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Human Events...
A Bad Day For
ObamaCare
Trillion-dollar
legislation disintegrates before our eyes.
by John Hayward
03/04/2011
Thursday was a tough day for ObamaCare. In the most spectacular
news, Judge Roger Vinson clarified his earlier ruling on Thursday,
explaining that he did indeed strike down the entire law as
unconstitutional, so it can’t be implemented against any of the 26
states that were party to the suit he ruled on. Vinson was
brutally dismissive of the Administration’s delaying tactics, and their
attempts to ignore his ruling, questioning their comprehension and
legal skills with dry wit. He gave the Administration seven days
to file its expected appeal.
Also on Thursday, the House passed a repeal of the 1099 reporting
provisions in ObamaCare. These new regulations were extremely
unpopular, as they would have burdened businesses with a vast amount of
new paperwork, by requiring them to submit 1099 tax forms for
relatively small purchases. It would have increased the number of
1099 forms filed each year by something like two thousand
percent. In the end, 70 percent of the House voted in favor of
repeal, including 238 Republicans and 76 Democrats.
It’s great to see bipartisan support for striking down a terrible
law. So… what was this bureaucratic nightmare doing in ObamaCare
to begin with? What does burying small business owners beneath an
avalanche of paperwork have to do with health care?
The point of the 1099 requirement, you see, was to harvest more tax
revenue. Too many small purchases were flying beneath the radar
of the IRS. Forcing business owners to fill out all those forms
was supposed to bring in about $17 billion from increased tax
payments. This was factored into the laughable pretense that
ObamaCare would be “budget neutral.”
“This 1099 provision hampers small businesses with red tape and is one
of the most out of touch ideas to come out of Washington in a long
time,” said Representative Gus Bilirakis (R-FL) after voting for
repeal. Yes indeed… and that ridiculous, out-of-touch idea was
dropped on the public like a bureaucratic hydrogen bomb because the
President and his flunkies needed to cook the books and pretend his
health-care scheme wouldn’t bankrupt the country. Obama slammed
the small businesses he supposedly loves with a requirement that even
76 Democrats couldn’t wait to shred into bird-cage lining because he
needed to fool the public into thinking his signature “legislative
achievement” would cost $17 billion less.
On the very same day, the House Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee
invited Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to swing
by and have a little chin wag about the budgetary implications of
ObamaCare. Representative John Shimkus (R-IL) noticed that the
rather large sum of $500 billion was dedicated to both sustaining
Medicare and funding ObamaCare. When he asked Sebelius which
destiny awaited those five hundred billion clams, she replied, “Both.”
That’s right, folks: another part of the ObamaCare fraud involved
double-counting half a trillion dollars. Shimkus said he was
“shocked” to learn this. “We knew the health care law’s actual
cost was much greater than originally told to the public,” he
declared. “And now, the truth is slowly coming out in
administration reports and testimony.” In other news, Shimkus was
equally “shocked” to discover there was gambling going on at Rick’s
Café.
Later at the same hearing, Representative Marsha Blackburn (R-TN),
thinking about the ObamaCare trillions that would soon surge into the
leaky pipes of Medicare and Medicaid, asked Sebelius to estimate the
amount of money lost to fraud in those programs. The HHS
Secretary replied, “We don’t know.” But ObamaCare is going to
make this woman one of the most powerful people on the planet, and
place a huge chunk of America’s gross domestic product at her
disposal. What could go wrong?
Chairman Joe Pitts (R-PA) wrapped up the Sebelius hearing with the
ominous observation that “The list of concerns with Obamacare is long
and growing.” It grew considerably in just one day.
Read it at Human Events
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