White House yesterday in connection with the signing of an executive order to fix a “glitch” in Obamacare. Obamacare itself is the glitch, but never mind. Biden exercised executive authority to expand the law’s coverage. The White House has posted a transcript of the speakers’ remarks here. The Wall Street Journal’s James Freeman quotes Paragon Health Institute’s Brian Blase testifying before House »

Supreme Court set to uphold Obamacare

Featured image During the hearings on the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett, Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee pretended that confirming Barrett would jeopardize Obamacare. To support this claim, they noted that the Supreme Court soon would be hearing a challenge to that law and they pointed to a law review article by Barrett that criticized Chief Justice Roberts’ reasoning when he upheld Obamacare in 2012. The Dems’ argument was always phony. »

Dick Durbin’s not so beautiful mind

Featured image In a post below, I complained about how, instead of questioning Amy Coney Barrett, Senators are using her as a prop while they make speeches. Not surprisingly, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a world class grandstander, was the biggest culprit during three hours or so of the hearing that I watched. Sen. Dick Durbin did a fair amount of speechifying, too. Much of it was directed, not at the issue of whether »

Democrats attack Judge Barrett with bogus talking point

Featured image Hearings on the nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court began this morning. It’s my understanding that today’s hearing was devoted to speeches. I didn’t have the stomach to listen to them. A reader who listened to the first few speeches writes: I’m watching the “hearing” about Judge Barrett’s nomination. Senator Leahy is now describing how “Vermonters” are “scared” that Judge Barrett’s nomination will mean that Vermonters »

Is that all they got?

Featured image The ABA’s finding that Judge Justin Walker is “well qualified” to serve on the D.C. Circuit removes the Democrats’ main, though always specious, talking point against confirming Walker. As a result, the Dems are reduced to basing their case against Walker on the Wuhan coronavirus. During today’s hearing on Walker’s nomination, Sen. Durbin found it ironic that, in this time of a pandemic, a “strident” opponent of Obamacare is up »

Alex Acosta’s signature policy flames out in court

Featured image President Trump is asked from time to time about Secretary of Labor Alex Acosta. The questions arise because Acosta gave a sweetheart deal to pedophile Jeffrey Epstein and, according to a federal judge, violated victims’ rights law in the process. Thus, it’s fair to wonder why Acosta still has his Cabinet-level job. In answering this question, Trump likes to say that Acosta is “doing a great job.” But I’ve never »

Experts weigh in on decision striking down Obamacare

Featured image John wrote last night about the ruling by a federal judge in Texas that Obamacare is unconstitutional in its entirety. Judge Reed O’Connor reasoned: (1) because Congress has repealed the penalty assessed against those who decline to buy health insurance, the Individual Mandate can no longer be fairly read as an exercise of Congress’s Tax Power; (2) because the Individual Mandate could only be justified constitutionally as an exercise of »

Federal Judge Rules Obamacare Unconstitutional [with comment by Paul]

Featured image Via Drudge, federal judge Reed O’Connor, in Ft. Worth, Texas, has declared the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional, apparently in its entirety. You may remember that Obamacare survived constitutional scrutiny by the skin of its teeth when the Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice Roberts, held that the penalty the act imposes for failure to buy health insurance is a tax, and therefore is constitutional. That holding discreetly bypassed the fact »

Trump Administration Undermines Obamacare

Featured image With the Democrats in control of the House, nothing useful will come out of Congress in the next two years. That means that progress in domestic policy will have to come via regulation and executive action. Happily, the Trump administration is very strong on this front. An underreported story is the administration’s regulatory reform of Obamacare. Here, the administration is implementing ideas that were developed in think tanks like my »

Trump offers limited relief from Obamacare coercion

Featured image In a post called “One Families’ Obamacare Tale — Mine,” I described how Obamacare deprived my wife of the medical insurance that fits our needs. Our tale is interesting, I think, but a bit complicated. I discussed it fully in the original post. Essentially, my wife needed “catastrophic insurance” to fill a gap in her insurance plan. In the pre-Obamacare market, we were able to purchase a fairly reasonably priced »

Trump administration won’t defend Obamacare in key case

Featured image The constitutionality of Obamacare is under challenge once again. Six years ago, the Supreme Court held that the federal government does not have the power to order people to buy health insurance, but does have the power to impose a tax on those without health insurance. The ruling saved Obamacare. However, the tax bill Congress passed last year eliminates the tax penalty contained in Obamacare. Thus, Texas now argues that »

Elizabeth Warren is a fraud

Featured image No, I’m not talking about her Indian thing, although there is that. I’m talking about her study more than a decade ago on the causes of bankruptcy. It purported to show that medical bills cause about half of bankruptcies. The purpose of the study was, at least in part, to fuel the drive for single-payer health insurance. Indeed, two of the co-authors belonged to the group Physicians for a National »

Did Obamacare Cost Hillary the Election?

Featured image Back in 2011 I noted over at National Review the work of three Stanford political scientists who dove deep into the data of the 2010 election to discern the causes of the wave that saw Republicans win 63 House seats from Democrats, when none of the pre-election prediction models forecast that Republicans would come anywhere close to that large a gain. Their article, “The 2010 Elections: Why Did Political Science »

Lies of Obamacare revisited

Featured image The Washington Examiner’s Phil Klein has no brief for President Trump as a truth teller, but he has been provoked by the New York Times to come to Trump’s defense in one particular: The New York Times has published a story with an accompanying chart suggesting that while President Trump has told 103 falsehoods during his first 10 months in office, President Barack Obama told just 18 throughout his entire »

The new Al Franken

Featured image The Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee held a hearing yesterday on President Trump’s nomination of Alex Azar to head the Department of Health and Human Services. Naturally, Azar received hostile questions from the likes of Elizabeth Warren and Patty Murray. In the hour or so that I watched, the nominee, a strong conservative, acquitted himself very well. During the time I watched, Al Franken questioned Azar (at the »

Monkey business at the CBO?

Featured image The mainstream media almost never mentions the Congressional Budget Office without adding the adjective “non-partisan.” But the CBO is staffed by folks who, in real life, are probably partisan. And given the pool from which its staff is drawn, most very likely are partisan Democrats. Are its findings infected by partisan bias? I don’t know. But something funny is going on with the CBO’s assessment of the impact of repealing »

Speaking of sabotage

Featured image During his two terms in office President Obama conducted an assault on the Constitution and on limited government in the name of the higher good as he saw it. Obama’s lawlessness was little noted in the mainstream media other than in disparaging accounts of the Republican and conservative reaction to Obama. President Trump appears to be a bull in the White House china shop. He is portrayed as a kind »