If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
The Blog
Dear Chief Justice Roberts, aka, Umpire in Chief: Let the elected Congress play the game. Precedent holds that Congress has acted within its power; changes should come from Congress revising or keeping a law, not a court creating new rules.
Nearly 16 million health insurance consumers will get rebates totaling an estimated $1.3 billion beginning Aug. 1 because Obamacare limits the profits that insurance companies can make off of illness, injury and pain. This is what Republicans are trying to take away from health insurance consumers.
During three days of hearings last month, the notion that the Supreme Court would invalidate the federal health care law went from being a right wing fantasy to a possible, even likely, outcome based on the questions and comments of the Republican justices.
I get that skin-in-the-game is a critically important component of market economics. I just can't accept that health care is a normal good to which this standard ought to be fully applied.
Two years ago, President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act. The president's health care law gives hard working, middle-class families security, makes Medicare stronger, and puts more money back in seniors' pockets.
While it's comforting to just blame the GOP for the unhappiness with health reform threatening the president's re-election, the truth is that Barack O...
Bill Frist is the former U.S. Senate Republican Majority Leader from Tennessee. During the heat of the health care reform debate, he sang the praises of President Obama's health care reform. His stance raises the question, "Why?"
April is National Minority Health Month, a time to raise awareness about the well-documented health disparities that continue to affect racial and ethnic minorities, as well as highlight how the Affordable Care Act is reducing those disparities.
This week, the branches of government traded checks and balances for sticks and stones. First, President Obama fired a shot across the Supreme Court's bow, saying that to strike down his health care law would be "an unprecedented, extraordinary step." Though not actually unprecedented, it would, in fact, be extraordinary -- but not as extraordinary as what came next: a Court of Appeals judge, hearing a related case, asked the Justice Department to turn in a three-page, single-spaced letter, signed by Eric Holder, explaining the executive branch's position on judicial review, a move that embarrassed even some conservative legal experts. The attorney general's response to the unusual homework assignment fell a bit short; it was only two-and-a-half pages long. Doesn't the AG know all he had to do was make his margins bigger, add a bibliography, and start off with a long quote?
Much of the reporting by the media cloaks the fact that while there may be a political controversy about this mandate, there is no constitutional dispute that the federal government has the right to impose a healthcare mandate.
Anti-government forces realize that once Americans begin to receive the benefits of universal health care -- no denials for pre-existing conditions, no medical underwriting, no caps on benefits -- they won't want to give them up.
It is always refreshing when folks who are charged with dealing with really serious subject matter bring a note of levity into the proceedings so people don't get too depressed.
Without the mandate, the costs of taking care of our own may become unsustainable. Striking it down thus would be a step toward the potential repeal of the Emergency Medical Treatment Act -- a repeal that would, for many, be a death trap.
If you want to practice good medicine on health care, you will do the following.
We should ask our doctors about the politics with a small "p" that's embedded in their advice -- the moral and cultural leanings that weigh on clinical judgment.
