Who would have standing in such a suit?
Why? The Antideficiency Act is longstanding law, which also involves criminal penalties for officers of the US Government who spend funds that Congress hasn’t approved. For the Supreme Court, it would probably be a straightforward question of whether Executive Branch employees are allowed to violate the Antideficiency Act, which is a total no-brainer. Of course they aren’t.
By ‘more inclusive’ you mean a bill that would provide adequate health care to more people? And be less expensive than Obamacare?
I can imagine a single-payer, non-employer sponsored system that would do that (like you would find in backwards countries like Canada, the UK or Sweden). But I’m unaware of any such bill here in the US that already exists and is being ignored in favor of Obamacare. Please share.
LOL!! :p:p:p
Everybody wants the ACA! Even you, because one day you will be old and sick, or one of your relatives will be, or your friends, and they will look at the mounting pile of bills that they cannot pay out of pocket and thank Obama that the ACA exists and they can live instead of suffer and die! Or you will realize that it was originally a Heritage Foundation plan created to make health care affordable to everyone, and you will realize that you’ve supported it all along!
Pretty much every single person in America wants the ACA. They may not want the name or the political implications, but if you ask every single person whether they wish that their medical care can be covered by a cheap insurance plan, then 99% of the people will say they support that!
If cuts to Medicare reimbursement rates are the worst thing you can find in Obamacare, have a look at the Republican budget Eric Cantor crafted. Tada! Same cuts to Medicare reimbursement, without any of the benefits of Obamacare.
Actually, I would opine that most people don’t want insurance at all. They’d prefer the cheaper and simpler method of single payer.
Most don’t want ACA because of the onerous requirement of paying corporations to get bigger while they do everything they can to get every last dime out of both me and my doctor.
We basically just guaranteed something like $5,000 a year times 310 million people to the insurance companies (less for poors, more for richies, about even with a corporation). That’s 1.5 trillion dollars. Per year. Guaranteed.
And what are insurance companies doing with this new found income guarantee? They are, of course, making it more expensive for the consumer! Oh, wait. That’s bad.
Now, it’s true. If you ask people on the street if they’d like healthcare, they will say yes. Some would even say “yes, I want insurance” because they equate the two. But I’m pretty sure very few want to be roped into $5,000 a year in payments to an insurance company by federal mandate.
And just because the Heritage Center came up with this plan that obviously benefits business doesn’t make it good. Just because something comes across a Presidential desk marked “Health Carez!” does not make it good, either. When it was rammed through Congress, almost the entire media and a crapload of the populace was up at arms about it. And then it was passed.
I have never heard more anger and contempt expressed about our government and I frequent internet forums that are both wildly conservative and wildly liberal.
This is a bad law. One that never should have been enacted. All it did was FORCE citizens to participate in the broken healthcare system that existed prior to it’s passing with a few new requirements on insurers that were nice to have, but could have happened without attempting to sit government behind, in front, and on top of the insurance industry all at the same time.
I was using that as an example of how bad this was going to hurt us. And if you are trying to convince me that Rebulicans suck, don’t bother. I dislike both parties with equal fervor in our two party system.
I wish I could pay only $5,000/year for HC Insurance. Right now I pay almost double that.
Not sure I want to be in one of the exchanges, but I’ll have to check them out.
I’m not a big fan of this bill, but I think at this point we should let it go and see how it plays out. You can bitch and moan all you want, but it isn’t going away. I do trust Obama that if something looks wildly wrong and is not working that he’ll at least try and make adjustments.
As I recall, the original debate went something along the lines of:
Dem: Universal coverage, single payer.
GOP: What kind of commie crap is that this is America, where we are all FREE to pay BIG BUSINESS all it demands for the BEST HEALTHCARE in the WORLD!
Dem: Universal coverage, single payer.
GOP: OK, we’ll cover sick kids
Dem: Universal coverage, single payer.
GOP: Federal Government (the evil) PAYS BIG BUSINESS all it wants to issue private policies!
Dems: OK
GOP: What kind of Commie crap is that!
(passes anyway)
That brings us to current 42+ votes to kill it, while ignoring little things like jobs, infrastructure, BUDGET.
As long as they understand what’s important.
So…should I let it go or bitch and moan all I want? Your post makes both recommendations. 
The problem with “letting it go” is that if we can nip it in the bud, now, we can actually pass reasonable health care within the next 5 years or so. If we just let it run it’s course, we will spend the next 50 years arguing about it and tweaking it to suit the needs of whomever gets a majority in congress. It’s already ripe for political perversion, let’s not just live with the Congress making itself richer than it already is while we have to be burned with additional bull crap each step of the way.
5,000 a year was my rectal average. The poor get it ostensibly free and the richer you are the more you have to pay. I personally pay 4,800 a year. If my employer stopped HSA contribution matching, that would go to roughly $7,800 a year.
This is so wrong it’s actually kind of breathtaking. If the ACA gets repealed, we will not see ANY public healthcare access program for at least a generation, if we’re lucky. The more likely interval is two or more.
And I’m one who wanted single-payer, Medicare-for-all. There were too many alleged Democrats in the Senate who were in too many insurance industry pockets for that to happen.
Honestly, I think if we could table a single payer shortly after repeal, we could get enough political pressure to pass it.
But the problem is that we have our historical system and then we have the ACA which takes our system, requires vast transfers of wealth to businesses, makes a few concessions for the patients, and then adds layer upon layer upon layer of bureaucratic nonsense. NO reform would have been better than throwing all of our money at the insurance industry and going “SAVE US PLEASE! Okay, we’ll be over here. Let us know how saving us goes.”
No, that’s not what I said. I said you “could” bitch and moan, not that you “should” do so. 
It can’t be nipped in the bud.
Hah! Obamacare passed when the Senate had more Democrats than now. Now, nothing could get through.
Most of the mandates haven’t kicked in, yet (and a couple others that should have kicked in have been deferred)
Additionally, the insurance industry hasn’t yet completed porting to all of the requirements that are coming in 2014.
Right now is pretty much the only window we have to nip it in the bud.
It will not be nipped. The Republicans have voted FORTY TIMES to repeal it and it’s still in force. There will be no nipping.
Let me explain two things called “ideal” and “possible”. “Ideal” was single-payer, Medicare-for-all. “Possible” (barely) was the ACA that we got. Even the more single-payerish but still free-marketish public option could not pass with Democratic majorities in both houses. We were NOT getting single-payer. We ARE NOT GOING to get single-payer, unless there’s a sea change in who the American people want to send to DC. All the nipping and bitching in the world isn’t going to get the USA an NHS-style single-payer system. Period.
NHS? I’d MUCH rather something akin to Health Canada. But that’s just me.
But, we should just roll over and let the elected officials do what they wish?
Orrrrr how about we participate in our democracy and let them know we are not a happy population. All those times that Republicans voted for no reason was when people were happy with the status quo. Now that mandates are starting to hit people (Especially the cost increases from the insurance for ACA as they sign up for next year’s services) it’ll ring truer that maybe this wasn’t the best law to pass.
The more people are up and arms about it, the closer we get to getting rid of a bad law. Just like anti-sodomy laws and laws that outlaw sneezing on the streets to avoid startling the horses, we need to get rid of it. (Sadly
I prefer optimism and hope. Sorry, sir.
The ACA is THE BEGINNING. SS didn’t look an awful lot like it does now when it was first instituted. Medicare likewise. Government programs evolve as needs which were not anticipated and events that require adjustment arise. The ACA of 20 years from now probably won’t be exactly the same as the ACA today. But in 20 years, the idea of universal access to healthcare will be as accepted by the majority culture as SS and Medicare are now.
This is the hand we’ve been dealt (and dealt ourselves, really, since we elected the people in Congress throughout the rollout of the ACA). We need to play that hand. We don’t really get to mulligan the whole thing and deal out another. It’s going to be politically impossible for the foreseeable future.
I agree. The 2012 election was just between Obamacare’s very eponym and the man who’d gleefully already adopted it in Massachusetts. That’s a choice? :smack: Both of these men are
What a shame that America is now so Marxist that both candidates came from the lunatic left-wing fringe. Both Obama and Romney are controlled by reptilian Illuminati overlords – do you need a cite for that?
America has fine political scholars that I’m sure many intelligent voters like DJ Motorbike could vote for happily – Michelle Bachmann and Alex Jones just to name two. Did the Rothschild-controlled media let them run for Presdient? Of course not!
By this point, Lenin and Stalin would be recoiling from U.S.A. in horror – we’ve gone too communist even for them.
Given the the Supreme Court ruled that Nixon couldn’t refuse to spend money appropriated, I doubt they’d ever rule the opposite, that a President could spend money not appropriated.
Hey, you know how the old saying goes: Forty-Three times is a charm!
…Huh?