Just Unbelievable

Why Obamacare is worse than understood by most and must be stopped.

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The Supreme Court will rule on the constitutionality of Obamacare this year. The arguments and the issue which got the most publicity was the individual mandate. I don’t actually care much about this although it may well violate the Constitution. There are far worse things in the legislation and they should be emphatically rejected by the Supreme Court. The worst of the issues is discussed in detail here. This is a really frightening piece of legislation and I cannot imagine that the Court will let it stand. Of course, given the absence of argument, the Court will have to find this hidden provision itself.

Perhaps nothing in the Obamacare legislation embodies the top-down, command-and-control nature of Progressive healthcare more than the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), a 15-member panel of “experts” to be appointed by the President. There are three particular features of the IPAB that illustrate this fact: The IPAB will control all healthcare spending, public and private. The IPAB has been awarded near-dictatorial power. And the IPAB is designed to be a nearly immutable entity.

How is this accomplished ?

Specifically, Section 10320 (in the Managers’ Amendments portion of the legislation) grants the IPAB, beginning in 2015, the authority to limit all healthcare expenditures, that is, all healthcare expenditures, and not just expenditures by Medicare or government-run programs.

To emphasize this expanded authority, Section 10320 changes the name of the “Independent Medicare Advisory Board” to the “Independent Payment Advisory Board.” It directs the IPAB, at least every two years, to “submit to Congress and the President recommendations to slow the growth in national health expenditures” for private healthcare programs. Furthermore, it designates that these “recommendations” may be implemented by the Secretary of HHS or other Federal agencies “administratively” (that is, without any action by Congress).

Thus the federal government can control, under penalty of criminal prosecution of doctors, private health care spending ! This goes well beyond Medicare and Medicaid. It will prevent, unless stopped, people from spending their own money on health care.

That is not the worst of it. The IPAB cannot be changed or repealed by Congress. This is unprecedented in US law. Even the ill-advised Prohibition Amendment, promoted as another moral obligation by progressives after World War I, could be repealed by another constitutional amendment.

A quick reading of Section 3403 might leave one with the impression that the IPAB is a sort of Mr. Rogers of healthcare a mild-mannered, friendly, always-helpful, but ultimately undemanding agent for good. This is the impression imparted by the first few paragraphs of the Section, which paint the new entity as an “advisory” board, whose main task is to develop “proposals” and “advisory reports,” which “proposals” and “advisory reports” would solely consist of various “recommendations,” that ought to be “considered” for the purpose of cost reduction.

Nothing could be further from the truth. This language is simply another example of supplying a new law, which is far more radical than the authors would like people to know, with a soothingly misleading introductory paragraph. The IPAB is actually designed to be as all-powerful as it’s possible to be.

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Disgusting

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A law firm is advertising on CNBC, trying to gin up plaintiffs for lawsuits against siren manufacturers. The pitch is: “Have you lost hearing after working around loud sirens?”

There must be people who have lost hearing from sirens. However, sirens are supposed to be loud. No one could reasonably expect otherwise. Nor is it the responsibility of siren makers to protect people from sirens. Individuals, and perhaps their employers, should do that.

Probably what the lawyers intend to do is find a large group of people who have imperfect hearing and used to drive ambulances or work in factories, assert that their hearing problems result from on-the-job exposure to sirens, and extract a settlement from siren manufacturers who want to avoid expensive litigation and the financial Sword of Damocles of a possible adverse jury verdict (jurisdiction to be selected for maximum plaintiff-friendliness).

Who will bear the costs of these cases (unless they are thrown out as they should be)? The siren manufacturers will go out of business, pay out a lot of money and/or move overseas. Sirens will cost more. The private firms and governments that use sirens will pass along the higher costs in the form of higher prices for their products, higher taxes and fewer jobs. Perhaps they will use fewer sirens in the future, which might lead to more accidents and related costs. Employers will tell workers to wear ear plugs, but many workers will not do so. Some of the plaintiffs, whose hearing loss may or may not have been caused by sirens, will receive windfalls. The lawyers will make a lot of money and look for other industries to plunder. Maybe they will sue rock bands or the Army next.

Just Unbelievable

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Story:

President Obama today affirmed American neutrality in the dispute between Argentina and England over the Falkland Islands. In the process, he made clear that the “special relationship” between the UK and the United States is not very special.
 
Obama’s comments were made during a speech in Cartagena, Colombia, at the Summit of the Americas. It was delivered in English, but Obama chose to refer to the disputed islands by their Spanish name the Malvinas. Argentina has insisted that the islands should always be referred to as “the Malvinas,” while the British have been adamant about calling them “the Falklands.” Obama’s choice of Malvinas might have been seen as a slap at the UK. Instead of feeling slapped, though, the British might be amused: He called them “the Maldives.”
 
The Maldives are a group of Islands off the coast of India, half a world away from the Falklands. The story for people who enjoy presidential gaffes is that Obama got the wrong islands in the wrong ocean, but because Obama is so clearly brilliant, we’ll just file this away as an anomaly, along with the extra states. The real story is that he wanted to call them “the Malvinas” in the first place. It puts the British on notice that if push comes to shove, they might expect us to be as neutral as France.

I agree with the quote. The big deal to me isn’t the Maldives vs. Malvinas gaffe (although it is unbelievable that our president would actually make that mistake), it is the fact that he isn’t calling them what they are. The Falklands. As an aside, who in gods name does Obama have making his speeches/helping him with public appearances? I get the fact that he hates Great Britain, but at least fact check the Maldives/Malvinas. Sheesh.

Just Unbelievable

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Via Martin Kramer, who asks: “What happens to aging ’60s American Jewish radicals after the kids move out, the dog dies, and their parents (may they rest in peace), who so valued and cherished Israel, have passed on to their heavenly reward?”

If the trailer is representative, this is a slick piece of agitprop packaged as folksy interviews with thoughtful Jewish intellectuals who just happen to have doubts about Israel, no doubt because their integrity and independent-mindedness let them see clearly the evils of Israel that other Jews (and most non-Jewish Americans) are brainwashed into overlooking. In fact this is a bunch of leftist hacks repeating buzzwords (apartheid etc.) and citing events pruned of context to single out Israel for demonization. The woman in the last interview gives the game away by blaming Israel for the “stateless” condition of Palestinian refugees, even though Palestinian Arab statelessness, to the extent it still exists, is a racket maintained by Arab governments and the Palestinians themselves, and even though the post-WW2 world has had many refugee populations that dwarfed the Palestinian Arab refugee population and that, unlike the Palestinians, were mostly resettled within a few years. The difference is that people like those in this movie couldn’t use those other refugee populations as a weapon against the Jews. You would have to be profoundly ignorant to find this movie convincing, but ignorant people seem to be the target audience. Watch it for yourself.

I was fortunate to have had in high school a leftist, anti-Semitic history teacher, a man who was an enthusiast of Third World “liberation” movements run by kleptocrats and gangsters but who put Israel under a moral microscope. The Israeli Jews, as he saw it, had treated the Palestinian Arabs unjustly by (he would quote a particular historian whose book he always had at the ready) expelling them and this unjust treatment colored everything that Israel did subsequently. Two wrongs — an allusion to the Holocaust — don’t make a right. We should all be citizens of the world and should drop our parochialisms and be happy. Of course he mainly applied this argument to the Jews, and I was not clever enough to point out that the Jews’ enemies had often persecuted them for supposedly being too worldly. I argued, and learned a great deal in that class, and watching this movie trailer transports me right back to it. Shabbat shalom.