States pushing back against ObamaCare mandates

The Associated Press reports that states all across the country are pushing back against healthcare “reform,” specifically in response to the possibility that their residents and businesses could be forced into buying health insurance by the federal government (via MM):

BOISE, Idaho — Idaho Gov. C.L. “Butch” Otter on Wednesday became the first state chief executive to sign a measure requiring his attorney general to sue Congress if it passes health reforms that force residents to buy insurance. Similar legislation is pending in 37 other states nationwide.

Constitutional law experts say the move is mostly symbolic because federal laws supersede those of the states. But the movement reflects a growing national frustration with President President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul.

Democrats are hoping to pass a version of the reform by this weekend.

Last week, Virginia legislators passed a measure similar to Idaho’s new law, but Otter was the first state chief executive to sign such a bill, according the American Legislative Exchange Council, which created model legislation for Idaho and other states. The Washington, D.C.,-based nonprofit group promotes limited government.

“Congress is planning to force an unconstitutional mandate on the states,” said Herrera, the group’s health task force director.

Otter, a Republican, already warned U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in December that Idaho was considering litigation if health reform went through. He signed the bill during his first such public ceremony of the 2010 Legislature.

“What the Idaho Health Freedom Act says is that the citizens of our state won’t be subject to another federal mandate or turn over another part of their life to government control,” Otter said.

These types of bills may be more symbolic in nature than anything else, but they send a powerful message to the Obamacrats in Washington, DC on behalf of the people who live in those states that health insurance mandates and fines are not welcomed:

These state laws would directly conflict with the national health care bill that Democrats are trying to pass, which includes a requirement that all individuals get health coverage or face a tax penalty.

Several legal analysts said if Congress enacts a national health care law, it would supersede any state laws written to block them.

“I think most of the states that are passing these laws understand that they can’t trump federal law with state law,” said Professor Jonathan Siegel at George Washington University Law School. “But what they get out of it is symbolic effect. They’re sending a message to the federal politicians that they don’t like the health care mandate.”

Such state laws might not be the only legal challenge to Democratic health care legislation.

Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum, a Republican, on Tuesday sent a letter to the other 49 state attorneys general, asking them to join him “in preparing a legal challenge to the constitutionality of whatever individual mandate provision emerges, immediately upon the legislation becoming law.”

To view the bill signed into law by Otter, click here. The Virginia bill is here.

Healthcare premiums to go down “3,000 percent” under ObamaCare?

A couple of days ago, in a speech in the battleground state of Ohio, President Obama made a shall we say lofty, ambitious claim about healthcare premiums and how much they supposedly would go down under ObamaCare. Sweetness and Light has the video of his remarks. David Gibberman at The American Thinker breaks the numbers down:

Monday in Strongsville, Ohio, President Obama said that ObamaCare will reduce health insurance premiums by “3,000 percent.” Considering that a 50 percent decrease in premiums would mean that we’d be paying half as much as we now pay for health insurance and that a 100 percent decrease in premiums would mean that we’d be paying nothing for health insurance, President Obama is telling us that insurance companies will actually start paying us money to keep our health insurance.

If your current health insurance policy costs $5,000 a year, insurance companies will pay you $145,000 a year (2,900 percent multiplied by $5,000). If you’re fortunate enough to be paying $25,000 a year for health insurance, insurance companies will pay you $725,000 a year. There’s no word whether you can purchase a more expensive health insurance policy to increase the amount of money that insurers pay you each year.

ST reader GWR, who tipped me off to this story, quipped in email:

My guess is that someone programmed the wrong number into the teleprompter and Obama has so little comprehension of basic math or the realities of paying for insurance that he didn’t find anything wrong with it.

That would be my guess, too – esp. if you take a look at the relevant part of the transcript:

Now, so let me talk about the third thing, which is my proposal would bring down the cost of health care for families, for businesses, and for the federal government. So Americans buying comparable coverage to what they have today — I already said this — would see premiums fall by 14 to 20 percent — that’s not my numbers, that’s what the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office says — for Americans who get their insurance through the workplace. How many people are getting insurance through their jobs right now? Raise your hands. All right. Well, a lot of those folks, your employer it’s estimated would see premiums fall by as much as 3,000 percent [sic], which means they could give you a raise. (Applause.)

[Sic], of course, means:

Sic is a Latin word meaning “thus”, “so”, “as such”, or “in such a manner”. In writing, it is placed within the quoted material, in square brackets – or outside it, in regular parentheses – and usually italicized – [sic] – to indicate that an incorrect or unusual spelling, phrase, punctuation, and/or other preceding quoted material has been reproduced verbatim from the quoted original and is not a transcription error.[1]

With that being said, did he actually mean to say 300% or 30%? Probably 30%, but so far, no acknowledgement/correction/clarification has been made by the WH that the TOTUS perhaps had a hiccup on Monday in Ohio (yes, we must blame the TOTUS, not the POTUS, because the POTUS is never wrong, you see …).

And speaking of Obama’s Monday speech, the AP reports that a cancer-stricken woman he’s been using as part of his centerpiece for healthcare reform actually is in no danger of losing her house, contra to what both O and his administration (including spox Robert Fibbs) have asserted about her situation more than once:

A woman championed as the Obama administration’s emblem for health care reform does not have to choose between her home and her health, according to officials at the Ohio hospital where she is being treated.

With a self-reported annual income of about $6,000, Natoma Canfield is a prime candidate for financial aid in the form of Medicaid — the federal health care program for low-income and disabled people — or charitable assistance.

And the Cleveland Clinic said it has no intention of putting out a lien on Canfield’s house — or letting the billing process interfere with her treatment.

“It appears that I think she’ll be fine,” said Lyman Sornberger, the hospital’s executive director of patient financial services. “By nature of the fact that she was not early on rejected by either program, that’s a key indicator that she will most likely be eligible.”

Canfield was stunned last month when she unsealed a handwritten letter from none other than the president himself. She had written to Obama before the holidays to request that he count her as a “statistic,” as she put it, among the scores of Americans unable to afford health insurance — but she never expected to get a response.

“I still can’t get over the thrill of opening that,” said Canfield, 50, who is undergoing chemotherapy treatments for leukemia.

Obama traveled to northeast Ohio on Monday to champion Canfield’s plight as proof of why health care reform is so urgently needed. The self-employed cleaning worker also stole the spotlight at Tuesday’s White House press briefing, when she was mentioned several times by press secretary Robert Gibbs as a make-or-break vote on Obama’s health care overhaul loomed over lawmakers.

“I think there are many that would want to conflate this process into something that’s different than the product; that is different than the heart-wrenching stories of people, as I’ve said, like Natoma Canfield … who made a decision to give up her health care to keep her house, a gamble that she’s lost,” Gibbs said.

Canfield’s not the only one who is stunned. I’m seriously stunned that the PrObama AP would even report this. I had previously seen it reported only on Fox, and I mentioned it briefly in this post yesterday. As I insinuated there, Ms. Canfield isn’t the first person whose story the President has hijacked, twisted, and misrepresented in order to get his ultra left wing agenda shoved through Congress, and sadly, she won’t be the last.

It’s understandably a thrill for Ms. Canfield to have the President use her story as a symbol of all that is wrong with our current healthcare system, but it’s not a thrill for anyone else desirous of having an open, honest, and up front debate free of misleading anecdotes and personal stories meant to persuade people purely on an emotional rather than factual basis. I wish her all the best, but for this President and his admininstration I have nothing but contempt for the way they have shamelessly and purposely manipulated her story in order to sell this monstrosity of an unpopular bill to the American people.

This, my dear readers, is “transparency” you can believe in – but not the type of “transparency” candidate Obama promised while on the campaign trail. Chalk it up as another one in a long line of broken promises, pledges I suspect he had no intentions of ever keeping.