In today’s American Spectator, I discuss the latest skulduggery from Commissar Sebelius. This time it’s the use of federal tax dollars to lobby for state and local initiatives:
The Anti-Lobbying Act forbids federal bureaucrats from using money appropriated by Congress to influence “an official of any government, to favor, adopt, or oppose… any legislation, law, ratification, policy, or appropriation.” Sebelius evidently didn’t get the memo.
Thus she has been using Obamacare funds to lobby for all manner of nanny-state measures:
Specifically, it looks like Madam Commissar and her HHS minions have been using federal money to lobby state and local officials to “favor, adopt or oppose” countless initiatives involving everything from local zoning rules to ordinances concerning tobacco use to the imposition of new taxes on soft drinks.
The cash they are thus spreading around comes from an obscure Obamacare trove called the “Prevention and Public Health Fund,” which provides Sebelius with what amounts to $12.5 billion in pin money.
Commissar Sebelius has finally discovered a regulation she isn’t willing to break. Sarah Murnaghan is a 10-year-old girl who needs a lung transplant but doesn’t qualify pursuant to federal regulations that put kids her age on a different waiting list than those 12 or older.
Sebelius has the authority to waive that rule but refuses to do it because, she says, her HHS lawyers have told her she can’t. Since when does does this apparatchik give a rat’s ass about regulations or the rule of law? Watch the Commissar justify her intransigence:
This is a complex situation, but at least one judge has decided that now is not the time to ponder nuances. U.S. District Judge Michael Baylson, apparently agreeing with the parents that the regulation is “arbitrary, capricious, and an abuse of discretion,” has ordered her to suspend it.
It is Sebelius’ normal practice to ignore the law when it suits her to do so. I wonder if she has the guts to ignore a court order in a situation like this.
In today’s American Spectator, I discuss the latest effort by Obamacare snake oil salesmen to deceive the public:
Peter V. Lee is the Executive Director of “Covered California,” the Golden State’s system of Obamacare insurance exchanges. On May 23, his shiny new bureaucracy issued a press release announcing that the premiums for health plans purchased through California’s exchanges will be lower than predicted by most economists. This was a premeditated falsehood.
And the “news” media is playing along withe deception:
If our national press corps were not utterly corrupt, the misleading assertions contained in Cover California’s press release would have been held up to scorn. Unfortunately, the leading lights of the establishment “news” media have decided to collude with Lee and his bureaucratic accomplices to deceive the public.
In today’s American Spectator I discuss a third IRS scandal about which the media has been conspicuously silent:
The public is still getting the mushroom treatment on two other outrages by that rogue agency. The media have devoted scant coverage to its theft of 60 million medical records … and they have been all but silent regarding the illegal IRS scheme to fund Obamacare’s federal insurance exchanges.
As scary as is the medical record theft, the more important of these two scandals involves IRS skullduggery relating to the exchanges:
A year ago, the IRS finalized a regulatory ruling to the effect that it will issue tax credits through Obamacare’s federal insurance exchanges. But the IRS has been granted no legal authority, by PPACA or any other act of Congress, to issue such credits.
In fact, the ruling flouts the explicit language of Obamacare. PPACA stipulates that all such assistance must emanate from state-run exchanges.
In today’s American Spectator, I speculate on whether your medical records are among the 60 million illegally seized by the IRS:
On Wednesday, it was reported that a class-action lawsuit had been filed against a group of IRS agents who, according to the complaint filed by “John Doe Company” in the Southern District of California, ‘stole more than 60,000,000 medical records of more than 10,000,000 Americans.’
Oddly, the MSM has ignored this:
Thus far, though, only conservative and libertarian publications have afforded it serious attention. Why so much focus on one story and none on the other? It’s those two words, “medical records.” The MSM is attempting to build a firewall between the IRS scandal and Obamacare.
But they are inextricably linked. How?
They are linked because Obamacare … mandated that every health care provider in the country adopt the very technology, electronic health records (EHR), which renders such abuse possible. Before these mandates, it wasn’t possible to steal 60 million confidential records from any single entity except from the federal government itself.
In fact, that has already been done as well, from the VA no less. To read the rest of the column, click here.
A good succinct explanation, from the folks at George Mason University, of why Medicaid has become such a problematic issue for the states since the advent of Obamacare:
In today’s American Spectator, I vent my spleen on John Boehner and Mitch McConnell for their empty posturing regarding IPAB:
Last week, Speaker of the House John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell ostentatiously announced their intention to fight implementation of the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB). They sent a letter to the President decrying the way IPAB will ‘impact America’s seniors … in the absence of the democratic process.’
Sadly, the exercise was a charade. McConnell and Boehner know perfectly well that Obama has no intention of setting up IPAB until after 2015.
Why not? Well, IPAB comes into play only if Medicare costs increase at a certain rate above the Consumer Price Index … As it happens, that is precisely what his new CMS actuary has reported. On April 30, acting actuary Paul Spitalnic advised his boss that “the projected 5-year Medicare per capita growth rate” won’t hit the trigger amount that would require the intervention of IPAB.
Boehner and McConnell have no doubt been planning for some time to make IPAB an issue in the 2014 midterms, and were caught flat-footed.
It’s time these hacks were put out to pasture. To read the rest of the column, click here.
My column in today’s American Spectatordiscusses the futile attempts by Obamacare advocates to explain away the latest calamity to hit the “reform” trainwreck:
It must be tough these days to be a pro-Obamacare journalist. Every day brings more bad news that must be explained away. Thus, the implementation train wreck becomes the result of Republican parsimony, and skyrocketing health coverage premiums have to be blamed on insurance company greed.
And it’s even worse when the statisticians start in on them:
Consequently, there must have been widespread consternation among the “reporters” tasked with writing such tales when the New England Journal of Medicine published a study last week showing that uninsured patients who go on Medicaid enjoy “no significant improvements in measured physical health outcomes.”
So, the PPACA pimps had to produce more bad fiction. The resultant fables were not, however, wholly devoid of value. Many were genuinely funny.
To read more about their frantic attempts to explain away this latest evidence that Obamacare is a pig’s breakfast, click here.
My column in today’s American Spectatordiscusses a lawsuit filed by a decorated Iraq veteran who wants Obamacare declared unconstitutional:
This 32-year-old artist, businessman, and holder of the Bronze Star is the plaintiff in Sissel v. U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, which Sissel sees as “a battle for my liberty — my freedom to live out my life to the fullest.” This is the only remaining lawsuit that has any chance of bringing down the entire health care law.
Matt Sissel’s lawsuit is based on Obamacare’s violation of the Origination Clause:
A variety of constitutional scholars have of course weighed in on the Sissel case. Last September Georgetown Professor Randy Barnett wrote, “If any act violates the Origination Clause, it would seem to be the Affordable Care Act. The Supreme Court has never approved the ‘strike-and-replace’ procedure the Congress employed here.
I must confess that I don’t read the Huffington Post, in any of its iterations, very much. But the other day, my email contained a Google alert indicating that someone at that outfit had linked to my American Spectatorcolumn titled “The Wheels Come Off Obamacare.”
Ruh-roh, I thought, I guess I’ve been hammered. But when I read the actual blog post it turned out to be pretty sensible. The author, Deane Waldman, used my piece and one by another writer to highlight how difficult it can be to distinguish wheat from chaff on the internet:
Two recent articles highlight our difficulty. Here on HuffPost, the President of the American Federation of teachers, Randi Weingarten, assured us that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is working.
And this is where Waldman ran into the wheat/chaff dilemma:
Five days before that in the American Spectator, healthcare economist David Catron blogged that, “The Wheels Come Off Obamacare.” He was referring of course to the same ACA as Weingarten.
In the end, Waldman (who is a physician with an MBA) did what every reader should do in these situations: He checked the facts. In this case, those stubborn little critters supported the assertions made in my column. Would that more people would just do their homework, as Waldman did.
