Healthcare

As the Obama administration grapples with a host of crises, from the Gulf oil spill to the potential war on the Korean Peninsula to another potential war in the Middle East between Turkey and Israel to the credit crisis in Europe to the crisis on our Southern border, it will also have to deal with a crisis of its own making.

The healthcare law, the one the president signed into law, sucks. There is no other way to describe it. It sucks for those who are trying to find a job, it sucks for those who will have to pay more in premiums, it sucks for our deficit problems, it sucks for American competitiveness, it sucks for doctors, for patients, for, well, everybody, except maybe those who want the whole system to collapse so that we can impose government-run healthcare in its place.

A.B. Stoddard answers viewer questions about several special elections and considering two new political scandals as well as the administration's approach to implementing the healthcare reform bill.

There is no doubt that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) will have to be the comeback kid in his battle for reelection, but take a look at his most likely opponent, and don't count Reid out just yet.

Here is the healthcare plan of Reid's likely challenger: If you have major root-canal work that needed to be done and can't afford a dentist, she proposes you bring a chicken to barter with the dentist. If you need major breast cancer surgery and your insurer gives you the shaft, she suggests you offer the surgeon two cows and offer to paint his house for free, and pray he accepts the deal!

How's the "repeal" campaign — or "repeal and replace" campaign — going? Notice Republicans are all over the map about this misguided political strategy that promises something to angry healthcare reform opponents that the GOP can't deliver, even in the event of a Republican majority next year in each chamber of the U.S. Congress.

There has been a move by some House Republicans to try and regroup and focus on reform as a "job killer," an effective message, particularly in light of news the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is gearing up to try and mitigate the brunt of the law on business by trying to influence regulatory language and also by spending money to defeat Democrats who support it. Caterpillar and other businesses have announced that the law will hit their businesses and hiring capability hard by ending a deduction for companies that offered prescription drug coverage.

So, according to various news reports, House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) is going to “investigate” corporate America for reacting to the president’s new healthcare law by promising to take huge tax write-downs because of the expected negative impact of the law on their bottom lines.

This kind of reminds me of when O.J. Simpson decided to launch an “investigation” into who killed his wife.

Who killed the jobs, Mr. Waxman?

You did. And no matter how you try to shift the blame, you can’t escape that truth.

There is nothing in the Constitution that gives the government the right to tell people what goods and services they should purchase. Proponents of healthcare reform argue that the Commerce Clause conveys this right to the government. It states "[The Congress shall have power] to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States." 

With healthcare reform signed into law, A.B. Stoddard talks with the Pundits Blog's Chris Kofinis and John Feehery about how both parties will make the plan appealing or make repealing the bill their message.

Republicans can learn much from Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).  

When a bipartisan majority in the House and the Senate passed the prescription drug benefit in 2003 (after a painful three-and-a-half-hour vote on the conference report), Pelosi, who was then minority leader, promised immediately to repeal the legislation.  

This is what is so ignorant about the claim healthcare reform represents a government takeover of private enterprise and by extension the United States' way of life: It is actually the opposite.

What just passed was a victory for corporate America, in this case the insurance companies, and by extension the free market system. That is, if you mean free to continue their cheating, profiteering ways.

By rejecting any effective public option, we are still at the medical mercy of the greedy ones. They get to set almost all the rules and cleverly sidestep the few new ones a writhing Congress did pass. All they did was gloss over the reality that we're still at the mercy of bottom-line-feeding corporations.