Obama interjects himself into many issues when he should stand aside and allow our justice system to take its course. Worse yet, he does not voice his opinion equally, but in a dicidedly biased manner. In the Boston police situation that involved a Black professor, he said that he did not know all the fact, but the "police acted stupidly." Now in the most unforutunate death of Trevon Martin, he played the race card by telling America that we all needed to do soul searching, as if we were all guilty of what had happened. Most significanlty, he said nothing when the Black Panthers put a price of $100,000 on the head of Zimmerman.
Somewhat earlier he had bemoaned during a news interview about what he wants to do for American but he is "constrained by the Constitution."
Now he is issuing a warning to the Supreme Court, an "unelected" body about overturning a law that was passed by an "overwhelming majority." Never mind that under the threat of finacial "crisis" he managed to get Obamacare passes by a Congress that was stupid enough to do when most of its members had not read the 2,000 plus page bill.
[This has echoes of Obama’s infamous lecture to The Justices during his State of The Union address in 2010. Clearly, he has a runaway ego. If Americans hand this arrogant man the reins for four more years it will be an historic and regrettable mistake. Obama’s megalomaniacal temperament almost guarantees that if reelected he will leverage his lame duck status and try to elbow aside the separation of powers and other safeguards in our Constitution that limit the ability of one branch of government to usurp the power of another. In fact, by interjecting himself into a matter already before the Court, he has just given us a sneak preview of the ugly things to come. df]
Yahoo News, 4/2/2012
Obama issues stern language on Supreme Court health care decision
President Obama on Monday issued stern language to the Supreme Court of the United States regarding his health care law, expressing confidence "Obamacare" will not be overturned by the nation's highest court.
"I'm confident this will be upheld because it should be upheld," the president said Monday afternoon at a White House press conference that included Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Mexican President Felipe Calderon, who are attending the North American Leaders' Summit. The president said overturning the law would be "an unprecedented and extraordinary step" and compared the court's rejection of the law to "judicial activism."
"For years what we've heard is the biggest problem on the bench was judicial activism," the president said, baiting conservatives who have long complained about justices' political agendas. The president stressed that the judges are "unelected" and noted that the law was passed by a democratically elected Congress.
Monday's comments were the first public warning the president has issued since the justices heard oral arguments last week on the constitutionality of the law, which includes an individual health care mandate.
It remains to be seen how the justices will rule on the matter. On Friday, the court began deliberations, which could last through June. The ruling could significantly impact the president's re-election strategy.
Dan Friedman
NYC
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The reason our emergency rooms re packed with people is that those without insurance use it for any ailment, whether an emergency or not. The other reason is that no one is ever turned away, not only if they have no insruance, but also because of the physian's oath and morality. And this extends to Americans or others.
Best,
Aggie
Return to the Article
March 31, 2012
Justice Sonia Sotomayor's Shocking Ignorance
Jason Lee
The liberal Supreme Court justices have demonstrated profound and shocking ignorance of the American health care system. Here's one of the most jarring examples:
"What percentage of the American people who took their son or daughter to an emergency room and that child was turned away because the parent didn't have insurance," asked Sotomayor, "... do you think there's a large percentage of the American population that would stand for the death of that child -- (who) had an allergic reaction and a simple shot would have saved the child?"
I have a precise answer for Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
The percentage of American people who took their son or daughter to an emergency room and were turned away because the parent didn't have insurance is exactly zero.
No person, whether American or not, is ever turned away from an emergency room for lack of health insurance. Ever.
This simply does not happen.
Here's why:
1. It's illegal.
Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) is a U.S. Act of Congress passed in 1986 as part of the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (COBRA). It requires hospitals to provide care to anyone needing emergency healthcare treatment regardless of citizenship, legal status or ability to pay. There are no reimbursement provisions. Participating hospitals may only transfer or discharge patients needing emergency treatment under their own informed consent, after stabilization, or when their condition requires transfer to a hospital better equipped to administer the treatment.
You can thank Republican President Ronald Reagan for that, for better or for worse.
As a health care provider who interacts with emergency room physicians on a daily basis, I can attest to the fact that seriously ill patients are never discharged from an emergency room in the tragic fashion that Sonia Sotomayor imagines. Even uninsured patients with minor, self-limited problems are treated better than that.
2. Morality and the patient-doctor relationship
Although this might come as a shocking revelation to liberal Democrats, most physicians understand the difference between right and wrong. No physician would turn away a child simply because the parent didn't have insurance. This is primarily because physicians, even conservative ones, are as compassionate as liberal Supreme Court justices. (And in securing scarce and enormously expensive resources for their patients in an emergency, physicians have virtually unlimited latitude.)
3. The legal risks of selfish, short-sighted decisions are enormous.
A jury would have no mercy on a physician who withheld treatment inappropriately, causing a child to die. The financial and professional consequences would be devastating.
It's disheartening to note that Justice Sonia Sotomayor, as profoundly ignorant as she is, will be making a monumental decision about a 2,700 page health care law. Justice Sotomayor needs to have a talk with her brother.
Jason Lee, M.D. blogs at RightKlik.net
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/03/justice_sonia_sotomayors_shocking_ignorance.html at March 31, 2012 - 12:52:54 PM CDT
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/supreme-court-considers-main-constitutional-question-in-health-care-law/2012/03/26/gIQAkyKWdS_story.html?wpisrc=nl_pmpolitics
Supreme Court expresses doubts on key constitutional issue in health-care law
By Robert Barnes and N.C. Aizenman, Published: March 26
The Supreme Court’s conservative justices appeared deeply skeptical Tuesday that a key component of President Obama’s sweeping health-care law is constitutional, endangering the most ambitious domestic program to emerge from Congress in decades.
In an intense interrogation of the government’s lawyer, Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr., the justices posed repeated and largely unanswered questions about the limits of federal power. At the end of two hours, the court seemed split on the same question that has divided political leaders and the country: whether the Constitution gives Congress the power to compel Americans to either purchase health insurance or pay a penalty.
The answer is likely to come from Justice Anthony M. Kennedy or perhaps Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.
Both men fully joined in the rough 60 minutes of questioning for Verrilli. But they indicated that the case might be a closer call for them than for their colleagues.
If either were to save the health-care law — championed by Obama, passed by a Democratic-controlled Congress in 2010 and increasingly unpopular in public opinion polls — it seemingly would require a judgment that there is something unique about the health-care market that allows such regulation and that some line could be drawn to limit the government’s claim of federal power.
Tuesday’s arguments were the most dramatic so far of the Supreme Court’s three days of hearings on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and the session was perhaps the most remarkable one since the court decided the 2000 presidential election with its ruling in Bush v. Gore.
Outside the courthouse, one demonstrator was dressed as Lady Liberty, while another posed as a prisoner with a ball and chain. Down the street, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) rallied tea party supporters. Inside the chamber, Cabinet secretaries and members of Congress were scattered throughout the audience.
Roberts concluded the session by saying, “Counsel, we’ll see you tomorrow.”
On Wednesday, the court will consider whether the entire health-care law must fall if the individual mandate is found unconstitutional and whether the law’s expansion of Medicaid is an improper demand on the states, which help foot the bill for the program. The court is likely to issue its ruling in late June, in the midst of the presidential campaign.
Verrilli was first up at Tuesday’s oral arguments and was granted twice the usual time to make his case. The reception he received must have made the hour seem long.
He defended the law as a valid exercise of Congress’s power under the Constitution’s commerce clause to regulate interstate commerce. Lawmakers chose to tackle the problem of the uninsured, along with cost-shifting by people who do not pay for their medical care, by regulating health insurance, the principal method by which medical care is purchased, Verrilli said.
But the conservative justices soon moved the arguments used against the law from the beginning, particularly that it is beyond Congress’s authority to require people to purchase something they do not want.
“Can you create commerce in order to regulate it?” Kennedy asked.
Justice Antonin Scalia, considered a possible ally by some of the law’s supporters because of a past vote on the commerce clause’s authority, seemed to dash those hopes quickly.
“The federal government is not supposed to be a government that has all powers,” he said. “If the government can do this . . . what else can it not do?”
Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said that under Verrilli’s theory — that the government can require the purchase of health insurance because everyone, at some point, will need health care — the government could also mandate burial insurance, since everyone will die.
Justice Clarence Thomas, who maintained his policy of not asking questions at the argument, has spent two decades on the court ruling that the commerce clause gives the government less power than other justices have recognized.
There were other troubling signs for supporters of the law. When Verrilli said the government’s argument concerned only insurance, Roberts said that was not reassuring. If the court approves that, he said, “all bets are off, and you could regulate that market in any rational way.”
Kennedy worried that the law could mark a significant shift in the government’s power over personal liberty.
“When you are changing the relation of the individual to the government in this . . . unique way, do you not have a heavy burden of justification to show authorization under the Constitution?” he asked.
Conservative justices repeatedly asked about the limits of the government’s power, using now-familiar examples of forcing the purchase of broccoli, or of cars to help struggling auto companies.
Verrilli, seemingly unwilling to tie the hands of future lawmakers, repeatedly answered such questions by referring to the uniqueness of the health-care market.
Liberal justices seemed to think that Congress was well within its powers in trying to reform a system in which uninsured people are raising costs for others. Those people do engage in commerce, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said, when they show up for treatment that cannot be denied.
“I thought what was unique about this is it’s not my choice whether I want to buy a product to keep me healthy, but the cost that I am forcing on other people if I don’t buy the product sooner rather than later,” she said.
Justice Stephen G. Breyer said the answer to Alito’s question might be that if the United States had a burial insurance market equivalent to its extensive system of private and public insurance for health care, perhaps it would not be inappropriate to require people to obtain burial plans.
Paul Clement, former solicitor general for President George W. Bush and the lawyer for Florida and 25 other states objecting to the law, said the legislation is unprecedented and has no limiting principle.
“The commerce clause gives Congress the power to regulate existing commerce,” Clement said. “It does not give Congress the far greater power to compel people to enter commerce to create commerce essentially in the first place.”
It was in the questioning of Clement and Michael Carvin, representing the National Federation of Independent Business, that supporters of the law saw a glimmer of hope.
Roberts told Carvin that he was not addressing the government’s point, “which is that they are not creating commerce in health care. It’s already there, and we are all going to need some kind of health care; most of us will at some point.”
And Kennedy said the government might be right that the interwoven markets of health insurance and health care are unique.
“The young person who is uninsured is uniquely proximately very close to affecting the rates of insurance and the costs of providing medical care in a way that is not true in other industries,” he said. “That’s my concern in the case.”
Oral arguments are often a good barometer of an outcome, but they can sometimes be misleading in cases of great import with complicated constitutional questions. Several years ago, for instance, oral arguments in a case about a key provision of the Voting Rights Act seemed to indicate that it was doomed. Instead, the justices found a narrow way out and avoided the constitutional controversy.
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http://times247.com/articles/cnn-obamacare-defense-a-train-wreck-for-white-house#ixzz1qWYWm23Q
Obamacare defense called 'train wreck' for White House
Commentary
Business Insider
by: Grace Wyler
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
CNN's legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin said Tuesday's arguments by Solicitor General David Verrelli before the Supreme Court were "a train wreck for the Obama administration." Photo Credit:AP
The Supreme Court just wrapped up the second day of oral arguments in the landmark case against President Obama's healthcare overhaul, and reports from inside the courtroom indicate that the controversial law took quite a beating. ...
According to CNN's legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin, the arguments were "a train wreck for the Obama administration." ...
"I don't know why [U.S. Solicitor General David Verrelli] had a bad day," he said. "He is a good lawyer, he was a perfectly fine lawyer in the really sort of tangential argument yesterday. He was not ready for the answers for the conservative justices."
http://times247.com/articles/cnn-obamacare-defense-a-train-wreck-for-white-house#ixzz1qWYWm23Q
Thanks Aggie Hoffman
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