Virginia's Evil Cooch Wins the First Round Against Healthcare Reform (and I agree with the ruling)

A federal Judge in Richmond, Virginia ruled Monday that a key part of President Obama's sweeping health care package is unconstitutional. The offending component is the legal requirement that everybody must buy health insurance whether they can afford it or not.

I would rather set my own hair on fire than admit it, but I agree with Ken Cuccinelli on this one. The reason is simple. Obama took a bad system and fucked it up even more.

The huge megatrillion dollar reform package did not reform health care and did nothing to make it more affordable. It was a half-assed patchwork of insurance reforms that did nothing to control the actual cost of health care. It did not include an affordable public option for people to buy into at what could have been a huge group discount rate. All it did do was make you and me a criminal if we lose our jobs and our insurance and can't afford to buy insurance on our own.

If you've ever lost a job due to downsizing like I have in the past, you know all about COBRA, which allows you to continue the coverage provided by  your former employer, provided you pay the full, non-group rate, which can be hundreds of dollars or more every month. About twenty years ago, when my former boss told me about COBRA and the cost involved, after informing me that I no longer had a job, my first response was, "How the hell am I supposed to afford that with no job?"

Faced with the "choice" of continuing my health insurance or eating and paying my rent, I chose the latter. Subsequently, I got very sick that winter with some kind of flu that wouldn't go away. As scary as it was to get sick without insurance and as hard as it was having to pay the full cost of the doctor's visit and the meds, at least I wasn't thrown in jail or fined for not having insurance. 

The real winners in Obamacare are the insurance companies, who hardly needed any help in fleecing the American public.

I've heard the argument that the government makes you buy insurance when you buy a car, but that doesn't hold water. The government can't make you buy a car. If you've ever been hit by an uninsured driver and had to pay for repairs or a new car, or medical bills out of your own pocket, then launch an expensive lawsuit against someone who doesn't have any money in the first place, you know what I'm talking about.

In a free society, the government can't make you buy something you don't want. Sure they can place conditions on the choices we make, like buying car insurance if you own a car or flood insurance if you live on a flood plain, but those are reasonable and justifiable restrictions. Health insurance is different. We all get sick or have the potential to get injured. If health care didn't cost so much in the first place, we wouldn't need health insurance at all. Obama's reform package did nothing to address that.

Don't get me wrong. I still think Ken Cuccinelli is a bigoted, homophobic, hate-monger with delusions of grandeur, but on this one isolated subject ~ and no other ~  I have to agree with him. Got a match?

Related articles

• Curtains for Obamacare? Not Hardly (themoderatevoice.com)
• Judge rejects key part of Obama healthcare law (reuters.com)
• David Sirota: Is Virginia Court's Health Ruling an Inadvertent Progressive Victory? (huffingtonpost.com)
• BREAKING: Virginia judge throws out health-care mandates as unconstitutional (crooksandliars.com)
• Va. federal judge strikes down health care law (msnbc.msn.com)

House Passes Healthcare Reform Bill

The big story this weekend is that Congress passed what some are calling a watered down version of the Health Care Reform Bill late Saturday night. Now it's on to the Senate, where more negotiations will go on. The president needs this victory almost as much as the American people need affordable health care. Politicos are saying this could be signed into law by the end of the year.

Okay, then can we have full equality?

The New York Times reports:

"WASHINGTON — Handing President Obama a hard-fought victory, the House narrowly approved a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s health care system on Saturday night, advancing legislation that Democrats said could stand as their defining social policy achievement.

After a daylong clash with Republicans over what has been a Democratic goal for decades, lawmakers voted 220 to 215 to approve a plan that would cost $1.1 trillion over 10 years. Democrats said the legislation would provide overdue relief to Americans struggling to buy or hold on to health insurance.

“This is our moment to revolutionize health care in this country,” said Representative George Miller, Democrat of California and one of the chief architects of the bill.

Democrats were forced to make major concessions on insurance coverage for abortions to attract the final votes to secure passage, a wrenching compromise for the numerous abortion-rights advocates in their ranks."

Read the full story here.

Barney Frank Deals Town Hall Smackdown

All summer long we've been hearing news about right-wing nut-jobs and their insane rantings at town hall meetings called by elected officials to discuss health care reform. Thanks to folks like Ex-Gov. Sarah "I'm-a-loser-and-a-quitter" Palin and Rush "Bow-down-and-worship-me" Limbaugh, efforts to educate the public about Pres. Obama's proposed health care overhaul have been met with shouting matches, accusations of socialism, paranoia about death panels pulling the plug on Grandma and comparisons to Nazis.

When faced with the lunatic fringe (or what Republicans call their base) doing their best Chicken Little impressions, most Democrats have turned tail and skipped out the service entrance.

Leave it to Congressman Barney Frank to put these idiots in their place. Love him or hate him, you've gotta admit that Barney's got more balls than Bill and Hilary Clinton combined. Check it out:

Obama Blinks in Health Care Reform Standoff, May Drop "Public Option"

It looks like President Obama may be caving in the the wing nuts on health care reform. After weeks of pushing the public option plank of his health care reform platform, Obama's mouthpieces were all over the tube on Sunday suggesting that government run health insurance for the uninsured was never the centerpiece of the president's reform package.

In town hall meetings across the country in recent weeks, congressional democrats have been trying to muster support for the administration's public option plan. The events have turned ugly when speakers were shouted down by wing-nuts who have never had a thought in their heads that wasn't put there by the likes of Rush Limbaugh and the folks at Fox "News".

The New York Times reports in Monday's edition:

"In an interview on Sunday, Mr. Obama’s senior adviser, David Axelrod, said the president remained convinced that a public plan was “the best way to go.” But Mr. Axelrod said the nuances of how to develop a nonprofit competitor to private industry had never been “carved in stone.”

On Capitol Hill, the Senate Finance Committee is expected to produce a bill that features a nonprofit co-op. The author of the idea, Senator Kent Conrad, Democrat of North Dakota and chairman of the Budget Committee, predicted Sunday that Mr. Obama would have no choice but to drop the public option.

“The fact of the matter is, there are not the votes in the United States Senate for the public option,” Mr. Conrad said on “Fox News Sunday.” “There never have been. So to continue to chase that rabbit, I think, is just a wasted effort.”

The co-op, modeled after rural electric and agricultural cooperatives in Mr. Conrad’s home state, would offer insurance through a nonprofit, nongovernmental consumer entity run by its members. Mr. Axelrod said one downside of a co-op, from Mr. Obama’s point of view, was that it might be unable to “scale up in such a way that would create a robust” competitor to private insurers."

In the months following the president's inauguration, it looked like Obama could get anything he wanted from the Democratic majorities in the House and Senate. Looks like the honeymoon is over.

The Daily Show's Lewis Black Takes on Health Care Reform

From Comedy Central