More Legal Experts Say ObamaCare Is Unconstitutional

More legal experts are questioning the constitutionality of ObamaCare.  In today’s Washington Post, two former Justice Department lawyers, David Rivkin and Lee Casey, argue that a central provision of Obama’s health-care plan — the “individual mandate” — is unconstitutional, and beyond Congress’s powers under the Constitution, such as its powers to tax and regulate interstate commerce.

Earlier, other legal experts and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights criticized major provisions of ObamaCare, such as its affirmative-action and racial preferences, and its intrusive regulation of medicine, as being unconstitutional.

The President yesterday repeated his false claim that ObamaCare will not cover illegal aliens.  But it effectively will cover illegal aliens, if they want coverage, as many commentators have explained, including think-tanks like the Heritage Foundation, legal experts, publications like National Review, and syndicated columnists.  (Most other countries do not provide national health insurance for illegal immigrants.)

Obama’s credibility is further undermined by his long line of broken promises, such as his pledge to enact a “net spending cut,” which he broke through budgets that will explode the national debt through $9.3 trillion in massively increased deficit spending. 

(Countries that refused to adopt stimulus packages modeled on Obama’s costly $800 billion stimulus package have fared better than those that imitated Obama.  And the biggest-spending countries have suffered worse in the recession.  The stimulus package was a costly failure that ended welfare reform and substituted welfare for productive investment).

Obama’s own advisors have called into question his claims about how ObamaCare will supposedly let you keep your health coverage while cutting costs.

“ObamaCare is all about rationing,” says one of Obama’s own advisers, Martin Feldstein. Feldstein earlier noted that Obama’s health-care plan would harm people with insurance, and massively raise taxes.

ObamaCare is penny-wise and pound-foolish, cutting reimbursement for crucial things like anesthesia to ridiculously low levels (and thus aggravating a shortage of anesthesiologists and doctors), even while increasing spending on wasteful frills.

Fact-checkers say Obama is lying about health-care.  Obama often contradicts himself.  In the very same speech, Obama claimed that Medicare is “unsustainable” and “running out of money,” then contradicted himself by claiming that “Medicare is a government program that works really well,” making it a model for national health-care.

Feldstein, a Harvard professor, warns that “For the 85 percent of Americans who already have health insurance, the Obama health plan is bad news. It means higher taxes, less health care and no protection if they lose their current insurance because of unemployment or early retirement.” Obama’s plan would “cost more than $1 trillion,” and raise the top federal “income-tax rate from 35 percent today to more than 45 percent,” he notes.

As a CNN commentary earlier noted, Obama’s plan would take away “5 freedoms,” including the freedom to choose your doctors, the freedom to choose what’s in your plan, the freedom to keep your existing plan, the freedom to be rewarded for healthy living, and the freedom to choose high-deductible coverage.

Earlier, we described how Obama’s health-care plan would destroy many affordable health-care plans, raise taxes on the middle class, and break Obama’s campaign promises, as well as his recent pledge that “if you like your health care plan, you can keep it.”