The Next Supreme Court Battle for ObamaCare
By Matthew Vadum
The U.S. Supreme Court decided yesterday to review a particularly odious mandate in the Obamacare law that undermines the religious liberties guaranteed by the First Amendment by forcing companies to provide health care coverage for birth control.
Although a court ruling nixing the birth control mandate would not kill Obamacare, whose constitutionality was upheld 5 to 4 by the Supreme Court last year in a bizarre, internally contradictory opinion, every obstacle placed in front of Obama’s socialist juggernaut gives hope to those fighting to save the country from the president’s policies.
At issue is whether President Obama’s health care law may compel for-profit companies to include birth control coverage as part of their health plans, even when such coverage violates the owners’ religious beliefs. The businesses say they are faced with having to violate their beliefs by providing birth control or dropping health care coverage for their workers. (The issues are discussed in a powerful 2012 book, No Higher Power: Obama’s War on Religious Freedom, by Phyllis Schafly and George Neumayr.)
“I really don’t think they had any alternative than to take this up,” said Holly Lynch, a health policy and bioethics specialist at Harvard Law School, about the case brought by almost 40 companies.
Companies said in court filings that fines for violating the mandate would cripple their businesses.
“This legal challenge has always remained about one thing and one thing only: the right of our family businesses to live out our sincere and deeply held religious convictions as guaranteed by the law and the Constitution,” said David Green, CEO of the Oklahoma City-based Hobby Lobby crafts chain, which won a lower court challenge to the law.
“Business owners should not have to choose between violating their faith and violating the law,” he said. Hobby Lobby calls itself a “biblically founded business”and is closed on Sundays.
The high court’s decision comes just over 11 months away from off-year elections early next November and is a reminder of how vulnerable Obamacare, and its main cheerleaders, President Obama and congressional Democrats, are politically. The hopelessly incompetent rollout of HealthCare.gov and so-called health care exchanges are generating bad ink for Democrats daily and Obama’s approval numbers fall every time he opens his mouth to tell a new lie about the widely hated program that bears his name.
We learned a month ago that Obama has been lying to Americans for at least three years, reassuring them that they would be able to keep their current healthcare plans, but knowing they wouldn’t. That was the upshot of a disturbing 2010 analysis of insurance market upheaval conducted by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that was revealed by Avik Roy of Forbes magazine.
There are credible estimates that between 93 million and 129 million Americans will lose coverage if Obamacare is fully implemented. More than two thirds of Americans with private health insurance can expect to be booted from their plans, says economist Christopher Conover, a research scholar at the Center for Health Policy & Inequalities Research at Duke University and an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
These people are, needless to say, not likely to be enthusiastic about voting for Democrats next time they head into the voting booth.
The court’s decision to take the Establishment Clause case comes as a major media figure admitted that Obamacare really, truly does contain death panels.
Left-wing journalist Mark Halperin, author of Double Down: Game Change 2012,admitted to radio host Steve Malzberg that yes, President Obama’s Affordable Care Act actually does contain provisions for “death panels,” whose members decide which critically-ill patients receive care and which do not.
“It’s built into the plan. It’s not like a guess or like a judgment. That’s going to be part of how costs are controlled,” Halperin said, confirming the very point that Sarah Palin said over and over again and was laughed at and savaged by left-wingers and erstwhile conservatives like David Frum.
Although leftists and mainstream journalists generally shy away from the phrase “death panels,” Halperin was undeterred, agreeing repeatedly with Malzberg when he equated Obamacare’s built-in health care rationing to “death panels.”
Halperin even doubled-down, insisting that death panels are good things. “We do need to do some of that in our country but we can’t afford to spend so much on end-of-life care,” he said.
And just in time for Thanksgiving, the Obama-idolaters of the Saul Alinsky-inspired group Organizing for Action (OfA) remind us that to them nothing is sacred and everything –yes, everything– is political.
Starry-eyed Obama zombies will be ruining the holiday tomorrow by engaging in in-your-face proselytizing about Obamacare with their captive family members around the dinner table.
OfA launched a new propaganda website, “Health Care for the Holidays,” that encourages Obamacare supporters to “have the talk” with relatives about signing up for health insurance on the bureaucratically bungled exchange websites. “It might not always seem like it, but your family listens to you. So have the talk,” the group urges.
Organizing for Action also provides a checklist of carefully crafted lies about the 2,000-page Obamacare law that is destroying the health care industry and causing totally unnecessary upheaval in American society. The group urges its storm-trooper members to challenge “common misconceptions” like the assertion that the law is “too complicated” — and spoon-feeds them rebuttals.
Does Obamacare cover indigestion?
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