It adds persuasive value to the suit. If North Dakota was the only state objecting then no one expects the courts to listen. However a substantial group of states carries more weight.

Also it may have to start out in low level district court that the state is in. IF say Arizona was the only state to do it, it would be filed in the 9th Circuit which is solidly leftist.

People come on. This suit has no chance in any federal court anywhere. This is pretty obviously within Congress' lawmaking authority under any post-1930 interpretation of the Commerce Clause. You might get Thomas if it gets to the Supreme Court. Maybe.

But this isn't true. The Republicans are getting death threats just the same.

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_1...68-503544.html

Not unless a Right-winger did this...

You left out:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicar...ernization_Act

That's why the act was introduced. How much faith do you have that these corporations are not going to dump all the expenses on the government?

And then finally, do you think that the CBO accounted for this possibility when it calculated how much all of this noise would cost? It wouldn't surprise me if they didn't, but I obviously cannot say for certain.

I found this interesting.

http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive...679D946196D6CF




Cliffs: Doctor in 1910 complains that benevolent societies' movement to keep doctors on retainer caused such stiff competition that doctors were in danger of going broke.

Makes me want to hunker down with a 12 pack and google news search and research the history of medicine in depth until my eyes bleed. Or until my 12 pack runs out.

Or until House comes on.

Oh ****, House is on!

Ok I am about a third of the way through the article and here are my first impressions:

I keep seeing Partners at the top. The graph is vague, at best, about what the data represents. [Findings III (A.) 1]

ok whatever that means.

So I am scrolling through the graphs and I keep seeing the usual suspect at the top until Children's Health care has the honor so I decide to see if I can see any discrepancy between it and some of the bottom providers. The first one I Google is the lowest provider (I mean a 280 percent discrepancy lets see if there is anything to it) and the second result is a news article about a Nurses strike at the hospital.

It turns out according to Wiki, Taunton Mass. boasts a per capita income of ~19,900.00 dollars and a full 10 percent of the population lives below the poverty line.

I Wiki the Childrens Health Care center and get

And they have 396 licensed beds!

Look, I will grant you that this thing reads like a damn promo pitch and it probably is. Even if it did not, I would be hardly qualified to discern if what they were saying is objectively correct or not.

But how can the report explicitly state

and reconcile said statement with the reality that one provider is in what is probably essentially a war zone, and in order to save money they are forcing staff to work overtime (however that saves money but I digress); while on the other hand we have a state of the art institution affiliated with none other than probably one of the top three, if not the best, medical schools in the world.

I mean which one is likely to have better more competent practitioners, better facilities etc. To say that these two institutions are delivering the same product is laughable on its face.

I will read the rest later.

No one is arguing that the facilities at every hospital are equal, just that there is no measurable difference in outcomes, and this is kind of the whole point. Of course the hospital that starts off with more financial resources is going to have more and nicer stuff, and people will want to go to the hospital with more and nicer stuff, but if patient outcomes are no different, then what message is being sent when the facility that reaches those objectives more expensively is rewarded outsized fee increases, which allow it to continue to overinvest in the stuff that allows them to to poach admissions from the facilities who are achieving similar results with much lest cost (wash, rinse, repeat)?

Hint: If I'm a hospital CEO, the takeaway is that focusing on efficiency is a fool's errand.

I haven't been paying too much attention to this whole health insurance thing - where is the majority of congressmen saying they get their legislative powers from to make this bill?

If they say anything but the Commerce clause, then LOL.

commerce and general welfare clause, although one dem congressman referred to it as the "good" welfare clause.

I'm not really sure it matters - we are still paying the subsidy, just not giving the additional tax benefit as the cherry on top. If employers stop giving the benefit, they stop receiving the subsidy.

I can't find it in any of the CBO documents I have, but it's being referenced as saving 4.5B over ten years, so it must have been scored someplace.

Well obviously if it was that easy, I'd be all for it too. Hell, we have a PRESIDENT who campaigned on this. And how do you feel about how it's going? It's an impossible problem with THIS government, do you agree? The amount of money involved and the politician's desire for money makes this a problem with the power of government giving businesses what they want, which they shouldn't be allowed to do.

Obviously you don't know my history. I was a delegate to the Republican State Convention, I ran for PC, hold CFL meetings in my store, write letters, etc etc etc. I actively campaigned for our own RPR in the district against Brian Baird and got incredibly disillusioned with the system (which is a whole different thread). I STILL try to "work within the system", but I realize my efforts have very very close to zero effect on the actual process. Convincing people of your views, be it online or IRL is much more important. And while sometimes I get short with people online (and use sarcasm as you say), I assure you I've talked to thousands of voters about actual small government ideas.

I don't doubt SOME people will benefit tremendously by this. Just like by everything else government does. And that just makes it that much harder to take away when you realize we're totally broke. What good is mandatory insurance if you can't afford to use it?

I'm a small government "Ron Paul" republican who hates just about everybody in the current GOP leadership because of their ridiculous hypocrisy after being in power for 8 years. That said, the only way to "win" the battle to get government smaller is to use the apparatus of the party, because you can't win anything as a 3rd party. The way I see it, we've already won the fiscal battle at home (at least to get them TALKING like small government conservatives), now we just need to get them to come around on foreign policy. And it is happening, but the current power structure isn't just going to roll over and give up.

weird that you think CEOs would intentionally have their companies violate GAAP accounting for a political point

actually, I don't think weird is the right word

"perfectly predictable"?

market failure LDO. rescission, adverse selection, etc. Definitely.

The general welfare clause is part of the tax sentence, not its own thing.

The expansion of federal power in the New Deal was by making the Interstate Commerce clause into a catch-all. But scotus has pulled back little bit in the 90s.

I'm looking further down the river man. I think Scalia and Thomas would vote against it for the most complicated reasons imaginable. I think the two Bush appointees are irate enough about Obama's rude potshots at the Court during the State of the Union to discover something.

However I am sure that the two socialists, grandpa, and the wise Latina woman have already decided that it is good policy and therefore constitutional.

So whatever Kennedy thinks.

I read most of this thread but still can't figure out if/when my insurance will finally cover the surgery that i need (torn labrum and bone fragment in my shoulder) I've been dealing with this since august of 2001. The doctor i originally saw told me i didn't need surgery, but a follow up to my 5th subluxation with an orthopedic specialist revealed damage that needed surgery to repair. My insurance company wouldn't cover it, and dropped me about a week after the request. The 1k+ total subluxations and countless partial (when the bone comes out of the socket and goes back without adjustment) suggest I need this sooner than later. It's also very fun when it comes out and the bone fragment goes into the hole before the my arm does.

On another note, I don't understand all of the hate toward providing something as basic as coverage to people who wouldn't otherwise get it gets some so incensed. I don't give two ****s about paying for insurance, I would already have it if not for this damned shoulder. If this law was in effect then, the surgery I require wouldn't be as extensive as it is now, even though it probably still is a relatively minor process (you're not even under while it's preformed.

Here's some imagery for those of you who don't what subluxation is:

Have you tried free market pixie dust on your shoulder? I hear it fixes just about everything.

This is A+ supreme court analysis.

It didn't work...

I'd better put it verbatim on the exam. The last sentence suffices for one essay.

of course you will probably have children and pass on your bad shoulder genes and then expect me to help pay for your childrens surgery.

Why did the insurance company deny the claim, and how did they justify dropping you? Also, what state are you in and what's the estimate for the cost of the surgery?

sorry to hear you had to wait so long for this, i hope you can have the surgery soon. but have you looked at your surgery options outside the US? i was talking to my brother recently and we couldn't figure out why medical tourism isn't more popular in the US, especially these days when anyone can find all the info they need on something like this. i mean it would be much much cheaper(even with the travel costs) and you can find plenty of top notch facilities around the world where you don't need to go bankrupt to get minor surgery.

I'm pretty sure this isn't considered minor surgery and involves a ton of rehab work in order to stick which may make it less appropriate for traveling abroad to get.