How to Protect Yourself From Obamacare

[RecycleMichael]

You cannot force someone to purchase something as a condition of being a US Citizen.

In most settings I am required to have a government issued ID on my person if I leave my house. The gubmints charge me for them...

As an employer, I am required to pay for Workmen's Compensation Insurance no matter what I hire workers to do.

Those seem to be government mandated expenses to me.

Why the outrage about medical insurance?

[Hoss]

In most settings I am required to have a government issued ID on my person if I leave my house. The gubmints charge me for them...

As an employer, I am required to pay for Workmen's Compensation Insurance no matter what I hire workers to do.

Those seem to be government mandated expenses to me.

Why the outrage about medical insurance?

Because our current President is blamed for it (with the idiotic moniker ObamaCare..might as well be called RomneyCare or DoleCare).

[Gaspar]

In most settings I am required to have a government issued ID on my person if I leave my house. The gubmints charge me for them...

As an employer, I am required to pay for Workmen's Compensation Insurance no matter what I hire workers to do.

Those seem to be government mandated expenses to me.

Why the outrage about medical insurance?

You may use your birth certificate for ID.  The cost for other identification is nominal.
You only pay workman's comp if you choose to employ.  
You only pay for driver's license if you choose to drive.
You only pay for car insurance if you choose to drive.

You cannot force a person to pay tens of thousands of dollars over a lifetime just to be alive.

[Conan71]

In most settings I am required to have a government issued ID on my person if I leave my house. The gubmints charge me for them...

As an employer, I am required to pay for Workmen's Compensation Insurance no matter what I hire workers to do.

Those seem to be government mandated expenses to me.

Why the outrage about medical insurance?

Main difference between the government mandating worker's comp and auto liability and mandatory health insurance is worker's comp and auto liability ensure others are protected from your negligence.  Health insurance is a coverage on yourself.  As well, worker's comp (far as I know) and auto liability are mandated by state law not federal law.  Your driver's license is also mandated as a state, not federal law.

Not quite sure how to spin the whole thing about a passport other than it's entirely optional and only necessary if you wish to travel abroad.

[Gaspar]

The ruling:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/47905280/vinsonruling1-31-11

[we vs us]

This is going to the Supremes, as it always has been, ever since the final vote was tallied.  Significantly, the judge in FLA didn't stop the implementation of the bill, so it will continue until the high court finally gets it and makes a decision.

[Gaspar]

Twitter is aflutter with moon-bats trying to find a foothold on defending Obamacare as somehow above the constitution.  Can't wait until all of the ideas congeal. 

[guido911]

This passing reference in the Court's Order to what led to the Boston Tea Party will make the left's heads collectively explode. Those damned original teabaggers! 

It is difficult to imagine that a nation which began, at least in part, as the result of opposition to a British mandate giving the East India Company a monopoly and imposing a nominal tax on all tea sold in America would have set out to create a government with the power to force people to buy tea in the first place.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/weigel/archive/2011/01/31/florida-district-court-rules-against-health-care-reform.aspx

[Gaspar]

This passing reference in the Court's Order to what led to the Boston Tea Party will make the left's heads collectively explode. Those damned original teabaggers! 

http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/weigel/archive/2011/01/31/florida-district-court-rules-against-health-care-reform.aspx

There's a little nugget on page 62 that I love:

The Necessary and Proper Clause cannot be utilized to "pass laws for the accomplishment of objects" that are not within Congress, enumerated powers. As the previous analysis of the defendants" Commerce Clause argument reveals, the individual mandate is neither within the letter nor the spirit of the Constitution.

[RecycleMichael]

Those damned original teabaggers! 

teabaggers? I thought that term was disrespectful.

[guido911]

teabaggers? I thought that term was disrespectful.

It is. I was being sarcastic. I guess I failed. 

Here is another passage from the opinion I found on Drudge.

"I note that in 2008, then-Senator Obama supported a health care reform proposal that did not include an individual mandate because he was at that time strongly opposed to the idea, stating that, 'If a mandate was the solution, we can try that to solve homelessness by mandating everybody to buy a house,'" Judge Vinson wrote in a footnote toward the end of his 78-page ruling Monday.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/jan/31/judge-uses-obamas-words-against-him/

Sucks to be caught.

[we vs us]

This passing reference in the Court's Order to what led to the Boston Tea Party will make the left's heads collectively explode. Those damned original teabaggers! 

http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/weigel/archive/2011/01/31/florida-district-court-rules-against-health-care-reform.aspx

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the colonists weren't objecting to taxation in principle, they were objecting to taxation without representation.  They didn't have any say in the taxes levied by the Crown.  Our entire form of government was created to ensure that we all have an adequate voice in our taxation.  In this case -- especially considering the torturous town halls, and all the minute wrangling that lasted for so many months -- I'd say there was a goodly amount of representation exercised in this decision. 

The more I look at the judge's decision, the more it comes off as, well, deeply ideological.

I'd say this:  if the government had had the cojones to divorce the idea of health care from health insurance, this would be a moot argument.  The funding could've been done through good old fashioned taxation, and while I know the very word makes select posters' heads spin, the upshot in general would've almost definitely been cheaper and better outcomes -- as is the rule in virtually every other first world nation with single payer healthcare. 

But instead Obama and the Democrats turned themselves inside out trying to guarantee bipartisanship and in the process gutting both the most direct and the most effective solution out there. 

/classic liberal rant off. 

[Red Arrow]

I'd say this:  if the government had had the cojones to divorce the idea of health care from health insurance, this would be a moot argument.  The funding could've been done through good old fashioned taxation, and while I know the very word makes select posters' heads spin, the upshot in general would've almost definitely been cheaper and better outcomes -- as is the rule in virtually every other first world nation with single payer healthcare. 

I don't know about cheaper and better (at this time that is still ideological) but financing it through taxation certainly would have taken away the argument about the commerce clause.

It's getting picky about words but I agree we need to differentiate between health care and health insurance. 

[we vs us]

I don't know about cheaper and better (at this time that is still ideological) but financing it through taxation certainly would have taken away the argument about the commerce clause.

It's getting picky about words but I agree we need to differentiate between health care and health insurance. 

You know, I don't pretend to believe that using a tax to build the healthcare infrastructure would be any less controversial or that certain folks would hate it any less; I do think that it would foster understanding, however. Paying a tax and receiving a service in exchange is a simple transaction.  Forcing people to buy a private product of widely varying efficacy in order to mysteriously exert downward pressure on an already complicated (and price-pressure resistant!) market just makes it needlessly complex. 

[Red Arrow]

You know, I don't pretend to believe that using a tax to build the healthcare infrastructure would be any less controversial or that certain folks would hate it any less...

I know that you know.  I am making the observation that it may still be despised in some quarters and loved in others but the legal question would at least be different and seemingly more difficult to repeal the law.