Let’s say that, back when I was a prosecutor, I tried and convicted a man on a charge of conspiring to sell narcotics. I can prove he was conspiring, but it was really to sell stolen property. I convict him but, on appeal, the court holds, “The prosecutor’s evidence that it was drugs the defendant conspired to sell is wholly lacking.” At that point, the conviction has to be dismissed, and if I want to try him a second time, this time for conspiring to sell stolen property, I’ve got to indict him and start the whole process over again.

Let’s suppose, however, that the appeals court instead said, “Eh, drugs, stolen property, what’s the big whup? You just wrote the wrong commodity into the indictment. So let’s not bother with a whole new trial at which you’d have to prove the correct charge to a jury. Let’s just rewrite the indictment and pretend that it says ‘stolen property’ instead of ‘narcotics.’ Then we can uphold the conviction and call it a day.”

That would never be permitted to happen — not even to a crook of whose guilt we were certain. It would be an outrageous violation of due process, a conviction obtained by false pretenses, that would not be allowed to stand.

Yet this is essentially what Chief Justice Roberts & Co. did. They said the American people are not entitled to an honest legislative process, one in which they can safely assume that when Congress intentionally uses words that have very different meanings and consequences — like tax and penalty — and when Congress adamantly insists that the foundation of legislation is one and not the other, the Court will honor, rather than rewrite, the legislative process. Meaning: if Congress was wrong, the resulting law will be struck down, and Congress will be told that, if it wants to pass the law, it has to do it honestly.

Just as an appeals court may not legitimately rewrite an indictment and revise what happened at a trial, neither may it legitimately rewrite a statute and fabricate an imaginary congressional record. But today, the Supreme Court rewrote a law — which it has no constitutional authority to do — and treated it as if it were forthrightly, legitimately enacted. Further, it shielded the political branches from accountability for raising taxes, knowing full well that, had Obama and the Democrats leveled with the public that ObamaCare entailed a huge tax hike, it would never have had the votes to pass...

Meanwhile our country, trillions of dollars in debt and rapidly sinking further, desperately needs a debate about the limits of Congress’s power to tax and spend for the general welfare...

During the New Deal, under FDR’s court-packing threats, the Supreme Court adopted Hamilton’s view — enabling Congress to enact the New Deal, the Great Society, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and innumerable other programs for which there is no enumerated power in the Constitution. These programs are unsustainable and leading us over the economic cliff, besides intruding on the domain of state power. Had ObamaCare been honestly presented as a tax, or had the Court acted properly by striking it down as an illegitimate use of the commerce power and telling Congress that if it wanted to pass the bill as a tax it would have to pass the bill as a tax, our dire financial straits might have forced this much needed debate about the limits of congressional welfare power.

We have now lost that opportunity through fraud: fraud in the legislative action, and fraud in the judicial review. Due process would not allow this to be done to a criminal, but the Supreme Court has decided that Americans will have to live with it.

Opponents of the law have endlessly invoked “socialism.” Nothing in the Affordable Care Act or any part of President Obama’s challenges the basic dynamics of market capitalism. All sides accept that some of us should continue to enjoy vastly greater comforts and pleasures than others. If you don’t work as hard as Mitt Romney has, or were born less smart, or to worse parents, or enjoyed worse schools, or invested your skills in an industry that collapsed, or suffered any other misfortune, then you will be punished for this. Your television may be low-definition, or you might not be able to heat or cool your home as comfortably as you would like; you may clothe your children in discarded garments from the Salvation Army.

This is not in dispute. What is being disputed is whether the punishments to the losers in the market system should include, in addition to these other things, a denial of access to non-emergency medical treatment. The Republican position is that it should. They may not want a woman to have to suffer an untreated broken ankle for lack of affordable treatment. Likewise, I don’t want people to be denied nice televisions or other luxuries. I just don’t think high-definition television or nice clothing are goods that society owes to one and all. That is how Republicans think about health care.

This is why it’s vital to bring yourself face-to face with the implications of mass uninsurance — not as emotional manipulation, but to force you to decide what forms of material deprivation ought to be morally acceptable. This question has become, at least at the moment, the primary philosophical divide between the parties. Democrats will confine the unfortunate to many forms of deprivation, but not deprivation of basic medical care. Republicans will. The GOP is the only mainstream political party in the advanced world to hold this stance.

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The maintenance of mass lack of access to medical care is their cause. That is why the Republicans never offered an alternative universal-health-care plan and why the Paul Ryan–authored budget they have embraced repeals Obama’s coverage subsidies and throws millions more off their Medicaid, without any replacement.

Their reason for failing to defend their actual principles is obvious enough: That tens of millions of Americans deservedly lack a right to basic medical treatment is a politically difficult proposition. Thus, they oppose Obamacare without defending the indefensible conditions they actually favor. Their tactic of adding vague gestures toward unspecified future reforms has been so successful that news reports almost uniformly describe the Republican health-care stance as yet-to-be-determined, rather than an outright defense of maintaining health care as an earned privilege rather than a right.

1. ...those people have synthesized marxism and capitalism into a communitarian future vision...
2. ...where we impoverished slaves experience a world without hope but with great PR...
3. ...and they experience the world as a corrupt Warren Buffet/Immelt/Rothschild/Mikhail Khodorkovsky/Lai Changxing/Daniel Ortega kleptocracy class...
4. ...who alone have the privilege of engaging in a sort of capitalism...
5. ...rich beyond measure but slaves to party ideologues...
6. ...and the only middle class will be the bare minimum number of thug police [of the body and mind] needed to keep the prison yard peaceful for the 1% at the top...
7. ...and they are cramming that future down our throats whether we like it or not.

The ACA [Affordable Care Act, an abbreviation for the law's formal title] lacks a funding mechanism for Department of Health and Human Services to set up exchanges for states that decline to do so themselves--and congressional Republicans are unlikely to appropriate additional money for that."

[and]

the Independent Payment Advisory Board, colloquially known as the death panel, which would recommend which medical services to deny in order to cut costs. "The problem," according to Kapur, is that "Senate Republicans can--and have signaled their intention to--filibuster nominees to the board."

But that isn't the only problem. As Kapur notes, "even some House Democrats" have voted to abolish the board. Kapur ignores another problem, reported last month by the Washington Post's Sarah Kliff: ObamaCare proponents despair of finding enough experts to serve on the 15-man panel, "a federal job where the compensation is low, the political controversy high and the ultimate payoff unclear."

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Sarah Hall Ingram served as commissioner of the office responsible for tax-exempt organizations between 2009 and 2012. But Ingram has since left that part of the IRS and is now the director of the IRS’ Affordable Care Act office, the IRS confirmed to ABC News today.

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‘Are you sexually active? If so, with one partner, multiple partners or same-sex partners?”

Be ready to answer those questions and more the next time you go to the doctor, whether it’s the dermatologist or the cardiologist and no matter if the questions are unrelated to why you’re seeking medical help. And you can thank the Obama health law.

He called the sex questions “insensitive, stupid and very intrusive.” He couldn’t think of an occasion when a cardiologist would need such information — but he knows he’ll be pushed to ask for it.

The president’s “reforms” aim to turn doctors into government agents, pressuring them financially to ask questions they consider inappropriate and unnecessary, and to violate their Hippocratic Oath to keep patients’ records confidential.

Doctors and hospitals who don’t comply with the federal government’s electronic-health-records requirements forgo incentive payments now; starting in 2015, they’ll face financial penalties...

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the 1.4 million figure has a margin of error of 700,000, meaning that there is a 95 percent probability that the actual number is between 700,000 and 2.1 million previously uninsured enrollees.

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