Category Archives: Health
Lawgiver
President Obama insists that he’s not a dictator or a king, but if Congress won’t act he will. How’s that work? He picks and chooses the laws he likes. In a speech last week he claimed the right to unilaterally “tweak” the Affordable Care Act because this is not a “normal political environment” – meaning Congress won’t do what he wants.
Funny, he didn’t have any trouble getting Congress’s cooperateration when they tweaked the law to subsidize the health care government workers must now buy through the exchanges. No one else earning$175,000 gets a subsidy.
George Will offers a pithy analysis of Obama’s Nixonian tendencies here.
Crony Congress
The president sings the praises of the middle class but hasn’t changed his tune on the individual mandate to buy Obamacare. Meanwhile he has taken care of big business and the political class by delaying the employer mandate for a year and relieving congress and staff of their obligation to pay for ObamaCare. The WSJ says the law is a “mere suggestion” to this White House. It’s enough to make Greta Van Susteren throw up.
Update:
Michael F. Cannon weighs in with Congress’s ObamaCare Waiver in NRO:
Obamacare includes a provision that should cost each member of Congress and each staffer $5,000 to $11,000 per year. Needless to say, the ruling class was not pleased.
Congress wasn’t about to try to exempt itself from this provision explicitly, though. If John Q. Congressman voted to give himself an Obamacare waiver that his constituents don’t get, he wouldn’t be John Q. Congressman much longer. What’s an aristocrat to do?
On July 30, I predicted that, even though he had no authority to do so, President Obama would waive that provision at taxpayers’ expense. On August 1, he ignobly obliged the aristocracy by decreeing we peasants give each member and staffer $5,000 or $11,000, depending on whether they want self-only or family coverage. It’s good to be king.
Gen Y Generation
No cartoon about the Royal Highness Prince of Cambridge, that is unless he counts as a Gen Y Generation Prince.
Why ObamaCare Isn’t Working
Democrats are blaming Republicans for standing by and watching, rather than climbing aboard the ObamaCare train wreck.
Line-Item Veto
Ben Sasse is the president of the Cornhusker Kickback state’s Midland University, and The Weekly Standard’s hope for the U.S. Senate. When President Obama deleted the employer mandate from the Affordable Care Act for one year Sasse said, “The president has just given himself the line-item veto, well after he had signed the bill into law.” … “Apparently Obamacare is a living, breathing document designed to grow and change with the desires of the president.”
The president, who insists he is not a king, later ruled to retain the individual mandate on the honor system.
Update: Actually, Justice John Paul Stevens says you don’t have a line item veto. From Michael McConnell in the WSJ:
“There is no provision in the Constitution that authorizes the president to enact, to amend, or to repeal statutes.”
