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repeal

Inside the 5th Circuit Obamacare Fight

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Listen to “Inside the 5th Circuit Obamacare Fight” on Spreaker.

On Tuesday, a three-judge panel of the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments over whether the repeal of the tax penalty for refusing to buy health insurance makes the entire Affordable Care Act unconstitutional.

Texas is leading a coalition of states trying to get the law declared unconstitutional. Rob Henneke of the Texas Public Policy Foundation is arguing for the law to be struck down on behalf of individual Americans. In December, a federal district judge in Texas agreed that the end of the tax penalty meant that all of Obamacare ought to be struck down. Liberal states then appealed to the Fifth Circuit.

What happened in the oral arguments before the appellate judges? Where did the judges focus most of their questions? How did they respond to the argument that only Congress, and not courts, can do away with the law?

We discuss all of this with Rob Henneke and ask whether he thinks he can win over Chief Justice John Roberts if and when the case reaches the Supreme Court.

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DOJ Joins Effort to Overturn Obamacare

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Listen to “DOJ Joins Effort to Overturn Obamacare” on Spreaker.

The effort to strike down the Affordable Care Act just got a powerful new ally, as the Justice Department now says the courts should find the 2010 law unconstitutional, and one of the lawyers spearheading the case is thrilled with the news.

“The Trump Justice Department is doing its job to uphold the Constitution,” said Rob Henneke of the Texas Public Policy Foundation. “I commend the Trump administration Department of Justice looking at the reasoning of the court and choosing to defend the rule of law and now seeking to uphold the correct opinion.”

Henneke joined Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton last year in arguing that a federal district judge should rule against Obamacare.  Judge Reed O’Connor agreed, and his decision is now being challenged at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.

Also known as Obamacare, the ACA survived a 2012 Supreme Court battle, when Chief Justice John Roberts admitted the ACA violated the Commerce Clause of the Constitution but allowed the law to stand because the penalties Americans paid to the government for failing to purchase health insurance fell under the power of Congress to levy taxes.

The 2017 tax reform enacted a zero dollar penalty for defying the individual mandate.  So critics like Henneke say there’s no longer a tax and revenue reason to keep the law.

Supporters of the ACA suggest conservatives are hypocritical for two major reasons.  First, they say critics of the Obama Justice Department were incensed when it refused to enforce laws it didn’t like, such as the Defense of Marriage Act, but are only too happy to fight against existing laws now.

Henneke rejects the accusation.

“This duty to defend is a made up doctrine from only the last couple of decades.  It’s not the role of the Department of Justice to win at any cost.  Their role is to seek justice and uphold the Constitution,” said Henneke.

Listen to the full podcast to hear Henneke explain why ACA defenders are also wrong to accuse Republicans of abandoning Americans with pre-existing conditions if the law were struck down.  He also explains where the case stands at the appellate level.

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Lawyer Who Argued for Obamacare Repeal Predicts SCOTUS Win

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Listen to “Lawyer Who Argued for Obamacare Repeal Predicts SCOTUS Win” on Spreaker.

Rob Henneke, the attorney who argued in federal court for the repeal of the Affordable Care Act is celebrating the verdict and predicting the U.S. Supreme Court will ultimately uphold the verdict.

On Friday, Federal Judge Reed O’Connor struck down the Affordable Care Act, also known as the ACA or Obamacare, agreeing with Henneke and officials from 20 states that the ACA is unconstitutional now that Congress has ended tax penalties for those refusing to purchase health insurance as mandated by the law.

“This is a great win, an historic outcome, with the federal district judge ruling that all of the Affordable Care Act is invalid because of the unconstitutionality of the individual mandate,” said Henneke, who directs the Center for the American Future at the Texas Public Policy Foundation.

While allies are hailing the decision and opponents are decrying it, Henneke points out that there are multiple legal steps remaining before the case is resolved.  He fully expects opponents to appeal O’Connor’s decision to a federal appeals court and one side or the other will then appeal that verdict to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Chief Justice John Roberts saved the ACA in 2012 by citing the tax component of the individual mandate, but Henneke says that same logic is how he expects to win the case this time around.

“The whole basis for the court’s ruling this past Friday was based on John Roberts’ opinion in NFIB v. Sebelius.  He found the Affordable Care Act constitutional because he said the individual mandate penalty was a tax and it was a tax because it generated revenue for the federal government.

“Now that Congress has set the individual mandate penalty at zero, it doesn’t generate revenue.  It is Chief Justice Roberts’ own analysis and own opinion which forms the basis of this case,” said Henneke.

Henneke is also firing back at media coverage suggesting millions of Americans will lose coverage and be thrown off their insurance because of pre-existing conditions.

He says the other side needs to be heard too.  Henneke represents two individuals in this case, Neill Hurley and John Nantz, who allege they have been unconstitutionally burdened by Obamacare.

Because of the limited options in Obamacare, Hurley had to choose whether to keep his own doctor and lose the pediatrician for his kids or keep the pediatrician and lose his physician.  He put his kids first but was still staring at $24,000 out-of pocket expenses before the insurance ever kicked in.

Henneke says there are millions of people like Hurley and Nantz who are suffering but never get their stories told.

Listen to the full podcast to hear Henneke discuss the Obamacare repeal in more detail, what he expects to happen in the legal, fight, and why he strongly rejects accusations that Judge O’Connor engaged in judicial activism similar to liberal judges striking down President Trump’s travel bans.

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Will Kyl Appointment Revive Obamacare Repeal?

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Listen to “Will Kyl Appointment Revive Obamacare Repeal?” on Spreaker.

A leading health care policy expert is imploring congressional Republicans to renew the push for an Obamacare repeal or risk the full wrath of many of their constituents, and timing for such a move just got better.

On Tuesday, Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey tapped former Sen. Jon Kyl to fill the U.S. Senate vacancy created by the death of Sen. John McCain, bringing a staunch conservative back to the Senate perhaps the decisive vote on repeal legislation.

Galen Institute President Grace-Marie Turner is part of a coalition pleading with Congress to take up the issue again – specifically on a plan to send power out of Washington and back to the states to establish their own rules for their own health systems.

She says many lawmakers like the idea but are reluctant to bring it up just two months before Election Day.

“They’re so frightened of bringing health care up again after the failed vote in July of last year,” said Turner.  They’re afraid of bringing it up again and failing.”

However, Turner says they might have more to fear from doing nothing based on the scolding lawmakers are getting from voters this campaign season.

“Members are getting hammered on the campaign trail because they haven’t done anything to give people relief from the high costs and the limited choices of Obamacare,” said Turner.

She cited one Virginia voter who makes over $100,000 per year but is saddled with monthly health insurance payments of more than $4,000 per month because the Obamacare exchange only offers one plan.  The rising costs are more than eating up the raises and extra income from the recent tax cuts.

“That’s what they’re hearing on the campaign trail: people trying to do the right thing and the costs just go up and up and up,” said Turner.  “The markets are really imploding.  The pools are not stable.”

In giving power back to the states, Turner says Republicans would once again be trumpeting what most Americans have always known.

“One of the things we’ve learned is that the federal government just cannot manage anything as complex and diverse as health insurance markets in the fifty states.  We need to give them not only more power but new resources to begin to give people more choices of more affordable coverage,” said Turner.

Turner says 46-47 Republican senators are on board with the prescribed legislation while a handful of others are diving into the specifics.  She says Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, want specific provisions for their states.  Sen. Rand Paul, R-Kentucky, wants a bigger focus on health savings accounts, and other conservatives want regulatory relief.

Listen to the rest of the interview with Grace-Marie Turner to hear all of her thoughts on the health care debate, the midterm elections, and how the liberal and media push for single payer is a tacit admission from the left that Obamacare is a failure.

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‘The Mask Is Coming Off’ in Gun Control Push

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After years of gun control advocates insisting they didn’t want to take away anyone’s guns, the March for Our Lives and a string of opinion columns headlined by former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens are making it clear that the movement is aimed at repealing the second amendment, and the head of one leading gun rights group welcomes the honesty.

“Obviously the mask is coming off.  There is a radical agenda that we are fighting against.  The anti-gun left wants to confiscate guns from law abiding Americans, but they’re not going to succeed,” said Gun Owners of America Executive Director Erich Pratt.

None of this comes as a surprise to Pratt.  He says opponents of the second amendment have been wanting this for a long time, even pointing to a ’60 Minutes’ interview with Sen. Dianne Feinstein from decades ago.

“If I could have gotten 51 votes in the Senate of the United States for an outright ban, picking up every one of them, Mr. and Mrs. America turn them all in, I would have done it,” Pratt recounted Feinstein as saying.

He notes Gov. Andrew Cuomo openly talked about gun confiscation in the wake of the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary massacre.

Pratt went to the March For Our Lives on March 24.  He says the overarching goal of the protesters was clear.

“It was all about, ‘Yes, we want to ban guns,’ or if they wanted to give us the privilege of keeping our guns, they would want to have the government go door-to-door and put trackers on the guns.  This is the type of thing we’re actually seeing in the movement,”said Pratt.

In his op-ed for the New York Times, Stevens asserted that the second amendment does not grant the right to keep and bear arms unless it is in the context of a militia.  Pratt begs to differ.

“That view lost at the Supreme Court,” he said, referring to a 2008 decision that affirmed an individual’s right to keep and bear arms.  The decision was 5-4.  Stevens wrote the dissent.

In addition to vigorously disagreeing with the effort to repeal the second amendment, Pratt says the logic of the protesters makes no sense.

“It’s almost like they don’t see the contradiction.  They want to take away our guns so therefore they want the Trump administration to have all the guns?  Wait, I thought they feared the Trump administration.  It simply doesn’t make sense,” said Pratt.

Stevens also claims a rich legal history of the courts severely restricting gun rights and he quotes former Chief Justice Warren Burger as saying the National Rifle Association committed “one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime,” by claiming the right to keep and bear arms could not be tampered with.

While Pratt admits the courts did clamp down on gun rights over the years, the second amendment was vital in the wake of the Civil War and during the tensions of the civil rights movement.

He says one of the purposes of the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment was to make it possible for blacks in the South to be able to purchase weapons when southern states refused to allow it.

In the 1950’s and 60’s, when police in the South were looking the other way while the KKK targeted black neighborhoods, black citizens restored order by patrolling their neighborhoods with guns.

“This idea that we can now trust the government, that we only needed (the amendment) in the 1700’s or 1800’s but we don’t need it today, that’s just simply crazy,” said Pratt.

Pratt does not believe the second amendment is going anywhere anytime soon, given 70 percent support for the right to keep and bear arms and the major difficulty of amending the Constitution.  He says the greater threat is the step by step erosion of gun rights that gun control proponents keep pushing.

For gun rights to survive long term, Pratt says parents need to educate their kids before the world gets to them.

“Use your sphere of influence.  If you’re a parent, I would ask you this.  Are you training your kids in your values and beliefs.  Sadly, too often the kids from conservative households have been lost to the current culture,” said Pratt.

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GOP Targeting Obamacare Again

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Reports of Republicans giving up on repealing and replacing Obamacare are greatly exaggerated, according to Galen Institute President Grace-Marie Turner, who is not only confident the GOP will address the issue again this year but is part of the team trying to make it happen.

Republicans have achieved a few wins on the health care front over the past year, namely the repeal of the individual mandate in the tax legislation, the repeal of the Independent Payment Advisory Board in a spending bill, and the end of cost-sharing reduction payments to insurance companies through executive action from President Trump.

When Republicans tried but failed to restore funding for the cost-sharing reduction payments in exchange for removing burdensome regulations from the individual health insurance market in the recent omnibus bill, many feared the GOP was giving up on addressing health care in a meaningful way this year.

Turner says that’s not the case.  First of all, she says the failure of Republicans to restore the subsidies to insurers was a major blessing.

“The measures that they were considering as part of the omnibus spending bill were really just papering over the problems.  And with Obamacare, they were ready to throw tens of billions more dollars into this black hole of Obamacare.  It was not going to fix anything,” said Turner.

But Turner also insists Republicans are ramping up for another legislative push to dismantle Obamacare this year.

“Congress is going to have to come back to a full repeal and replace measure and we have been working every week since October to refine this legislation at the behest of the Senate.  (Former) Sen. Rick Santorum has really been the energy behind this effort,” said Turner, who also explained the other players in the effort.

“Heritage Foundation, Ethics and Public Policy Center, the American Enterprise Institute, a lot of state-based think tanks and a lot of experts from around the country have been putting together a proposal that we believe cannot only get majority support in the Congress but majority support of the American people to fix  this for good,” said Turner.

In 2017, the House of Representatives passed reform legislation but the Senate failed on several different bills.  Republican Sens. Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and John McCain voted down all GOP bills.  Since then, Republicans lost a Senate seat in Alabama and McCain has been home battling cancer.  On most days, the GOP holds a 50-49 voting majority.

Turner says the focal point of this effort will look less like the bills that tanked last summer and more like the Graham-Cassidy bill that failed to advance in September.  the sponsors were Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-Louisiana.  Cassidy is a longtime physician.

“That bill was based upon a different approach, a federalist approach to return money and power to the states to ultimately empower individuals to have more choice and more control over their health insurance,” said Turner.

“We’ve got to devolve power to the states and they need resources in addition to new flexibility to be able to provide people with the kind of policies they actually want  to buy instead of what they’re forced to purchase.  They would use the money to make sure that they purchase private coverage and that they have many more choices and that the coverage is more affordable,” said Turner.

She says Obamacare is a proven disaster and is only getting worse because more people are getting out of the system and leaving older and sicker people to deal with soaring premiums.

“Obamacare is becoming one big high risk pool.  That means millions, probably tens of millions of people, are being shut out of health insurance.  They need a different place to go.  That’s what states can do.  States can figure out how they can revive their individual and small group health insurance markets,” said Turner.

But Republicans have a problem besides finding a majority to support any legislation.  The budget reconciliation rules that allowed them to attempt passage with a simple majority expired in September.  Right now, they would need 60 votes to get anything done.

Turner is confident the Senate GOP leaders could ramp up support for another budget reconciliation rule, and she believes this time they would do it right.  Turner says a big problem with the process last summer is how the rules were structured.

“They did it backwards last time.  This time we’re going to do it the right way, starting with good policy and then create a vehicle to get that enacted,” she said.

So what happened last time?

“What they did is pass budget reconciliation instructions to create the pathway for the repeal and replace legislation they wanted to pass.  And they had to fit it in to that channel and it didn’t really fit,” said Turner.

“As one of my colleagues said, they just kept having to pull limbs off of it until it would fit through that process.  At the end, nobody really liked the product.  We’re doing this differently.  We’re starting out by creating a product that we believe can work and that people will like and then they’ll write the budget reconciliation instructions around that,” said Turner.

Turner says the polls consistently show health care is the number one concern of voters and the GOP must make another push this summer.

“How can they go back to their voters and say, ‘Oh, sorry.  We know we told you for four election cycles we were going to repeal and replace Obamacare but it was just too hard.’  They can’t do that,” said Turner.

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Dems Tied to Hillary, Stevens vs. Constitution, NYT Discovers Pro-Life Goal

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Alexandra DeSanctis of National Review and Greg Corombos of Radio America enjoy watching new Republican ads tying incumbent Senate Democrats to Hillary Clinton’s trashing of Trump voters.  They also respond to former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, who says individual gun rights should have vanished at the same time as state militias and that the second amendment ought to be repealed.  And they get a kick out of the New York Times breathlessly revealing that state laws designed to limit abortion are all part of an effort by pro-life activists to reverse Roe v. Wade.

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Individual Mandate Repealed: Now What?

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Republicans succeeded in repealing the individual mandate in the 2010 Affordable Care Act as part of the recent tax reform package, but a leading health care expert urges President Trump and members of Congress to do even more this year to bring financial relief to Americans saddled by high premiums and deductibles.

Galen Institute President Grace-Marie Turner has been on the front lines of the health care debate since before the Clinton administration attempted to give government a greater role in the sector in the 1990’s.  A fierce critic of the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare, Turner is relishing how the individual mandate was sent to the scrap heap starting in 2019.

“The lovely irony is that the least popular provision of Obamacare was repealed in the tax bill.  It’s a bit of a touché to the Supreme Court,” said Turner, noting that the court upheld the individual mandate as constitutional only if it was considered a tax.

Beyond the political and legal drama, Turner says the mandate improved nothing and was a major burden on people.

“It was ineffective.  It was not doing what it needed to do.  Health insurance was so expensive that it was driving people away from policies.  Even with the tax penalties, people still found it was cheaper to pay the penalties than to buy this expensive coverage,” said Turner.

“The people who were most effected by these penalties were people making less than $50,000 a year.  It was backfiring from all perspectives,” said Turner.

As a result of the mandate being ineffective, Turner does not expect costs to rise noticeably when people can refuse to buy health coverage with no penalty next year.

As Congress was voting the tax bill into law, President Trump suggested in comments to reporters that ending the individual mandate was akin to repealing Obamacare.

“The individual mandate is being repealed.  When the individual mandate is being repealed, that means Obamacare is being repealed because they get their money from the individual mandate,” said Trump on Dec. 20.

Turner says Trump is right to be excited over nixing one of the most burdensome aspects of Obamacare, but she says Trump and Republicans in Congress need to stay focused on even more health care policy changes.

“There’s still lots of things on the books.  We’re spending hundreds of billions of dollars still on subsidies for people who may decide that they would rather purchase a different kind of coverage.

“All the rules and regulations are still on the books about the kind of coverage that we have to purchase, the expansion of Medicaid to the point where many states are finding they can’t begin to afford their share of the costs of Medicaid; all of that is still on the books,” said Turner.

And Turner know Trump is fully aware of this, as evidenced by his impending plan to offer expanded temporary health insurance.  The Obama administration allowed only one-time, three-month temporary insurance policies for people between jobs or going through other transitions.  The Trump plan will approve year-long policies that can be renewed year after year.

Trump is also expected to give the green light to association health plans through executive orders in the coming days.  Turner say this will allow smaller companies that share a similar focus to band together so employees can be offered plans at competitive rates.

“Let’s say you’re a small contractor or you run a barber shop or a beauty parlor.  You really can’t afford to compete with the big guys in offering good health insurance to your workers.  But if you were able to aggregate your policy with a lot of other similar businesses, then you can get the economies of scale.  You could get more choices for your employees,” said Turner.

She believes getting Washington bureaucrats out of health care also ought to be a top legislative priority.

“Give states a lot more authority in being able to approve the kind of health insurance policies that people want to buy, to allow the market to work to bring more players into the market.  In many parts of the country, people are still only going to have a choice of only one plan.  That’s not a choice,” said Turner.

Turner admits Republicans will be less motivated to address health reforms in 2018 since they repealed the mandate in the tax bill and want to avoid a repeat of of their Obamacare failures in 2017.

But she says that is not an option and voters will demand results.

“If Republicans don’t act, they are going to be on the defensive,” said Turner.  “I believe the voters are going to insist they take action this year.”

She says Republicans have about six months to get these reforms through Congress and onto Trump’s desk, otherwise the improvements will not appear in premium forecasts just weeks before Election Day.

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Will Left Push Full Repeal? Cabinet ‘Suicide Pact,’ Michelle’s Identity Politics

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Jim Geraghty of National Review and Greg Corombos of Radio America actually welcome the increasing chatter from the left and from the op-ed pages for Democrats to embrace full repeal of the Second Amendment as a way of drawing clear lines in the gun debate.  They also wince as three top Trump cabinet officials reportedly agree to a so-called “suicide pact,” meaning all three will leave office if President Trump fires one of them.  And they slam Michelle Obama for another round of horrible statements, this time claiming people don’t trust politics because Republicans are supposedly all men and all white.

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‘It’s Whack Job Economics’

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Five Senate Democrats are now publicly endorsing a government-run, single-payer health care system in a sign the party is quickly rallying to that goal, however the idea promises to be a financial and regulatory nightmare that should compel Republicans to revisit the issue and get it right before the 2018 elections.

On Tuesday, Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Oregon, announced he would support the “Medicare for All” legislation sponsored by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont.

“It’s time to simplify health care and lower patients’ costs, and embrace Medicare for All,” said Merkley, who is now the fifth Senate Democrat to join the cause publicly.  In addition to Sanders, Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., Kamala Harris, D-Calif., and Cory Booker, D-N.J., are all co-sponsoring the bill.

In addition, roughly half the House Democrats are on board with the idea.

Heritage Foundation Senior Fellow Robert Moffit says the Democrats are making their moves now because Republicans failed to get their health care reforms passed in the Senate.

“The immediate reason is the abject failure of Senate Republicans – and it’s the Senate’s fault here – to enact a health care reform bill to repeal and at least partially replace Obamacare,” said Moffit.

“It has created a major health policy vacuum, so the liberals in Congress and elsewhere are ready to fill it, and they’re preparing now for a total government takeover of health care, which is a single-payer system,” said Moffit.

But while touting “Medicare for All” and health care as a right, Moffit says Americans should not miss what is really at stake here.

“What they are proposing is nothing short of a government monopoly over the financing and the delivery of health care,” said Moffit.  “Ultimately what this means is that politicians will be in direct charge of health policy.”

He says Democrats in 2017 are making the exact opposite promise that President Obama made in 2009 and 2010, only this time they would actually keep it.

“When Obama promised he would not take away your plan, that turned out to be false, especially if you were in the individual market.  Here the Democrats in the Senate – Warren, Sanders, Sen. Merkley, John Conyers in the House – they are telling you they are going to take away your health plan,” said Moffit.

With Medicare already in deep debt and staring at $33-44 trillion dollars in unfunded liabilities, Moffit says adding the rest of the nation to the program would require a major wallop to the wallets of taxpayers.

He says California is an important test case.  The state senate there has approved a single-payer plan that would result in a a spending hike of anywhere from 53-110 percent.

“Frankly, it’s whack job economics.  The Senate legislative analysts themselves say that this will require a 15 percent payroll tax,” said Moffit.

Moffit also took aim at Merkley’s assertion that having Medicare for everyone would somehow simplify the health care system.  He says the story of Medicare shows exactly the opposite.

“I think that Merkley is living in an alternative universe.  Anyone who has had to deal with Medicare, members of the medical profession are very familiar with it.  Medicare today is governed by tens of thousands of pages of rules, regulations, and guidelines and medical paperwork is eating up more and more of the time and energy and effort of physicians,” said Moffit.

“If you think that Medicare is a model of administrative efficiency or that Medicare is somehow simple, you’ve got to have rocks in your head.  you’re living on another planet.  Medicare is the Godzilla of government regulation,” said Moffit.

“It imposes enormous administrative costs on doctors, hospitals, clinics, and home health agencies, who have to bear the real costs of complying with Medicare’s regulatory systems,” said Moffit.

Moffit says this is also another clear signal of how far Democrats have moved to the left.

“They’re consumed by identity politics.  They’re eager to impose political correctness as part of an aggressive, counter-cultural agenda.  Now their economic agenda boils down to heavier taxation, higher spending, larger government programs, and even greater government control over our personal lives.  Frankly, if they want to have that debate, I’m ready to go,” said Moffit.

He says the key to foiling a complete government takeover of health care is for Republicans to roll up their sleeves and do health care legislation right this time.  He says failure is not an option.

“This is not an optional matter.  The individual market in the United States is in crisis.  They have no options here.  It’s not a question of what the hell they want to do, pardon me.  They have got to do their job.  If they don’t do their job, millions of Americans get hurt, especially the millions of middle class Americans who today do not get any subsidies whatsoever,” said Moffit.

“Congress has got to get its act together.  They have no choice,” he added.

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