Freedom Line Blog

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) this morning is releasing the House GOP budget proposal.  Ryan previews his budget in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal here, and outlines the “choice of two futures” — the status quo of more debt and greater decline vs. a path to prosperity that includes less debt, lower taxes and inidividual opportunity — in the web video posted below.

Newsmax.com reports:

The gross costs of the national healthcare law rammed through Congress by President Barack Obama will reach an estimated $1.76 trillion over 10 years – nearly twice the amount originally projected.

The figure, which the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) revealed on Wednesday, is bound to cause embarrassment to the administration as it comes just as debate on ‘Obamacare’ is starting to heat up again, two weeks before the Supreme Court is set to hear arguments on whether the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional.

Truth be told, nearly everyone already knew that the cost estimates used to sell ObamaCare to the American people were part of the White House shell game to get it passed.  That much is understood by both supporters and opponents of ObamaCare.  What is embarrassing is the administration’s response to the latest CBO estimate.

‘The bottom line is clear: the Affordable Care Act will reduce our deficit, control health costs and make health care more affordable,’ Jeanne Lambrew, deputy director of the White House office of Health Reform, wrote on the White House blog.

Remember, this is the same White House trying to convince you that algae is the answer to rising gas prices.

My column this week explains how WWII wage ceilings and a compliant Congress teamed up to create employer-based health insurance, a market distorting phenomenon the reduces take-home pay while increasing both health care spending and widespread dissatisfaction with the results.  (When was the last time you heard anybody happy about the cost or care in an HMO?)

Of course, one of the reasons this problem is allowed to persist is the lack of a motivated constituency to change the status quo.  That may be changing thanks to the Great Recession.

According to Economic Modeling Specialists, Inc., between 2007 to 2011 there has been a steady rise in the numbers of independent contractors in industries like real estate, financial services and natural resource extraction.

More recently EMSI showed how self-employed money management consultants are adapting very well to the new economic landscape. “The surprising thing to note is the huge growth that took place in the three money management occupations – personal financial advisors, securities/commodities/financial services sales agents, and financial analysts.”  Many of these jobs are classified as non-covered, i.e. independent contractors who service clients rather than employees who work for employers (and thus get benefits).

The rise of the independent contractor makes perfect financial sense for a business looking to shred costs while maintaining quality in services and products.  The legal profession is being transformed by a switch to contract-based work for attorneys while other white collar jobs like money management are following the same route.

It is very likely that this type of vendor-client relationship will come to redefine the work life of many Americans who in a previous era may have counted on a brick-and-mortar institution to cover everything from an expense account to health care benefits.  But if millions of American workers are to be recast as intellectual entrepreneurs, the federal tax incentive to exempt employer-based health insurance but not insurance purchased by individuals or families has to change.

As I explain in my column, the Heritage Foundation has an easy fix to this problem.  From my column:

In Saving the American Dream, a team of Heritage experts propose transforming the existing exemption into a “uniform, nonrefundable federal tax credit” to assist individuals and families purchase health insurance.  The annual net value of the tax credit would be $2,000 for an individual and $3,500 for a couple or family.  The credit could be used “either to offset the cost of coverage offered through the workplace or to buy insurance outside the workplace.  For most middle-income working families, the value of the credit is similar to the tax relief that they receive for health insurance today.”

Law always lags behind reality, but if a presidential candidate wants to make an easy reform that will remove a huge disincentive to become an intellectual entrepreneur, adopting the Heritage Foundation’s health insurance tax credit would be a huge step in the right direction.

[Cross-posted at The American Spectator]

At the University of Mobile’s twelve23 site, I again examine the Obama assault on religious liberty.

Key passage:

To be very clear, this is a matter extending far beyond Catholic institutions. A recent letter by 300 leading scholars objecting to the mandate included signatures by Mike O’Neal, the president of Oklahoma Christian University; Thomas Hibbs, Honors College Dean at Baylor University; Daniel Akin, president of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary; Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary; professors of neurobiology, chemistry, biochemistry and other sciences from numerous colleges; law professors from across the country; Rabbi Meir Y. Soloveichik, Director of the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought, Yeshiva University; and Chuck Colson, the beloved founder of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

The letter called the rule “unacceptable,” “morally obtuse” and “an insult to the intelligence of Catholics, Protestants, Eastern Orthodox Christians, Jews, Muslims, and other people of faith and conscience.”

In an interview with CFIF, Carrie Severino, chief counsel and policy director at the Judicial Crisis Network, discusses why Justice Elena Kagan should recuse herself from any consideration of ObamaCare’s constitutionality before the Supreme Court.  Ms. Severino authored the white paper titled, “Elena Kagan: The Justice Who Knew Too Much.”

Listen to the interview here.

Remember the alleged “crisis” that demanded ObamaCare?  To hear Obama, Pelosi, Reid and their minions, that crisis demanded that we do something, anything, even if it meant passing a bill before finding out what was in it.

The overwhelming majority of Americans apparently never got the memo.  According to Gallup, fully 82% of Americans rate their healthcare “excellent” or “good,” while 11% of the remaining 18% rate their care “fair,” and only 5% say “poor” (2% said “no opinion” or “not applicable”).  As Gallup notes, “That combined excellent/good percentage has remained fairly steady at around 80% since 2001,” when polling on this question began.

Occupy the 5%!

This video of Gingrich from 2005 shows his true ideological colors, methinks.

Though we’re still a few years away from full implementation of Obamacare, we all know the program’s general drift: greater government control of everything from what kinds of care health insurance policies must cover to which medical procedures or pharmaceuticals doctors can provide. Yet at the same time, we’re seeing how the remarkable power of freedom and voluntary collaboration — the exact opposite of the Washington model — can revolutionize our health. From a remarkable piece at Reason:

For more than 10 years, health researchers have been stumped by an enzyme that helps retroviral infections like AIDS reproduce. Biologists studying the enzyme were unable to model its shape, a crucial first step in figuring out how to beat it.

Recently scientists turned the problem over to an unusual team of collaborators: video gamers. Using Foldit, a free online protein folding game developed at the University of Washington in 2008, those gamers competed to see who could produce the most accurate virtual model of the real-life enzyme.

In just three weeks, gamers accomplished what scientists had been unable to do for more than a decade—no special scientific under- standing required.

An ingenious marriage of technology and creativity. Does anyone expect to see more of this when Washington is in the driver’s seat?

As we anticipated in last week’s Liberty Update, the U.S. Supreme Court announced today that it will hear legal challenges to ObamaCare this term.  As we also noted in that commentary, the issue broadly boils down to whether an explicit provision of the Constitution will be rendered meaningless and effectively read out of the document itself.

That is not hyperbole.  Our Founding Fathers didn’t randomly insert provisions into the Constitution for no reason whatsoever.  Rather, they crafted that document to design a federal government of limited, enumerated powers and to safeguard individual freedom to the greatest extent possible.  Accordingly, they intentionally included the Commerce Clause of Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution to empower Congress “To regulate Commerce with Foreign Nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes.”  ObamaCare, however, does not merely “regulate commerce among the several states.”  Rather, it compels commercial activity from every citizen, and punishes inactivity on the part of any individual.

Anyone asserting ObamaCare’s validity must therefore answer this question:  If the Commerce Clause somehow permits forced commercial activity and prosecution of inactivity, what possible hypothetical federal mandate would it not permit?  Such a result would void a specific clause within the text of the Constitution because no limiting principle would remain.  That, in turn, would mean that no other provision remains safe in such a brave new world.

Hopefully, at least five Justices respect the Constitution enough to not remove yet another thread from its fabric.  Should the Court fail, however, the fight will not be finished.  The job will simply fall upon us as individual citizens to effectuate the individual freedoms that too few elected and appointed officials seem to respect.

Aside from being unconstitutional, Obamacare is also financially unsustainable.  Of course, everyone except the White House and their drones at HHS acknowledged this when the law passed.  Now, fiscal reality has forced the Obama Administration to scrap a program that was supposed to provide half of the fallacious budget savings from passing Obamacare.  Per Phillip Klein of the DC Examiner:

As Obamacare’s critics noted at the time, Democrats’ deficit reduction claims were based on a series of accounting gimmicks. One of the most obvious was the inclusion of the Community Living Assistance and Support Services Act, a program that was slated to collect five years of premiums before paying out any benefits. Though it was unsustainable over time, on paper it produced surpluses during the Congressional Budget Office’s 10-year budget window.

At the time of final passage, the CBO found that the health care law would reduce deficits by $143 billion, and $70 billion of that was attributable to the CLASS program.

Earlier, I noted a new HHS report recomending against implementing the program. HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has now sent a letter to Congress conceding that there’s no path forward.

Republicans are still rightly moving to formally repeal the CLASS Act from federal law.  Let’s hope they keep pressing for a complete elimination.

In an interview with CFIF, Sally Pipes, President, CEO, and Taube Fellow in Health Care Studies at the Pacific Research Institute, discusses why the American Medical Association’s support of ObamaCare undermines its mission to “help doctors help patients” and what it may mean to the 2012 presidential race if the U.S. Supreme Court rules on the constitutionality of ObamaCare prior to the election.

Listen to the interview here.

At the University of Mobile’s twelve23 project, I assess House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s great speech earlier this week on health care. My final note therein deserves more elaboration:

Give the health care vouchers or credits directly to consumers, and let them, not bureaucrats, search for the best deal for their individual needs.

This idea is nothing new. Back in the 1990s, several leading Democratic senators – among them Bob Kerrey of Nebraska and John Breaux of Louisiana – agreed with Republicans on a Medicare Commission appointed by President Bill Clinton on exactly this approach to the problem. Alas, when Clinton (and Congress) became embroiled in the Monica Lewinsky scandal and subsequent impeachment effort, the political well was so poisoned that the commission’s recommendations fell by the wayside.

What bears repeating is that this idea is bipartisan and nothing radical at all. Indeed, although at different spending levels, the concept was embraced (or re-embraced) as recently as last winter by Alice Rivlin, former director of the Office of Management and Budget under Bill Clinton and later Clinton’s appointee as vice chairman of the Federal Reserve. A number of other top-ranking Democratic economic-policy folks have endorsed the concept in whole or in part.

As I also noted, this is essentially the system used in the Medicare prescription drug program — an unaffordable new entitlement, but happily far less unaffordable than originally expected, precisely because competition has worked to keep down costs for taxpayers and consumers alike while providing services with which the consumers are mostly happy.

If Barack Obama wants to stop pretending to be pushing “ideas both parties agree on,” and actually accept an idea that has been bipartisan for 15 years, he would adopt Ryan’s approach. But that won’t happen. Obama isn’t for anything that takes power away from government.

So how many times must Barack Obama be wrong – flatly, indisputably, wholly, precisely wrong – before he withdraws from American political life out of pure shame?

Today provided another example.  In selling ObamaCare, his cornerstone “achievement,” to the American people, Obama promised on March 8, 2010 that his bill “reduces most people’s premiums.”  So what is actually happened in just the first year since he made that assurance?  The Kaiser Family Foundation and the Health Research and Educational Trust report that health insurance premiums rose 9% this year.  Employers’ average yearly premium for families climbed from $13,770 last year to $15,073 this year, and from $5,049 to $5,429 for individuals.

Perhaps this explains why Obama’s Justice Department curiously didn’t seek to delay United States Supreme Court review of ObamaCare this week – maybe even Obama suddenly wants it overturned as quickly as possible.

Tim had a great post explaining why the 4th Circuit’s dismissal of the two Obamacare lawsuits is not all that big a deal. He’s absolutely right, in terms of ultimate effects. At the American Spectator (in the first of my three unrelated, half-formed thoughts), I explain why on legal grounds the rulings are an absolute outrage anyway, even though, as Tim said, they don’t really harm the overall argument against the individual mandate as the issue moves inexorably toward the Supreme Court.

As I explained:

The grounds on which the judges made the decision are so ludicrous as to be intellectually bankrupt.

Against all reasonable evidence and against the rulings of every other court, both liberal- and conservative-dominated, that has considered the issue, this Fourth Circuit panel concluded that the mandate actually operates as a “tax.” Congress has broader powers to tax than it does merely to regulate; thus, legal challenges to a tax face a higher bar. Because these obstreperous judges say it is a tax that hasn’t actually been imposed yet (it has been passed by Congress but not yet implemented), they say the university has suffered no harm yet and thus can’t sue. The absurdity is that the mandate is in no way a tax. By both definition and implementation, it imposed no tax but instead a penalty for non-compliance. President Obama himself repeatedly argued in public that it wasn’t a tax. Congress didn’t call it a tax. And every other court — at least four district courts and two appeals courts — that has analyzed this claim has made mincemeat of the administration’s contention that it is a tax. Most of those courts haven’t just rejected the claim; they have eviscerated it.

As I said on my radio show last night (in the introductory 15 minutes, before I interviewed Rick Santorum), this is why the fights over judges are so important.  Bad judges are an affront to constitutional republicanism. And this ruling by three bad, liberal judges is an abomination.

Today, a three-judge panel of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against challenges of ObamaCare by Virginia and Liberty University.

For several reasons, however, today’s ruling should be taken with a Jimmy Buffet-sized shaker of salt.  First, the ruling itself did not address the substantive merits or the primary Constitutional claim that ObamaCare exceeds the authority permitted by the interstate commerce clause.  Instead, the judges ruled that neither Virginia nor Liberty possessed procedural “standing,” the ability to demonstrate harm that has occurred or may imminently occur.  That is very different than a ruling that ObamaCare itself passes Constitutional muster, and at any rate is subject to change down the road as ObamaCare’s provisions are more fully implemented.  Second, two of the judges who ruled today were appointed by Barack Obama himself, and the other by Bill Clinton.  In the Fourth Circuit as a whole, however, there is an even split with seven judges appointed by Republican presidents and seven appointed by Democrats.  So the ideological makeup at an en banc hearing will be very different.  Third, the question of standing is not one within the unique expertise or authority of these three particular judges.  Quite the contrary, standing is an issue within the authority of every court in every case, because it is a requisite to move forward with any lawsuit in the first instance.  Accordingly, today’s particular ruling is at odds with not only the lower court’s standing determination, but that of the Eleventh Circuit in its recent ruling overturning ObamaCare.  Fourth, this particular panel’s decision wasn’t a surprise, as its line of questioning in May focused on the issue of standing, rather than the merits of ObamaCare.

In other words, the immediate overarching theme is that today’s ruling is not a game-changer, and certainly not a significant “W” for ObamaCare as it continues its inevitable course toward the United States Supreme Court.  Whether through the Supreme Court or through the next Congress, ObamaCare will be defeated.

In an interview with CFIF, Anna Rittgers, senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum, discusses the recent decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, which struck down as unconstitutional the individual mandate in the 2010 Affordable Care Act.  Rittgers also discusses the anticipated next step for the case as it makes its way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Listen to the interview here.

If the real purpose of presidential debates was to clarify the views of the candidates, then the next GOP forum would be Mitt Romney debating himself. From a report by Justin Sink in The Hill:

The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled, correctly, that the “individual mandate” of ObamaCare is unconstitutional.  That stands to reason.  The Founding Fathers drafted the Constitution to ensure liberty through a federal government of strictly limited powers.  One aspect of that effort was to restrict federal authority to regulating actual “interstate commerce.”  But since ObamaCare’s individual mandate effectively declares that a citizen’s inactivity somehow amounts to “interstate commerce,” upholding ObamaCare would have rendered the Constitution’s interstate commerce clause meaningless.  Accordingly, it follows that if one explicit portion of the Constitution can thus be rendered meaningless, what would be the logical limit restraining government from declaring any other Constitutional clause meaningless at whim?

This is a moment for grateful celebration, even if only temporary.  The broader battle continues, eventually at the Supreme Court level.

In an interview with CFIF, Todd Gaziano, Director of the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the Heritage Foundation, discusses the outlook for the 26-state lawsuit against ObamaCare, which is soon to be decided at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit.

Listen to the interview here.

Byron York reports that the implementation of Wisconsin’s controversial ban on collective bargaining by public employee unions is already freeing one state school district from financial hardship.  Among the benefits of the change in policy:

• Swapping a $400,000 deficit for a $1.5 million surplus thanks to increasing teachers’ health insurance cost of coverage from 10 percent to 12.6 percent, which is “still well below rates in much of the private sector”

• Being able to shop around for health insurance coverage instead of being forced under collectively bargained contracts only to purchase coverage from a union-operated provider – the demanded premium levels have already dropped to “match the lowest bidder”

• Changing work rules like upping a teacher’s hours of instruction from five out of seven periods to six, thus allowing the district to reduce student-to-teacher ratios and provide more one-on-one tutoring with troubled students

Wisconsin’s Democratic Party and its liberal lobbyists may still consider the ban on collective bargaining a “disaster,” but it’s clearly a win for parents, students, and administrators.