Obamacare

Wesley J. Smith: Obamacare Lives

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Source: National Review Online | Wesley J. Smith

The people of the United States ensured an Obamacare future by apparently reelecting President Obama and maintaining a Democratic Senate. Here are the immediate consequences:

1. The IPAB will go into effect: As I have written, IPAB is the cornerstone of a planned bureaucratic state. The only way now to thwart that is pure obstructionism. First, by filibustering the nominations that President Obama will make to the Board. Not going to happen. Second, by defunding. Even though the House will stay Republican, I don’t see them taking that route on what, to most people, is an abstract issue.

2. The attack on religious freedom will continue: The Obama Administration is an implacable foe of faith operating outside the four walls of church or cloister. Don’t look for the president to offer religious institutions who oppose the free birth control rule anything other than lip service to accommodation of religious institutions. Businesses will be forced to take their cause to the Supreme Court. Don’t count on help there, as the technocratic statists control the court 5-4, perhaps 6-3. Eventually, we will see a free abortion rule.

3. The Mandate will now be carried out: States that have been resisting will now begin to cooperate with the Feds by establishing exchanges.

4. There will be death panels: In a centralized system, rationing is the cost containment method of choice. The UK shows us the future of the USA. Already, powerful liberal voices on health care such as the New York Times and New England Journal of Medicine, have called for it. It is going to become very scary to be considered unproductive.

5. Single Payer, here we come: Obamacare is going to eventually implode. That will also take down the private insurance market. The result, in about 10 years, will be single payer. And that is by design. Oh, and single payer’s inevitable outcome is health care rationing.

Obamacare isn’t just about health care. It is–as designed–a cultural bulldozer, forcing the left’s liberal social views on all of society. And at this point, I am not sure what can be done about it.

Welcome to the Cult of Government

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Source: Real Clear Religion | By George Neumayr

Either say “long live the federal government” or die, Mexican government officials hectored Catholics in the early twentieth century, as depicted in the movie, For Greater Glory, an account of the Christian resistance to this persecution known as the “Cristeros war.”

Is Mexico’s past America’s future? After four years of in-your-face secularism from Barack Obama, it is not an idle question.

“Darn tooting,” Barack Obama said to militant feminists when they asked him, after the passage of the “Affordable Care Act,” if he was going to force Christians to pay for the contraceptives, sterilizations, and abortifacients of their employees.

Under his secularist mandates, of which his HHS contraceptive/abortifacient mandate is the most obvious example, Americans are in effect forced to say “long live the federal government” or face financial death. Now that the Supreme Court has upheld the essence of the “Affordable Care Act,” noncomplying religious organizations can expect to face fines of $2,000 per employee as soon as August 2013. These fines will cripple most Christian hospitals and schools and cause the closures of many religious charities.

Judeo-Christianity is so dangerous to the common good, according to Obama, that he feels free to persecute it through fiats and a cramped definition of “religion” which renders, as the United States Bishops have pointed out, even Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity nonreligious. As HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius decreed at the time of the HHS mandate’s announcement, only private sects that “primarily” employ and serve fellow members of their sects qualify as “religious” under the Obama administration’s definition of a religious organization.

How convenient. By this Orwellian definition of “religion,” Obama seeks to maintain the fiction that he is respecting “religious freedom” while driving the religious out of the public square.

Purging the traditionally religious from public life has long been the objective of the ACLU left, from which Barack Obama comes. He is, as his supporters put it in 2008, the one “we have been waiting for” — meaning that he is the final consummation of socialism and secularism.

According to Barack Obama, no higher power should exist in public life than godless government. Government, not God, is the sole measure of morality and law for him. Government, not God, is the determiner of the “good.” Never mind that the word good derives from the word God. Hence, Obama feels justified in shunting the religious into the shadows of society. While he has not pursued this aim violently, as Mexican President Plutarco Calles did in the 1920s, he has pursued it bureaucratically and legislatively.

Were Plutarco Calles alive today, he would no doubt approve of Obama’s attempts to define religion out of public life through statute, not to mention Obama’s use of public schools as instruments of secularist propaganda. Raised by an atheistic uncle who taught him to hate the Church and influenced by the growing secularism in Western Europe (where he traveled), Calles was a socialist and secularist who sought to monopolize all of public life by plucking children from parents and priests and indoctrinating them in statism. “We must enter and take possession of the mind of childhood, the mind of youth,” Calles liked to say.

In For Greater Glory, the child who is pressured to say “long live the federal government” instead says bravely, “Viva Cristo Rey!” Let us hope that the parents of America will teach their children to emulate this heroic example.

George Neumayr, a contributing editor to The American Spectator, is co-author (with Phyllis Schlafly) of the forthcoming book, No Higher Power: Obama’s War on Religious Freedom.

Fr. Gregory Jensen On Our (Orthodox Christianity’s) Cultural Failings

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Fr. Gregory Jensen wrote the following response to my essay (Catholic Online: The Republic is Finished and the America We Knew is Gone). It’s good, really good in fact, and I am posting it here to generate discussion that not only analyzes the reason for the present decline but to generate discussion of where to go from here.

Excerpt:

American Orthodoxy is as secular as the rest of America. Like the Catholic Church and the various Protestant communities…we have discovered that he who drinks the king’s wine sings the king’s song.

Thank you to Fr Hans Jacobse for his recent essay (Catholic Online: The Republic is Finished and the America We Knew is Gone) and for the many thoughtful comments it has inspired.

As to whether or not the latest decision of the SCOTUS supporting the constitutionality of the Patient Affordability Act is the end of the Republic or not I can’t say. If however our’ Republic is rooted in virtue understood as the fruit of human obedience to Natural Law then this needn’t be the end. In fact since virtue grows best in adversity I see this as a potentially good thing since it might inspire just the moral awakening and cultural renewal that America needs. On the other hand, if our Republic is not really and truly rooted in virtue and obedience to “the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” then we are better off for the loss and of our pretense to being a virtuous and “almost chosen people.”

Contrary to what some might want to believe, the American culture were not taken by the forces of moral corruption. Rather I think we are where we are as a People became we became complacent, we withdrew from the Public Square and the culture. We forget that vice is not a real thing but the absence of virtue, of those habits of thought and action that make human flourishing possible.

Vice never wins.

It is rather that we retreat from the hard work of virtue. We see this around us in those who would drive the Church from the Public Square. That some of these voices are Christian, and even Orthodox Christian, is a source of great shame and sorrow to me.

Looking more specifically now at the American Orthodox Church I am saddened by how little this ruling effects the Church itself. Metropolitan Jonah has asked us where are our hospitals, our nursing homes, and our schools. His asking this highlights for me the fact that we have no hospitals, that we have only a scant few nursing homes and parochial schools and except for our seminaries no institutions of higher learning. If these things are essential to the faith (and they are) and if they are essential to the health of our Republic (and they are) then as Orthodox Christians we need to shoulder at least some portion of the blame for the Republic’s moral collapse. Why? Because that collapse has is evident in (among other places) our parishes, our dioceses and our jurisdictions, .

We can bemoan what was decided by the SCOTUS but we are where we are because as a culture we have abandoned the pursuit of virtue. Worse, as Orthodox Christians we have neglected to develop those institutions that foster virtue. We have instead grown slack and lazy preferring the State (or what is only slight better, our Catholic or Protestant brethren) to educate us, to heal our bodies and to care for our elderly.

As citizens we are within our rights to be disturbed–but what right do we have to do so as a Church in America? I’m not so sure we have the institutional right to complain. Yes we have stood up to defend religious liberty in general and the Catholic Church in particular in the face of the HSS mandate and good for us that we have done so. But we can’t forget that personally and institutionally, American Orthodox Christians have profited from the welfare state, public education and the rest.

Putting our tradition aside for the moment, American Orthodoxy is as secular as the rest of America. Like the Catholic Church and the various Protestant communities around the country, we have discovered that he who drinks the king’s wine sings the king’s song. To quote Pogo, that great American political philosopher, we have met the enemy and he is us.

Obamacare Ruling Reflects Technocratic Imperative

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Wesley J. Smith

Why is anyone surprised? Obamacare was never going to be overturned. Not that it is constitutional, as the Constitution was originally conceived. It surely isn’t. But that Constitution has been terminally ill for a long time. Now it is dead.

Why would the Supreme Court’s conservative chief justice rewrite the individual mandate’s penalty to be a tax, when the law’s authors unequivocally stated it was not a revenue generator during the legislative process? Let’s call it the “technocratic imperative” — faith in big government solutions for societal problems — a mindset that generates a far stronger gravitational pull than the standard conservative/liberal paradigm. The technocratic imperative is why, when push comes to shove, conservative judges almost always move “left” and liberal judges almost never move “right.”

The case was always about two contrasting approaches to law and government. Opponents of Obamacare mounted a legal challenge to the individual mandate. They argued that the government does not have the constitutional authority to force Americans to buy anything, and indeed that such a legal compulsion is unprecedented in American history.

Proponents responded with a strong policy defense: They argued that a modern state must have universal health coverage. In a private system, without the mandate, people will wait until they are sick before buying insurance, which would cause a financial collapse. Because the majority of the court favored the policy — even though Chief Justice John Roberts disingenuously claimed that wasn’t his concern — the majority simply rewrote the law to make it appear to fit established constitutional paradigms.

Again, why is anybody surprised? The Supreme Court has steadily expanded the power of the federal government since the 1930s. In so doing, the justices have often based their decisions as much on policy as on law — and then, as now, fashioned legal justifications to back up their decisions (which, in turn, become springboards for further federal legislative and regulatory expansion).

This corruption of constitutionalism has come about, in my opinion, because most federal judges are members of the “ruling class” — people who graduated from Yale, Harvard, Princeton, etc. — who don’t believe in localism or the power of the individual to solve society’s problems. Rather, the Supreme Court’s ruling reflects a deep faith in the ability of “experts” — operating through government bureaucracies — to fashion regulations to make all things right. (Just look at the recent upholding of the vast and increasing powers of the EPA by an appellate court.) Since the ruling class believes that Obamacare’s purposes are laudable, that universal coverage is equitable and that the mandate is a necessary element of making the new law work, it is, ipso facto, constitutional — even if the law has to be rewritten.

As I learned in law school, the Constitution is what the Supreme Court says it is. That’s why it’s called judicial legislating.

My big clue that today would come was a November 2011 decision validating the individual mandate written by one of the federal judiciary’s most conservative members, Reagan-appointed Appeals Court Judge Laurence Silberman. To wit: “The right to be free from federal regulation is not absolute and yields to the imperative that Congress be free to forge national solutions to national problems.” That’s policy, baby! Moreover, it encompasses a philosophy that places technocratic problem-solving above upholding limited government. And that’s the essence of today’s ruling.

With the coming of the Obamacare decision, a new era has now fully dawned for the United States of America — even in the unlikely event that Obamacare is legislatively repealed. The beating heart of the Affordable Care Act is technocratic. Within the next few years, unelected and unaccountable bioethical cost/benefit boards of experts will decree from central control what (and perhaps, who) is covered by health insurance, and what (and perhaps, who) are not — just as happens in places like the United Kingdom. The Independent Payment Advisory Board even has power over a presidential veto regarding areas within its jurisdiction.

In this sense, think of Obamacare as our Brussels, the E.U.’s bureaucratic central control center. The cornerstone been laid for the construction of a full-blown bureaucratic state. Limited government is dead. Long live the technocracy!

Wesley J. Smith is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism. He also consults for the Patients Rights Council and the Center for Bioethics and Culture.

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Wesley J. Smith: At what cost?

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To the Source

Wesley J. Smith

Obamacare is now the law of the land. Because health care and wellness are such essential parts of our lives and our culture, America will never be the same.

For now, Obamacare preserves a private financing system—no public option. Nonetheless, it still represents a government takeover of healthcare. By eliminating risk assessment–and seizing control of benefit determinations—government bureaucrats will now choose winners and losers. Because we are all now ensconced in the same closed system, we each now have a direct financial stake in the health care received by every other one of us.

Government control is, by definition, intensely political. Politically powerful “in crowds” are rarely denied what they want, while “out crowds” may be excluded altogether. The same will be true in health care.

Canada is a vivid example, where terminal cancer patients are routinely refused life-extending chemotherapy by cost containment boards, while support is growing to fully fund IVF (recently allowed in Quebec) and abortions must be publicly paid.

The UK presents another disturbing look into our potential future. In the UK, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) imposes an explicitly utilitarian quality of life rationing, with the aged, for example, refused treatments available to younger people. Obamacare was written to establish a similar centralized federal oversight system.
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