Travels With Susan

There is a huge difference between required auto insurance and required health insurance. States require that you be financially responsible for injury you cause to others-- that's required auto insurance. You are not required to be responsible for injury you cause to yourself.

Click to read more ...

ERISA limits an employer provided health care insurance policy in excluding coverage for pre-existing conditions.

Click to read more ...

Fee awards create a lopsided incentive for people to sue for violation of first amendment rights.

Click to read more ...

If you listen to the left and the President, (oops, redundant.  The President is the left) all those angry old people have been stirred up by lying hypocrites.  The left keeps saying that this or that isn't in the bill.  

So, let me tell you what I found in the bill.  Read section 124 of the house bill.  It requires the Secretary of HHS to set standards for benefits to be offered by Qualified Health Care Benefit Plans.  That is it requires the Secretary to issue rules that set out what benefits must be offered by Qualified Health Care Benefit Plans.   That is, in reality, a who lives and who dies kind of proposition because it will dictate what kinds of benefits must be provided and what kind of benefits will not be provided  So, for example, if the Secretary decides that pacemakers will not be provided to people who are over 65, a lot of people who are over 65 will die for lack of a pacemaker.  

But, you say, health insurance plans don't have to be qualified Health Care Benefit Plans.  And you will be right and wrong all at the same time.  Section 102 of the plan provides for "grace periods" and phase in periods which allow people to keep the coverage they have now, FOR A WHILE.  But, eventually, everyone will be required, under penalty of taxation, to be a member of a Qualified Health Benefit Plan.  And those Health Benefit Plans will be tightly regulated by the Federal Government. 

If your coverage is denied for a particular procedure, you will have an appeal to an ombudsman.  Sure you can have judicial review after, but will you win?  95% of the time the answer is no because the courts will defer to an administrative body.

So, is Sarah Palin right, will there be panels deciding who gets health care and who doesn't?  Yes.  It won't be open and obvious at first, but it will be there.  There is a lot of discussion in the bill about "clinically appropriate" care and effectiveness research and high value procedures.  

It isn't the language so much that scares me, it is what is allowed by the language.  It allows the federal government to set up a series of agencies  that will make all of the decisions, and , as we have seen in England and Canada, those agencies will be panels deciding who gets health care and who doesn't.  And those panels, in England and Canada do discriminate against the aged and the disabled.  We see where this is heading and we don't like it.

It is almost a given that Judge Sotomayor wil be confirmed.  The Democrats have enough votes to confirm her.  Period.  But should she.  I am not one of those who think that all justices of the Supreme Court have to be brainy intellectuals.  I think there is something to be said for people who have some real experience of everyday life.  The trouble with people who have lived all of their lives in their heads and who have never had to live with the practical effects of everyday decsisions is that they sometimes come up with schemes and rules that my have some intellectual appeal but are unworkable in everyday life.  I am, if you haven't read the rest of this website, a conservative.  Very conservative.  But not an total intellectual conservative.  I think that judges owe a duty to the litigants before them to be practical, to realize the real impact of their decisions.  For example, if you require that an educational institution afford the full panoply of hearings and appeals for every limitation on speech, you will have an educational institution that can no longer educate because it is spending all of its time holding hearings.  I like a judge who. like Sotomayor, can understand that schools have to have rules, and the rules have to be enforced for students to have an environment in which they can learn.    I can't say I have studied Sotomayor's opinions in depth.  I haven't.  But I have skimmed through and/0r read about 30 of them.  That's more than most people commenting on her qualifications.  From the opinions I have read, she is not an idealogue.  She is a middle of the row, we just apply the law kind of judge in the opinions I have read.  If I were in the Senate, conservative that I am, I would acknowledge the practical realities, be grateful that Diane Wood wasn't nominated and vote for her.  My 2 cents worth