Healthcare will be a long slog and the Supreme Court decision is a major battle but this particular war has many phases and chapters to go....

http://theulstermanreport.com/2012/06/28/white-house-insider-obamacare-now-we-are-truly-ready-to-fight/

The Obamacare ruling is good news for us.  Real good news.  It’s 2010 all over again now.  Swing states will shift over to Romney in most cases.  Trust me on this.  We’ve done the polling.  The data is conclusive on this.  It’s a huge tax.  We got Obama lying.  Again.

The Tea Party movement, which was as real and powerful a political movement as I’ve ever seen in my lifetime, is back in play.  That scares the hell out of the Obama White House.  You just got a bunch of Dems sweating hard over their re-election.  The Republican Party will now be a lot more focused and clearly conservative and that’s exactly what they need to be this time around.  We must make the election a clear divide between one side and the other and this Obamacare ruling has forced that to happen.

And the initial reports I’m getting are telling me there was a lot more clever going on inside that decision than the initial reaction will indicate. It’s the Obama Tax now.  And states were given an out.  The entire law is a big ass convoluted mess and the ruling has reinforced that fact.  Obama will have to defend something he doesn’t understand, and Romney can now sit back and just repeat over and over again “repeal-repeal-repeal”.

You can call bullsh-t on me here and I’ll understand if you do but I’m telling you right up this ruling today is GOOD NEWS.  Politically,  as a motivator, it’s great news.  Watch contributions toward Republicans jump up even more than they already were.  Watch the Obama White House have to face very hard questions over the Obamacare tax issue.  Watch states rise up to challenge the administration using the weapon the Supreme Court placed in their hands to do so. Watch the Tea Party come back stronger and more powerful than ever.

The giant has woken up.  Country needed a hard kick in the ass to remind us what is at stake in November.  Now we are truly ready to fight.

Last thing.  Romney was preparing for this decision.  He gets to go with the better script now.  He’s coming out swinging hard on this one. 

Chin up.  Fists clenched.  Eyes open.

Let’s roll.

http://hotair.com/archives/2012/06/30/can-obamacare-survive-success/

Can ObamaCare survive success?

POSTED AT 1:01 PM ON JUNE 30, 2012 BY ED MORRISSEY

The Supreme Court gave ObamaCare a new lease on political life by upholding the entirety of the law — well, almost the entirety of the law.  The decision by Chief Justice John Roberts threw out a portion of the bill in a dispute that didn’t get a lot of attention during the two-year legal fight, one that removes the penalties for states that don’t take part in the Medicaid expansion. Shortly after the decision was announced, at least three Republican governors announced that they would not expand Medicaid as dictated by the ACA.  Bobby Jindal of Louisiana declared in a conference call with the media that his state would not enact either the exchanges or the Medicaid expansion, which would force his state to absorb much larger costs.  Jindal wasn’t alone for long:

Gov. Scott Walker pledged again Thursday not to phase in any parts of President Barack Obama’s signature health care reform law ahead of November’s elections even though the U.S. Supreme Court ruled it is constitutional.

Walker, a Republican, has said he holds out hope the GOP will recapture the White House and gain full control of Congress and repeal the legislation. He reiterated his stance Thursday minutes after the court released its ruling.

“While the court said it was legal, that doesn’t make it right,” Walker said at a news conference. “For us to put time and effort and resources into that doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

In Kansas, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’ successor Governor Sam Brownbackconcurred:

A day after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act, Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback said he had no plans to implement provisions of the health care law.

“This is now in the hands of the American public. Mitt Romney has said on Day One he’ll grant a global waiver from the implementation of Obamacare, so now it’s up to the American public to decide, and I’m going to see what’s going to happen in the fall election before we move forward,” he said on CNBC’s “The Kudlow Report.”

Chuck Blahous warns that the court’s change of the Medicaid-expansion provision makes ObamaCare much less sustainable and practically guarantees its failure:

The Supreme Court left intact most of the health care law’s provisions, excepting only one section that would have allowed the Secretary of HHS to withdraw “existing Medicaid funding” from states that fail to comply with the law’s expansion of Medicaid eligibility.

This is important. At first glance, it appears quite possible that this decision could:

1. Considerably worsen the budgetary effects of the law, and;
2. Result in substantial cuts, later in this decade, to the subsidies for low-income individuals who are compelled to buy health insurance under the law.

Blahous, a former economic adviser to George W. Bush and deputy director of the National Economic Council, argues that the states have very compelling reasons to stay as far away from the Medicaid expansion as possible.  The federal government covers the costs for the first few years, but after that it becomes a huge unfunded mandate.  If states refuse to participate — and remember, 26 states sued to block implementation of the law — the federal government will have to expand the subsidy program to help lower-income families in the 200-400%-of-poverty-line group buy health insurance.  And that means that ObamaCare costs will explode:

How much worse? No one (perhaps outside of CBO) can say. But under past estimates, a 1 million-person reduction in the law’s reliance on Medicaid has meant an increase in net costs of about $50-$90 billion over ten years. With 26 states joined in a lawsuit to be released from this forced coverage expansion, the fiscal worsening could be substantial.

The side effects of the court ruling don’t end there. The health law also contains a “fail safe” provision requiring that total costs of the health exchange credits be limited to 0.504% of GDP per year after 2018. In previous estimates, CBO projected that subsidy percentages would “eventually” be cut by this provision to keep their total costs beneath this cap. But if health exchange participation is to be significantly higher than previously projected, then costs will be also much higher. This would force significant cuts in subsidies to low-income individuals starting in 2019; the text of the law is explicit that the cap will be enforced by reducing these subsidies. Lawmakers would thus have to choose between allowing these cuts to low-income individuals to go into effect, and waiving the existing fiscal constraints of the health care law.

So much for the promise of cost control, which was always a shell game, with the states playing the role of sucker.  ObamaCare backers could only claim cost control by shifting the costs for the Medicaid expansion to the states, while taking credit for more-or-less universal coverage.  That would mean either higher state taxes, reductions of other state services, or both.  By freeing the states from having to bear those costs, the bill will come due at the federal level instead, and Blahous thinks that will start sinking into the national consciousness soon:

The Supreme Court may have just set in motion of chain of events that could lead to the law’s being found as busting the budget, even under the highly favorable scoring methods used last time around.

I’m not sure that really does us any favors, but at least the reversal on the Medicaid expansion exposes the dishonesty of the “deficit-neutral” argument.

summing up what may come to pass...

The armies separated; and, it is said, Pyrrhus replied to one that gave him joy of his victory that one more such victory would utterly undo him. For he had lost a great part of the forces he brought with him, and almost all his particular friends and principal commanders; there were no others there to make recruits, and he found the confederates in Italy backward.....

—Plutarch, ^[1]

as an addendum , note the reactions from tea party leaders coming forth......

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/06/29/tea-party-leader-calls-for-insurrection-against-obamacare/

Numerous Republicans have expressed discontent with the Supreme Court’s upholding of the Affordable Care Act, but it took a Tea Party leader to imply that the decision could justify a new Civil War.

Mississippi Tea Party Chairman Roy Nicholson posted a statement at his group’s website on Fridayproclaiming that “the US Supreme Court has joined with the Executive and Legislative branches of the federal government in abandoning the Constitution, the Rule of Law, and with that ruling abandoned the People.”

“The all out oppression of all people has begun,” Nicholson continued. “In such cases submission is treason. Treason against the Constitution and the valid legitimate government of the nation to which we have pledged our allegiance for years. To resist by all means that are right in the eyes of God is not rebellion or insurrection, it is patriotic resistance to invasion. . . . May godly courageous leaders rise up in His wisdom and power to lead us in displacing the criminal invaders.”

Think Progress notes that although Nicholson’s language may be the most extreme, he is not alone in his apocalyptic reaction. A former Michigan Republican Party spokesperson, Matthew Davis, sent out an email on Thursday headed “Is Armed Rebellion Now Justified?” Even Breitbart.com’s Ben Shapiro took to Twitter to call the decision “the end of America as we know it. No exaggeration.”

A number of Republican governors, including Wisconsin’s Scott Walker, have announcedmore modestly that they intend to drag their heels about implementing the provisions of the act, in hopes the the election of a Republican president and Congress next fall could lead to its repeal. Walker’s intransigence has since prompted Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen to point out that the governor is obligated to obey the law as set forth.

*  *  * 

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/06/30/nh-tea-party-leader-wishes-colon-cancer-on-supreme-court-justices/

A New Hampshire Tea Party head has said that he hopes the majority justices in the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Affordable Care Act get “get colon cancer,” according to the Merrimack Patch. Mike Malzone, founder of the Merrimack, New Hampshire Tea Party joined the ranks of conservatives who are heaping opprobrium upon the heads of the Supreme Court, who upheld the bulk of the Affordable Care Act, President Barack Obama’s signature piece of domestic legislation as constitutional on Thursday.

Conservatives have exhibited a veritable rainbow of bad reactions to Thursday’s announcement. Former Fox News personality Glenn Beck has taken to selling Chief Justice John Roberts T-shirts that say “Coward” on his website ($30 plus shipping and handling). Matt Drudge and others have been blaming the ruling on Roberts’s epilepsy medication, although presumably his ruling on Citizens United was not affected by the same factors.

Merrimack, New Hampshire libertarian and Tea Party president Mike Malzone has gone further than others in his outrage, declaring in a Facebook post on the Merrimack Tea Party page, “I hope the (5 supremes) get colon cancer.”

When the post was met with outrage, Malzone backtracked a day later, while waxing lachrymose.

“I didn’t wish for anyone to die, but I said I do wish for them to feel our pain,” he said. “No one cares about me, they all make their promises and then go do what they goddamn feel.”

Malzone was a Merrimack city councilman who contemplated, but never followed through on making a run to unseat Rep. Frank Guinta (R-NH). Guinta signed a compromise bill to raise the nation’s debt ceiling in summer of 2011, a move that disappointed many Tea Partiers.

“It’s easy to talk the talk, but when you get there, you need to walk the walk,” he said at the time, “We’ve got nothing to lose except this country.”

With regards to wishing cancer on members of the nation’s highest court, Malzone told the Patch that he’s not a hateful person, and that “he loves serving his community and giving back and he’s the first to help a neighbor if they need it.”

To the Tea Party leader, the Supreme Court ruling was a personal breaking point.

With regards to wishing cancer on members of the nation’s highest court, Malzone told the Patch “I’m so fed up, I’ll do anything for anybody,” he said, “but they’re breaking me, they’re breaking me down.”