White House Says No ‘Veracity’ to Argument That Forcing Individuals to Buy Health Insurance Is Unconstitutional

Thursday, October 29, 2009

By Fred Lucas, Staff Writer

(CNSNews.com) – White House Spokesman Robert Gibbs told CNSNews.com on Wednesday that there is no “veracity” to the argument that the U.S. Constitution does not authorize the federal government to force individuals to buy health insurance.

The Congressional Budget Office has said that the federal government has never before in American history forced Americans to purchase any good or service.

When the health-care bill was being debated in the Senate Finance Committee, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), the former chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, raised questions about the constitutionality of forcing Americans to buy health insurance, which all congressional versions of the health care bill would do.

Hatch rejected the notion that the Commerce Clause–which empowers Congress to regulate commerce “among the several states”–justifies forcing Americans to purchase a product they do not want to buy. If Congress can make people buy health insurance, Hatch argued, they can force Americans to buy refrigerators or new cars.

But Gibbs said those who make this kind of argument have no federal court cases to back them up.

“I won’t be confused as a constitutional scholar, but I don’t believe there’s a lot of–I don’t believe there’s a lot of case law that would demonstrate the veracity of what they’re commentating on,” said Gibbs.

Asked by CNSNews.com last week where specifically the Constitution authorizes Congress to mandate that individuals buy health insurance, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said, “Are you serious? Are you serious?”

A Congressional Research Service report concluded that requiring individuals to purchase or have health insurance could be challenged.

“Whether such a requirement would be constitutional under the Commerce Clause is perhaps the most challenging question posed by such a proposal, as it is a novel issue whether Congress may use this clause to require an individual to purchase a good or service,” the CRS reportedly says.

In 1994, when the Clinton administration attempted to push a health care reform plan through a Democratic Congress that also mandated every American buy health insurance, the Congressional Budget Office determined that the government had never ordered Americans to buy anything.

“The government has never required people to buy any good or service as a condition of lawful residence in the United States,” the CBO analysis said. “An individual mandate would have two features that, in combination, would make it unique. First, it would impose a duty on individuals as members of society. Second, it would require people to purchase a specific service that would be heavily regulated by the federal government.”

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Congress’ Secret Plan to Pass Obamacare – CONFIRMED

• Posted October 7th, 2009 at 12.38pm in Health Care.

Leaders in the House and Senate have a plan to pass President Barack Obama’s sweeping health care plan by Thanksgiving without any significant participation by the American public. CNS News has confirmed the details in our September 22nd titled “Passing a Shell of A Bill: Congress’ Secret Plan to Ram Through Health Care Reform.” Nicholas Ballasy reports “a senior aide to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) told CNSNews.com that it is ‘likely’ that Reid will use H.R. 1586—a bill passed by the House in March to impose a 90-percent tax on bonuses paid to employees of certain bailed-out financial institutions—as a ‘shell’ for enacting the final version of the Senate’s health care bill, which Reid is responsible for crafting.”

This story confirms the four part scenario that would railroad the bill through the Senate using a very unusual closed door procedure to craft the bill with no input from the American people.

The four stage plan to pass Obamacare has been publicly confirmed and is ready to be implemented. The following is a comprehensive update:

Step One: “The Senate Finance Committee will finish work on the marking up of Senator Max Baucus’ (D-MT) conceptual framework for legislation by this Friday.” Progress on this had been stalled and the bill was not passed by the end of last week. Foxnews.com is reporting that the Congressional Budget Office score of the bill will be released later today and a high score may further stall progress on the Committee’s Vapor Bill.  Senate Finance Committee’s progress on passing something out of committee – INCOMPLETE.

Step Two: Next, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will take the final product of the Senate Finance Committee and merge it with the product of the Senate Health, Education, Labor & Pensions (HELP) Committee. CNSnews.com has confirmed that “the actual final text of the legislation will be determined by Reid himself, who will consolidate the legislation approved by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee and the still-unapproved legislation from the Senate Finance Committee. Reid will be able to draft and insert textual language that was not expressly approved by either committee.” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will write the final version of Obamacare to be considered in the Senate with no input from the American people. This is an extremely complex procedure that will not be done in public, or in the form of a hearing, or a public conference committee, and only Senator Harry Reid, some other Senators chosen by Reid and Obama Administration officials will be allowed to read the bill before the Senate debate starts. Merger of the bills – IN PROGRESS.

Step Three: Senator Reid will then move to proceed to H.R. 1586, a bill to impose a tax on bonuses received by certain TARP recipients. A senior aid to Senate Majority Leader Ried has confirmed that he will move to proceed to Senate Calendar Number 36, H.R. 1586, or another House passed tax measure, so the Senate can avoid the Constitutional mandate that tax bills originate in the House. Proceed to tax shell of a bill – CONFIRMED.

Step Four: This scenario would most likely be implemented after the Massachusetts state legislature gives Governor Deval Patrick the power to appoint a new Senator and that Senator is seated by the Senate. The Senate swore in new Massachusetts Senator Paul Kirk on September 25th. Change Law of Massachusetts to allow for interim Senator – COMPLETE.

The final step in this plan is for the House to take up Obama care, without amending the legislation, and then sending that bill directly to the President for his signature. Matt Cover at CNSnews.com reports “House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) won’t rule out having the House vote on the Senate health-care bill without making any changes in it, which would allow the bill to go directly to President Barack Obama without having to pass through a House-Senate conference committee and another round of votes in the House and Senate–and a longer period of public scrutiny of what the text of the proposed law actually says.” This scenario is in the process of being implemented and, if successful, it will result in Obamacare being on the President’s desk in time for Thansgiving with minimal participation of the American public.

The San Francisco Examiner published an editorial today that exposed the fact that the American people can’t see the bill. “When then-Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama promised not to sign major legislation until it had been posted on the Internet for public reading at least five days, trusting voters took him at his word. Now they know better. Not only is the actual language of what is likely to become the main legislative vehicle for Obama’s signature health care reform not available on the Internet, it hasn’t been given to members of the key Senate committees or the Congressional Budget Office.” The procedure being used, in addition to the exclusion of the American people from the process, should be of grave concern to all who want to participate in democracy and have a say in Congress’ health care reforms that will touch 1/6th of the American economy.

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A sign identifies the Internal Revenue Service building on Constitution Avenue NW in Washington, D.C., Jan (Bloomberg: Dennis Brack) (Bloomberg)

There’s been a lot of discussion about the new and powerful federal agencies that would be created by the passage of a national health care bill. The Health Choices Administration, the Health Benefits Advisory Committee, the Health Insurance Exchange — there are dozens in all.

But if the plan envisioned by President Barack Obama and Congressional Democrats is enacted, the primary federal bureaucracy responsible for implementing and enforcing national health care will be an old and familiar one: the Internal Revenue Service. Under the Democrats’ health care proposals, the already powerful — and already feared — IRS would wield even more power and extend its reach even farther into the lives of ordinary Americans, and the presidentially-appointed head of the new health care bureaucracy would have access to confidential IRS information about millions of individual taxpayers.

In short, health care reform, as currently envisioned by Democratic leaders, would be built on the foundation of an expanded and more intrusive IRS.

Under the various proposals now on the table, the IRS would become the main agency for determining who has an “acceptable” health insurance plan; for finding and punishing those who don’t have such a plan; for subsidizing individual health insurance costs through the issuance of a tax credits; and for enforcing the rules on those who attempt to opt out, abuse, or game the system. A substantial portion of H.R. 3200, the House health care bill, is devoted to amending the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 in order to give the IRS the authority to perform these new duties.

The Democrats’ plan would require all Americans to have “acceptable” insurance coverage (the legislation includes long and complex definitions of “acceptable”) and would designate the IRS as the agency charged with enforcing that requirement. On your yearly 1040 tax return, you would be required to attest that you have “acceptable” coverage. Of course, you might be lying, or simply confused about whether or not you are covered, so the IRS would need a way to check your claim for accuracy. Under current plans, insurers would be required to submit to the IRS something like the 1099 form in which taxpayers report outside income. The IRS would then check the information it receives from the insurers against what you have submitted on your tax form.

If it all matches up, you’re fine. If it doesn’t, you will hear from the IRS. And if you don’t have “acceptable” coverage, you will be subject to substantial fines — fines that will be administered by the IRS.

Under some versions of health reform now circulating on Capitol Hill, the IRS would also be intimately involved in how you pay for insurance. Everyone would be required to buy coverage. The millions of Americans who can’t afford it would receive a subsidy to pay for it. Under the version of the plan currently under negotiation in the Senate Finance Committee, that subsidy would come through the IRS in the form of a refundable tax credit. Under the House plan, the subsidy would come directly from the Health Choices Administration.

In either scenario, the IRS would be the key to making the system work. Before you could receive any subsidy, whether through the IRS or not, the Health Choices Administration would have to determine whether you are eligible for it. To do so, the bills under consideration would give the Health Choices Commissioner the authority to demand sensitive, confidential information from the IRS about individual taxpayers. The IRS would have to provide it.

Under current law, it is a felony for a government official to release taxpayer information in all but the most limited of circumstances. One such exception is for law enforcement; the IRS is allowed to give taxpayer information to prosecutors in criminal cases. The information can also, in some instances, be released to the Social Security Administration and the Veterans’ Administration for the determination of benefits. The health care bills would change the Internal Revenue Code to permit the IRS to give similar information to the vast, new health care bureaucracy.

That means the personal tax information of millions of Americans would enter the system whether they want it to or not. “There’s a mandate to buy insurance,” says one Republican House aide. “You have to buy it. You have millions of people who can’t buy it without a subsidy, so they will have no choice but to accept the subsidy in order to buy insurance, and then the Health Choices Commissioner will have access to their tax records.”

“How many hands would this information go through?” asks a GOP source in the Senate. “What are the quality controls? This increases the risk of misusing this information.”

Some versions of the bill even permit the release of confidential taxpayer information for decidedly less pressing reasons. In H.R. 3200, the IRS would be required to provide taxpayer information to the Social Security Administration for the purpose of helping Social Security officials find qualifying seniors who can then be encouraged to enroll in the prescription drug program. “There is no precedent for using taxpayer information for the purpose of identifying people to go out and advertise to them,” says the House expert.

So far, there has been little substantive public debate about the integral role of the IRS in nearly every aspect of the various national health care proposals. But people who are closely involved with the process are deeply concerned about what they view as a massive, and in some senses unprecedented, expansion of the Internal Revenue Service.

First, they wonder whether the IRS can handle the new demands. “There is a sense at the IRS that their purpose is to collect revenue and not to implement all sorts of other programs,” says a second Senate GOP aide. “Also, the IRS isn’t necessarily great at doing what it does already. How is it going to determine whether 300 million people have health insurance?”

Second, they are concerned about anticipated abuse of the system. “You’re going to have lots of fraud,” says the House source. “People claiming lots of affordability credits or refundable tax credits. The IRS is not going to have the resources and expertise to police this stuff.”

Finally, there is a third concern, more fundamental than questions of whether the IRS can handle the job: Should the IRS be involved in health care enforcement in the first place? As seen in the town halls across the country in August, many Americans are concerned about the coercive nature of the proposed national health care system. Handing the IRS the power to monitor every American’s place in the system worries them even more.

Backers of the Democratic bills are betting that the handouts involved — giving people money to buy health insurance — will outweigh concerns about privacy and coercive government. Perhaps. But before Congress makes any decision on national health care, voters should know just what it will involve.

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Many progressives are getting all bent out of shape over the “brown shirt” rabble organized by health industry PR firms to disrupt the so-called “town meetings” being organized all over the country by Democratic members of Congress.

What they are conveniently forgetting is that these are not really “town meetings” at all, at least in the sense of the town meetings I grew up with, and started out covering as a young journalist in Connecticut–that is, meetings called and run democratically, with leaders elected from the floor, open to all residents of a community.

These “town meetings” are really nothing but propaganda sessions run by members of Congress who are trying to burnish their fraudulent credentials as public servants, and trying to perpetrate a huge fraud of a health care bill that purports to be a progressive “reform” of the US health care system, but that actually further entrenches the control of that system by the insurance industry, and to a lesser extent, the hospital and drug industry.

ObamaCare is to health reform what bank bailouts are to financial system reform, which is to say it is the opposite of what its name implies.

The right-wing nuts who cry that ObamaCare is introducing euthanasia for the elderly and infirm, or that it is socialism, are ignorant wackos, to be sure, but they are right about one thing: Americans are about to be royally screwed on health care reform by the president and the Democratic Congress, just as they’ve been screwed by them on financial system “reform.”

The appropriate response to this screw-job is the one the right has adopted: shut these sham “town meetings” down, and run the sell-out politicians out of town on a rail, preferably coated in tar and feathers they way the snake-oil salesmen of old used to be handled!

This is not about civil discourse. This is about propaganda. The Obama administration and the Democratic Congressional leadership have sold out health care reform for the tainted coin of the medical-industrial industry, and are holding, or trying to hold, these meetings around the country to promote legislation that has essentially been written for them by that industry–legislation that will force everyone to pay for insurance as offered, and priced, by the private insurance industry. What a deal for those companies–a captive market of 300 million people! There will be little or no effort to control prices, and the higher costs will be financed through higher taxes, and through cuts in Medicare benefits.

This isn’t “reform.” It’s corruption, pure and simple.

Any mention of a system that works–single payer–the system we already have in the form of Medicare for the elderly and disabled, and the system that has proved successful for almost four decades in Canada– has been systematically blocked and censored out of the discussion. Every effort has been made to bury an excellent bill, HR 676, offered up by Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), which would cover every American by simply expanding Medicare to cover everyone.

The only proper response at this point is obstruction, and the more militant and boisterous that obstruction, the better.

Instead of opposing the right-wing hecklers at these events, progressives should be making common cause with them. Instead of calling them fascists, we should be working to turn them, by showing them that the enemy is not the left; it is the corporations that own both Democrats and Republicans alike.

The only proper approach to the wretched health care legislation currently working its way through Congress at this point is to kill it and start over. At these “town meeting” staged events, Obama and the Democrats need to hear, in no uncertain terms, that we don’t want no stinkin’ ObamaCare. We want Medicare for all.

Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now available in paperback). He can be reached at dlindorff@mindspring.com

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Statistical deceptions (07/30/2009 11:05)

Statistical deceptions
By Paul Craig Roberts
Online Journal Contributing Writer

Jul 30, 2009, 00:18

Last week on NPR, a professor in the Sloan School of Management at MIT explained that what is really at stake in the health care bill is the US government’s ability to borrow. In other words, the bill is about cutting health care costs, not about providing hard-pressed Americans with health care.

The professor said that if we didn’t get health care costs under control, in 30 years the US government would not be able to sell Treasury bonds.

It is not at all clear that the Treasury will be able to sell its debt instruments in 30 months, and it has nothing to do with health care costs. The Treasury debt marketing problem has to do with two back-to-back US fiscal year budgets, each with a $2 trillion deficit. The size of the US deficit exceeds in these troubled times the supply of world savings available to fund the US government’s wars, bailouts and stimulus plans. If the Federal Reserve has to monetize the Treasury’s new borrowings by creating demand deposits for the Treasury (printing money), America’s foreign creditors might flee the dollar.

The professor didn’t seem to know anything about this and gave Washington 30 more years before the proverbial excrement hits the fan.

One looks in vain to the US financial media for accurate economic information. Currently, Wall Street, the White House, and the media are hyping a new sign of economic recovery — ”surging” June home sales. John Williams at shadowstats.com predicted this latest reporting deception.

Here is the way Williams explains how statistics can produce false signs of recovery.

The economy has been contracting for so long that a plateauing of the falloff in home sales compared to the previous time period’s more rapid contraction can appear like a gain.

The Census Bureau itself notes that the reported 11 percent increase in June home sales might be illusory. The reporting agency says that the gain is not statistically meaningful at a 90 percent confidence interval and that “the Census Bureau does not have sufficient statistical evidence to conclude that the actual change is different from zero.”[PDF]

Williams explains other data distortions likely to create false hopes and lead to investment losses. Financial stresses from the current state of the economy have changed behavior. This means that normal seasonal adjustments to statistical data can result in misleading information.

For example, the recent decline that was reported in seasonally-adjusted new unemployment claims was a result of the normal adjustments for the retooling of auto lines that did not, in fact, take place to the normal extent due to the bankruptcies and uncertainties. Adding in seasonal adjustments that did not in fact take place artificially reduced the unemployment claims.

Williams warns that after a period of contraction, new monthly or quarterly figures are being compared to prior periods of collapsing activity. “Improvements” are thus artifacts of the prior collapse and not signs of economic rebound.

The “Birth-Death Model” is used by the Bureau of Labor Statistics to estimate the net of the non-reported jobs lost by failed businesses (deaths) and new jobs created by start-up companies (births). Williams explains why the model understates job loss during periods of contraction. The modeling on which the birth-death adjustment is based consists primarily of periods of economic growth when there are more non-reported start-up jobs than non-reported job losses from business failures. The BLS model came up with a monthly adjustment of 75,000 new jobs added to the reported number. That means an adjustment factor of 900,000 new jobs added to the reported payroll jobs number each year.

However, during economic contraction, such as the current one, it is wrong to assume that new start-ups are creating 75,000 jobs each month more than are being lost to business failures. Thus, the job losses are understated by the 900,000 upside birth-death adjustment and by the absence of a downside adjustment to estimate the jobs lost as a result of failed companies that cease to report.

The reported unemployment rate is itself deceptive, as it no longer includes discouraged workers who have been unemployed for more than a year. These long-term discouraged workers are simply erased from the rolls of the unemployed.

The Consumer Price Index no longer measures a constant standard of living and is not comparable to pre-Clinton periods. During the 1990s, the CPI ceased to be based on a weighted fixed assortment. The principle of substitution was introduced. For example, under the old measure, if the price of steak rose, the CPI rose. Under the new measure, if the price of steak rises, the index switches to hamburger on the assumption that consumers substitute hamburger for steak.

Consumer confidence typically is swayed by “good news” hype. The drops in the Conference Board’s and the University of Michigan’s measures of consumer confidence in July suggest that Americans are becoming inured to recovery hype and are realizing that the government and the media lie about the economy just as they lie about everything else.

Paul Craig Roberts [email him] was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan’s first term. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He was awarded the Legion of Honor by French President Francois Mitterrand. He is the author of Supply-Side Revolution : An Insider’s Account of Policymaking in Washington; Alienation and the Soviet Economy and Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, and is the co-author with Lawrence M. Stratton of The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice. Click here for Peter Brimelow’s Forbes Magazine interview with Roberts about the recent epidemic of prosecutorial misconduct.

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