Loy's Blog

The Truth About the Health Care Bills – Michael Connelly, Ret. Constitutional Attorney

Well, I have done it! I have read the entire text of proposed House Bill 3200: The Affordable Health Care Choices Act of 2009. I studied it with particular emphasis from my area of expertise, constitutional law. I was frankly concerned that parts of the proposed law that were being discussed might be unconstitutional. What I found was far worse than what I had heard or expected.

To begin with, much of what has been said about the law and its implications is in fact true, despite what the media are saying. The law does provide for rationing of health care, particularly where senior citizens and other classes of citizens are involved, free health care for illegal immigrants, free abortion services, and probably forced participation in abortions by members of the medical profession.

The Bill will also eventually force private insurance companies out of business, and put everyone into a government run system. All decisions about personal health care will ultimately be made by federal bureaucrats, and most of them will not be health care professionals. Hospital admissions, payments to physicians, and allocations of necessary medical devices will be strictly controlled by the government.

However, as scary as all of that is, it just scratches the surface. In fact, I have concluded that this legislation really has no intention of providing affordable health care choices. Instead it is a convenient cover for the most massive transfer of power to the Executive Branch of government that has ever occurred, or even been contemplated If this law or a similar one is adopted, major portions of the Constitution of the United States will effectively have been destroyed.

The first thing to go will be the masterfully crafted balance of power between the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches of the U.S. Government. The Congress will be transferring to the Obama Administration authority in a number of different areas over the lives of the American people, and the businesses they own.

The irony is that the Congress doesn’t have any authority to legislate in most of those areas to begin with! I defy anyone to read the text of the U.S. Constitution and find any authority granted to the members of Congress to regulate health care.

This legislation also provides for access, by the appointees of the Obama administration, of all of your personal healthcare direct violation of the specific provisions of the 4th Amendment to the Constitution information, your personal financial information, and the information of your employer, physician, and hospital. All of this is a protecting against unreasonable searches and seizures. You can also forget about the right to privacy. That will have been legislated into oblivion regardless of what the 3rd and 4th Amendments may provide.

If you decide not to have healthcare insurance, or if you have private insurance that is not deemed acceptable to the Health Choices Administrator appointed by Obama, there will be a tax imposed on you. It is called a tax instead of a fine because of the intent to avoid application of the due process clause of the 5th Amendment. However, that doesn’t work because since there is nothing in the law that allows you to contest or appeal the imposition of the tax, it is definitely depriving someone of property without the due process of law.

So, there are three of those pesky amendments that the far left hate so much, out the original ten in the Bill of Rights, that are effectively nullified by this law It doesn’t stop there though.

The 9th Amendment that provides : The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people;

The 10th Amendment states : The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are preserved to the States respectively, or to the people. Under the provisions of this piece of Congressional handiwork neither the people nor the states are going to have any rights or powers at all in many areas that once were theirs to control.

I could write many more pages about this legislation, but I think you get the idea. This is not about health care; it is about seizing power and limiting rights. Article 6 of the Constitution requires the members of both houses of Congress to “be bound by oath or affirmation to support the Constitution.” If I was a member of Congress I would not be able to vote for this legislation or anything like it, without feeling I was violating that sacred oath or affirmation. If I voted for it anyway, I would hope the American people would hold me accountable.

For those who might doubt the nature of this threat, I suggest they consult the source, the US Constitution, and Bill of Rights. There you can see exactly what we are about to have taken from us.

Michael Connelly

Retired attorney,

Constitutional Law Instructor

Carrollton , Texas

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- FOXNews.com – December 11, 2009

Watchdogs Cry Foul Over Thousands of Earmarks in Spending Bill

Republicans and taxpayer watchdogs are railing against the thousands of earmarks included in the omnibus spending bill that passed the House Thursday and is awaiting a vote in the Senate.

Republicans and tax watchdog groups are railing against the thousands of earmarks included in the omnibus spending bill that the House passed Thursday and is awaiting a vote in the Senate.

The $1.1 trillion bill includes $447 billion in operating budgets for 10 Cabinet departments. Mixed in are more than 5,000 earmarks totaling $3.9 billion, according to watchdog Taxpayers for Common Sense.

Pork-watchers are only just beginning to sort through the earmarks, which typically are goodies set aside for the districts of members of Congress, as the bill tracks toward a final vote. So far, they’ve uncovered gems ranging from $700,000 for a shrimp fishing project in Maryland to $30,000 for the Woodstock Film Festival Youth Initiative to $200,000 for a visitor’s center in a Texas town with a population of about 8,000.

“Let’s stop the madness,” House Republican Leader John Boehner said, before the bill passed without any GOP support. Twenty-eight House Democrats also opposed it.

House Minority Whip Eric Cantor, R-Va., wrote to President Obama urging him to veto the bill, and pledging that Republicans would stand by him if he did.

Obama in March waved off controversy over a $410 billion spending bill that also was riddled with earmarks, arguing that it represented “last year’s business.” This time around, Boehner said, the president needs to crack down on the pork under his watch.

Republicans, though, have hardly shied away from the earmarks. Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., is pushing $200,000 for the Washington National Opera. Sen. Judd Gregg, a fiscal hawk, is behind a $1 million earmark for renovation at the Portsmouth Music Hall.

Taxpayers for Common Sense reports a total of 5,224 earmarks in the 2010 spending bill, which also includes funding for Medicare and Medicaid. Groups like Citizens Against Government Waste, as well as Sen. John McCain’s staff, have drawn attention to dozens of items they consider questionable. Here’s just a sampling:

– $150,000 for educational programs and exhibitions at the National Building Museum.

– $400,000 for renovation of the Brooklyn Botanical Garden.

– $150,000 for exhibits at the Theodore Roosevelt Inaugural Site Foundation in Buffalo, N.Y.

– $500,000 for Mississippi River exhibits at the National Mississippi River Museum and Aquarium in Dubuque, Iowa.

– $200,000 for the Washington National Opera.

– $30,000 for the Woodstock Film Festival Youth Initiative.

– $2.7 million for the University of Nebraska Medical Center, to support surgical operations in space.

– $200,000 for a visitor’s center in Bastrop, Texas.

– $700,000 for a project called, “Shrimp Industry Fishing Effort Research Continuation,” at the National Marine Fisheries Service in Silver Spring, Md.

– $292,200 for the elimination of blight in Scranton, Pa.

– $750,000 for exhibits at the World Food Prize Hall of Laureates in Iowa.

– $1.6 million for a tram between the Marshall Flight Center and Huntsville Botanical Garden in Alabama.

– $655,000 for equipment at the Institute for Irritable Bowel Syndrome Research in Los Angeles.

Republicans have been on a tear over earmarks and excessive spending over the past week, particularly as Congress prepares to take up a new jobs-creation package and raise the debt ceiling by nearly $2 trillion.

Rep. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., and Rep. Tom Price, R-Ga., on Thursday named what they called the 11 most wasteful spending projects considered by Congress so far this year.

On Wednesday, four Republican lawmakers demanded an audit of the $787 billion stimulus program following reports of exaggerated or inaccurate accounts of the number of jobs created.

McCain, R-Ariz., and Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., on Tuesday released a report on 100 “questionable” stimulus projects worth nearly $7 billion.

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Let’s first channel Alfred, Lord Tennyson from his poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade”:

Half a league, half a league,

Half a league onward,

All in the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred (two-hundred eighty)

“Forward the Light Brigade!

Charge for the guns,” he said

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred. (two-hundred eighty)

“Forward, the Light Brigade!”

Was there a man dismay’d?

Not tho’ the soldier knew

Someone had blunder’d:

Theirs not to make reply,

Theirs not to reason why,

Theirs but to do and die:

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred. (two-hundred eighty)

But still you charge. Still you vote for a bill the American public has repudiated, after extensive debate, by 18 points. Still you back legislation that seniors oppose by two to one. Still you use your majorities to pass the single most unpopular piece of legislation in recent history.

Civil rights, Social Security, women’s suffrage — all of Harry Reid’s metaphors — were popular and had broad approving majorities. This bill has the opposite: a nation paralyzed with fear for what you are about to do to its healthcare.

Will you listen to the elderly who absorb 40 percent of medical care and not to the AARP, which you have bought by way of a promise to eliminate Medicare Advantage?

Will you listen to the doctors of America, two to one in opposition, and not to the AMA, which you have bludgeoned into submission via your threats of reimbursement cuts?

Will you stop to examine how, as Democrats, you can vote to slice $500 billion from Medicare and cut home healthcare? Former comrades-in-arms, former party-mates, do not commit party-cide by passing this bill!

Is this to be your epitaph? That you put all healthcare under government control? That your legacy is to be the waiting list to see a doctor? That the memorial to your public service is to be the denial of care at a bureaucrat’s whim?

Many of you must know that you are sacrificing your careers. Can Blanche Lincoln, Byron Dorgan, Harry Reid and others really believe they will return?

Can any of you believe you will remain in the majority after you have so flouted the obvious will of your constituents?

Why does this pied piper have such power over you? His approval is sinking in every poll at a pace unprecedented for presidents. If he promises you judgeships, ambassadorships, Cabinet posts or other patronage to enliven your retirement, can you doubt that there is but a two-year term in the offing?

And think about what the deficit you are creating will do to your country. The nation you have already burdened with so much debt that you know and we all know that inflating the currency is the only way out! In your souls you must know that in five years and 10 years and 15vyears, it will be the skyrocketing cost of the system you now put in place that will animate future deficits. You must realize that the CBO estimates are a fiction created by 10 years of taxing divided by six years of spending.

What has gotten into you? Where are your senses? What happened to your instincts?

Are you all to line up and drink the Kool-Aid, march off the cliff in lockstep? Charge into the cannon?

Charging an army, while

All the world wonder’d:

Then they rode back, but not

Not the six hundred.

Cannon to right of them,

Cannon to left of them,

Cannon behind them

Volley’d and thunder’d;

Storm’d at with shot and shell,

While horse and hero fell,

They that had fought so well

Came thro’ the jaws of Death

Back from the mouth of Hell,

All that was left of them,

Left of six hundred.

Have you truly worked for this all your life: to sacrifice your political careers to pass the most unpopular piece of legislation I can ever remember passing Congress?

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I was in the FOX News green room last night with Karl Rove, waiting to go on the Hannity Show. I asked Karl whether he thought we had a chance to defeat the health care bill. We both agreed that we did.

As this bill enters its next phase in the Senate, let’s all remember that the Democrats need to win every vote. We only need to win one to kill the bill.

The debate in the Senate takes place against a backdrop characterized by two contradictory forces: public opinion is moving more and more against this bill in particular and Obama in general and at the same time, the Democratic leadership in Congress is ratcheting up the pressure on its members to stay in line and back the bill.

One top Democratic strategist conceded to me that “we are losing the message war.” In fact, he implicitly conceded that they have given up on the message war and “are concentrating on holding our guys in line.”

In the long run that’s great for us! It means that if they eventually do pass this bill, it will be a big nail in their coffin for the 2010 election…but we can still beat this bill!

The key is to force the moderate Democratic Senators to demand amendments that move the bill so far to the right that the House can’t pass it. By putting restrictions on the use of funds for abortion, modifying or eliminating the public option, reducing the subsidies for insurance premiums, cutting the penalties for not buying insurance, reducing the Medicare cuts, modifying the cuts in doctor reimbursement, cutting back the Medicaid mandate to expand coverage, and moving in a number of other areas, we can so modify the bill that the House liberals won’t accept it.

We also need to buy time by fighting on each of these amendments in the Senate.

Meanwhile, we need to really pour it on in the message war. We have the public opposing this bill by 38-56 in the Rasmussen Poll of last week. If we can move those numbers to something more like 30-60, we will create irresistible political pressure. Politicians seeking re-election are not made to withstand pressure like that!

If, eventually, the bill — in some form — does pass the Senate, the more we have forced moderate amendments, the more the conference committee will be a long and bloody deadlock.

Obama is alienating the left by sending more troops to Afghanistan. The left will not take kindly to the moderate amendments the Senate will likely add. And the longer the bill remains in conference committee, the more public pressure can build to kill it…and the closer the 2010 elections loom. The more his popularity on the left ebbs, the more liberal Senators and Congressmen will refuse to go along with modifications of the bill.

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First, we learned that a $500 billion cut in Medicare will dramatically affect the quality and quantity of healthcare available to America’s senior citizens. Grandma’s access is being slashed to add illegal immigrants and twenty-somethings into the insurance system. However, this revelation pales in relation to what we heard this week.

Here’s the latest shock: Average current health care insurance premiums will likely triple under ObamaCare!

The new data comes from well regarded, state-by-state study conducted for WellPoint, Inc. The most dramatic premium boosts will hit young people. These are the actual individuals that often opt out of insurance plans now.

Reaction from the Obama White House was swift and harsh. Linda Douglass, Obama‘s healthcare spokesperson , had the audacity to compare the health insurance firm with tobacco companies. Since the White House refuses to argue the facts, they instead turned to using one of their favorite tactics, which is demonizing any voices of dissent.

The reason for the dramatic insurance premium increases is the result of ObamaCare regulations. First cause is the mandate that insurance companies take any customer. Insurance traditionally is an actuarial business that rates different based on risk factors. This is the reason a driver aged 19 with two speeding tickets pays more for auto insurance than a customer aged 35 with no speeding tickets. Nineteen-year-olds have more accidents! Therefore they pose more risk.

Traditionally, health insurance companies charged customers with risk factors and chronic illness more than young, healthy 19-year-olds. ObamaCare stands the the concept of insurance on its head. Since an insurance company will be forced to sell to any sick patient, the incentive to buy insurance when you are healthy decreases. Why not wait until you are sick; get cancer, diabetes or some other severe illness before you buy? To circumvent this problem, Obama is riddling the program with police-state mandates on healthy, younger citizens. Perverted, negative incentives such as threats of large fines and even prison time will hang over young people’s heads to force them to join and stay enrolled in Obama‘s healthcare scheme. Does this sound like America to you?

Democratic leaders in Congress are seeing support slip through their fingers because Americans are learning that they will end up paying more for less-adequate care.The beneficiaries of this plan are still lobbying hard. Big business will likely dump most of their current employee-based plans and pay the less expensive tax. Big unions are facing the reality that they are going to be bankrupted by their generous membership health plans. Many want to dump their responsibilities on the new government option recently revived by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. AARP is salivating at the money they will make selling new, bigger Medicare-gap plans after the current program is gutted!

These powerful lobbies are the driving force for change. Individual family finances will pay the higher costs and see no benefit!

There is still time to kill this wrong-headed plan and replace it with reforms that will truly work. Selling insurance across state lines will increase competition and lower prices. Tort reform that eliminates outrageous judgments in malpractice cases will get lawyers out of medicine; this will result in eliminating billions currently spent in the name of defensive medicine.

Insurance can work, but the costly mandates and regulations, already choking the healthcare system are a big barrier to cutting costs.

Free markets deliver to Americans consumer goods, groceries, veterinary services, and even plastic surgery at affordable prices with little government meddlling. Let the free market price and correct the distortions currently in the health care system.

Government has bankrupted Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Social Security, Medicare and the U. S. Postal Service. Let’s not let the politicians destroy the greatest healthcare delivery system in the world! Bar none!

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