The great misnomer in the health care “reform” debate comes in references to “the health care bill” or “the health care plan.” There is no one health care bill, and no one health care plan. There are various versions of legislation, and much yet to be decided, and probably whole sections that haven’t been written. There is in no reasonable sense one coherent piece of legislation.
More importantly, though, even when there is, and even if it passes, we still won’t be that much clearer on what the law is. Randall Hoven explains:
Let’s just say that you use HR 3200 as a surrogate for Obama’s plan. It definitely has words—1,017 pages worth. Here is what Congressman John Conyers said about it.
What good is reading the bill if it’s a thousand pages and you don’t have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you read the bill?To appreciate this statement, you should know that Conyers has been in Congress since 1965; only John Dingell, the bill’s sponsor, has served longer in the House. You should also know that Conyers has a law degree. And now he is chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.
If a legislator of 44 years, himself a lawyer and in fact chair of the judiciary committee, along with two other lawyers cannot figure out what this bill means, what hope do you, or I, or any “neutral” fact checker have of figuring it out?
William Jacobson, a professor of law at Cornell Law School, chronicled his efforts to understand this “dense House bill” in the American Thinker. He used a “dartboard” method to randomly select pages to analyze, stopping after seven such pages. “I will try to explain what the section and provisions on the page mean. There is no guarantee that I will be able to do so, as some of these provisions may be incomprehensible.”
“Incomprehensible” to a law professor. Also incomprehensible to an experienced legislator and lawyer working with other lawyers. Yet we are supposed to believe, say, the Huffington Post, when it interprets Obama’s health care plan for us?
This is not just a health care issue; it is an issue with all modern legislation. That is, the legislation passed by Congress and signed by a President become ink blots for those left to interpret it in the future. The money to fund the legislation is quite real, but the meaning of the legislation is more like quantum mechanics: there is no “there”, just probability distributions.
In other words, whatever plan passes (if a plan passes at all) won’t be “law” in the sense that we usually think of; it will, rather, be only an approximation. The way things work these days, we might think we know what the law means, but we really don’t until the courts are done making up their collective mind how they want to rewrite—err, I mean interpret—it.
This isn’t the only issue that arises, either, when we stop to consider Obamacare not as a political issue but as a potential addition to the law code. There is in fact a more significant one: is it even constitutional? Retired attorney and constitutional law instructor Michael Connelly, having read all of HR 3200, doesn’t think so:
This legislation also provides for access by the appointees of the Obama administration of all of your personal healthcare information, your personal financial information, and the information of your employer, physician, and hospital. All of this is a direct violation of the specific provisions of the 4th Amendment to the Constitution protecting against unreasonable searches and seizures. You can also forget about the right to privacy. That will have been legislated into oblivion regardless of what the 3rd and 4th Amendments may provide.
If you decide not to have healthcare insurance or if you have private insurance that is not deemed “acceptable” to the “Health Choices Administrator” appointed by Obama there will be a tax imposed on you. It is called a “tax” instead of a fine because of the intent to avoid application of the due process clause of the 5th Amendment. However, that doesn’t work because since there is nothing in the law that allows you to contest or appeal the imposition of the tax, it is definitely depriving someone of property without the “due process of law.”
So, there are three of those pesky amendments that the far left hate so much out the original ten in the Bill of Rights that are effectively nullified by this law. It doesn’t stop there though. The 9th Amendment provides: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” The 10th Amendment states: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are preserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” Under the provisions of this piece of Congressional handiwork neither the people nor the states are going to have any rights or powers at all in many areas that once were theirs to control.
Much has been made, and quite properly, of the fact that the President wants to transfer 1/7 of the American economy to government control; but if Hoven and Connelly are right, that’s only the lesser danger. The greater danger is the corrupting effect HR3200 (or more likely, its descendant) would have on our laws and our political process. It’s a funny thing, when a Republican was in the White House, the Democrats raged against the “imperial Presidency”; but when it’s one of their own, they’re happy to go along with an absolutely unprecedented power grab by the Executive Branch. They must not figure they’re ever going to lose another election.
