A SAD DAY FOR AMERICA – THE SUPREME COURT RULING ON OBAMACARE

by Dr. Lawrence Wilson

All information in this article is for educational purposes only. It is not for the diagnosis, treatment, prescription or cure of any disease or health condition.

On June 28, 2012, the Supreme Court of the United States decided by a 5 to 4 decision that the 2010 Affordable Care Act, is constitutional if the “personal mandate”, which is a fine one must pay if one does not buy health insurance the government wants you to buy, is considered as a tax, not a fine.

However, the decision, when reading it through, is thoroughly bizarre and rather insane. Before explaining what the court did, one must recognize that in law, words are very important! Here is what occurred:

The majority decision begins by saying that if the personal mandate were a tax, the Court would have no jurisdiction. This means they could not hear the case. However, since it is called a fine in the law, the court can hear the case. Indeed, the government insisted over and over again for 3 years that the mandate was not a tax. All the language in the law calls it a fine.

However, when they went to court, the government attorneys changed their mind and said it was a tax.

The Supreme Court majority allowed this bait and switch tactic. The majority of the judges allowed the government attorneys to essentially rewrite the law, changing the description of the personal mandate from a fine to a tax. Yet the Court agreed to hear the case because they said it is a fine, not a tax!

This is not how the Supreme Court or any US court usually operates. One cannot have it both ways. If it is a tax, then the court has no jurisdiction. If it is a fine, as it is written, then it should have been declared unconstitutional.

The reason for this is the Court said one cannot fine someone for doing nothing (in this case, for not buying a health insurance). In this case, the law should have been sent back to the Congress to rewrite it properly.

Also, if the law is indeed a tax, then the American people and the Congress were deceived by the Obama administration for over three years because the people were told repeatedly it was not a tax, and that taxes would not go up on the middle class. This type of deception would be a fraud, in legal terms. Committing fraud in this way should be grounds to declare the law null and void. Again, it should have been sent back to Congress to be written properly.

Part unconstitutional. Also, the court decided that part of the law is unconstitutional. It is the part that authorizes the government to withhold ALL Medicaid funds from any state that will not go along with the new expansion of Medicaid that the law includes. The government may withhold new Medicaid funds, the Court said, but not ALL Medicaid funding.

The odd thing here is that when the Supreme Court declares part of a law unconstitutional, it always looks for a clause in the law called the severability clause. This clause, found in many laws, states that if one section of the law is found to be unconstitutional, the rest of the law still remains in force.

The Affordable Care Act of 2010 does not contain a severability clause. Without this clause, if one clause is found to be unconstitutional, the entire law is null and void.

Oddly, however, in this case, the court allowed the rest of the law to stand in spite of striking down a part of it. It is somewhat as if the law is “too big to fail”, a phrase we have heard before.

Both of these aspects of the Supreme Court decision are very strange, and not characteristic of the Court protocol at all. In other words, these actions violate basic legal protocol. Considering it is a very important case, it is extremely odd that the Supreme Court would “fudge” their decision in these ways. The dissenting opinion blasted the majority for these clear errors of protocol that make a mockery of justice.

As if this is not enough of an insult and mockery of justice, there are two other reasons why the Affordable Care Act of 2010 is null and void. These are:

- It is a revenue bill and according to the Constitution, revenue bills must originate in the House Of Representatives. This bill did not originate there.

- A more esoteric reason is that the US Congress has no authority to impose a law regulating health care on the 50 states. The items the national government can legislate on are spelled out in the Constitution and health care is not one of them.

JOHN ROBERTS, THE DECIDING VOTE

John Roberts, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, was the deciding vote in this case, and wrote the majority opinion. Normally a conservative judge, in this case he sided with the four left-wing-leaning justices. One must wonder why?

Some pundits on television say he did it so the court would not appear to be partisan. This makes no sense, as it means he made a decision based on politics, not the constitution, which is his job.

Another theory is that his brain is affected by medication. On August 1, 2007, The New York Times discussed the fact that John Roberts is on drugs for his epilepsy. These drugs can compromise one’s mental faculties and slow mental functioning. The shoddiness of the written opinion is so bad that one wonders if Judge Robert’s mental faculties are sound.

A third theory is that someone “got” to the judge, threatening, intimidating him or blackmailing him if he did not switch sides. To me, this is most likely the truth. Here is why. First, it makes the most sense logically, to me since he is normally a smart, conservative judge and this was a bizarre, weak, liberal opinion.

Secondly, if one reads the opinion of Ruth Bader Ginsberg on the case, she attacks the view of Judge Roberts, as though he had ruled differently. Finally, the dissenting opinion by the four conservative justices is very short and just signed by all four. This is very unusual, as usually each signs his own work. All of this suggests a sudden, last minute change of mind on the part of Judge Roberts.

Unfortunately, everyone can be threatened this way, and only time will tell if it occurred here.

OTHER PROBLEMS WITH THE AFFORDABLE CARE ACT

The law is full of fees, fines, and 7 types of new taxes on medical equipment, for example, and even a 3.5% tax on some home sales! All these taxes are eventually passed on to the consumer. Thus the claim that it raises no taxes on the middle class is a total fraud and a lie.

The law is also about 2700 pages long and very complex. Complex laws are always a bad idea, as they cause a tremendous amount of lawsuits as people argue about what the law actually means. The joke about the bill is that Nancy Pelosi, then speaker of the House of Representatives, stated, “Just pass the law. Then we will let you know what is in it.”

Americans ought to know that anything that is run by the government is far more costly and always riddled with waste, fraud and abuse, compared to running an industry by the private sector. This is not my opinion. It has been shown repeatedly in studies of cost effectiveness of government enterprises.

The Democrats, however, believe in centralized power, and do not like private enterprise, so this is what they propose, even if it is not working well at all in Europe, for example, which has had socialized medical care for decades. In most of these nations, the government health care system is the main thing that is bankrupting the nation. With this law, America goes down the same dumb path.

Socialized medicine, which is the reality of this law, also tends to reduce the quality of health care. Canadians and Europeans know this well. It reduces incentives for excellence by giving everyone a one-size-fits-all program dictated by distant bureaucrats who are necessarily out of touch with the real needs of the people.

A bureaucrat in Washington, DC, no matter how many degrees he has from Harvard, cannot know the needs of the people as well as those who are local. The consumers of health care and their doctors ought to be making the decisions, not far away bureaucrats or elites.

This principle of governing locally has been known for thousands of years. Centralized bureaucracies tends to be slow, stupid and corrupt. If you do not believe this, then you would have enjoyed living in the former Soviet Union and you would like Europe, where bureaucracy is much greater.

The more power people tend to have, the more corrupt they tend to be. This is the nature of power and government. The Affordable Care Act greatly increases the power of the Washington elites, at the expense of individuals and the states.

LITTLE UNDERSTANDING OF THE PROBLEMS OF HEALTH CARE

The Supreme Court is not at fault for the deeper issue of not correctly diagnosing the problems of the health care industry so as to arrive at the right solution.

The problem is that the health of Americans, and many others around the world, is very poor and getting worse. Medical care, in our view, is in decline around the world.

The reason is simple. Drugs and surgery, which are the main healing modalities in mainstream medical care, are poisons and do not rebuild the body. The cost keeps escalating because drugs never rebuild one’s health well enough. Surgery is wonderful, when absolutely needed, but it will not rebuild health. Radiation therapy may help in some cases, but it does not rebuild health.

Meanwhile, medical licensing laws maintain the status quo and prevent much real innovation. Essentially, we are “building” poor quality bodies with bad diets, polluted air and water, and overuse of toxic drugs and vaccines, CT scans and other exposure to radiation. So, of course, the bodies break down.

Much better diets, healthier lifestyles, proper drinking water, correct nutritional supplements, hydrotherapy and other simple measures are needed, but are largely excluded from the ‘system’ that is kept in place by unconstitutional licensing laws. For details, read The Case Against Medical Licensing.

Until this becomes clear, health care will be a financial and health disaster, no matter how many laws are passed.

Also, the central planners either do not want empowered patients, or do not understand that anything that interferes with the doctor-patient relationship damages health care. This is a fundamental principle of economics and health care.

The doctor-patient relationship is a type of contract between a buyer and a seller. Anything that interferes with that relationship interferes with the quality of the transaction that we call health care. The reason is that such interference means that your doctor is not really working for you, but rather for others, whose interests are not the same as yours.

Already, today, things that interfere with the doctor-patient relationship include 1) licensing boards, 2) attorneys that insist doctors practice “defensive medicine”, 3) hospital rules, in some cases, and finally 4) myriads of government rules and regulations.

The Affordable Care Act adds many more layers of these rules. Few realize that this bill creates 159 new government agencies of boards! This just worsens the doctor-patient relationship further, which always worsens health care – a very special type of relationship that needs to be kept pure. For details, read Your Doctor’s Priorities.

THE REAL AGENDA

Many people, however, believe that “solving the health care problem” is not the real focus of the Affordable Care Act. The real focus is to take over an industry that accounts for one-sixth of the US economy. Installing socialized medicine is one of the key features of any socialist nation, as it gives the government tremendous power over individuals. Basically, it instills great fear in the people because if you do not go along with the government’s agenda, they can and will deny you health care.

This government takeover of the health care industry has been a slow one, beginning around 1910 with the passage of the state medical practice acts. These were the brainchild of the allopathic medical union, the American Medical Association, and their friends in high places.

They bribed and blackmailed the state legislatures to pass the licensing laws that converted American medical care from a free market system that worked perfectly, to a cartel system. A cartel is an economic system in which a small group of individuals or organizations controls an entire industry. For example, there is an oil cartel run by OPEC, and there are others as well.

Government encroachment upon health care continued in the USA with the insurance laws of the mid-twentieth century, the 1973 HMO law that is unconstitutional, and the advent of Medicare and Medicaid around 1967. George W. Bush signed the bill giving prescription drug benefits to seniors around 2006. This bill was just the latest nail in the coffin.

This method of destroying an industry is called gradualism and is a standard socialist and communist tactic to change a society from a free one to a socialist, meaning government-controlled or totalitarian society.

This is totally contrary to the intent of the founders of America, who believed that people have a right to contract for health care services as they please, and that no one type of care should dominate all the others.

WHAT TO DO

A number of methods could be used to rid the nation of the Affordable Care Act of 2010:

- President Trump promised to repeal Obamacare, but he has not delivered on that promise. He signed legislation that removed the ‘mandate’ or fine if one does not buy health insurance. But the law remains on the books.

- The president could just announce that the law is null and void for the reasons given above. So far, he has not done this, either.

- There may be more challenges to the law in the courts.

- Vote out the politicians who voted for this law. This would include all or almost all of the Democratic Party representatives in both houses of Congress. No Republicans voted for the bill, to the best of our knowledge.

- Judges, and especially Supreme Court Justices, that have upheld the law should be removed from office through the impeachment process.

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