Nothing about global payments.

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Also see: Health care ruling fulfills Kennedy’s ‘cause’

Well, Ted once advocated for single payer, but the corporations eventually beat him down. And what is this?   

Obama on single payer health insurance

I used to be for that; however, I no longer trust this government to deliver good, decent, health care like those countries mentioned in "Sicko." Look what a horror show the VA has become.

"In awkward agreement, Mitt Romney backs President Obama’s contention on mandate" by Callum Borchers  |  Globe Correspondent, July 02, 2012

Mitt Romney and President Obama, typically at distant poles on the national health care law and on taxes, found themselves in awkward agreement Monday, sharing the position that “penalty” — not the politically riskier “tax” — is the proper word to describe money owed to the government by people who flout the law’s mandate for health insurance.  

Not really. Only awkward if you buy into the s*** political fooleys.

Romney’s spokesman, Eric Fehrnstrom, begrudgingly conceded his candidate’s belief that Obama and his team — and not Republicans — are on the right side of a dizzying debate over how to characterize what the Affordable Care Act officially calls a “shared responsibility payment.”

Romney “disagrees with the court’s ruling that the [federal] mandate was a tax,” Fehrnstrom said in an interview on MSNBC.

It is a twist in political logic. Yet, Romney needed to back Obama on this in order to guard one of his most vital conservative credentials: that he did not raise taxes as governor of Massachusetts, where he championed a state law that, like Obama’s federal legislation, included an individual insurance mandate. If Romney were to label mandate payments as taxes, he would effectively undercut his own antitax credibility.

But Romney’s accord with Obama has several downsides. It puts him at odds with GOP leaders and deep-pocketed super PACs whose continued support he needs. They have declared the levy against people who fail to obtain health insurance a massive tax.

It also makes Romney, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, open to charges of hypocrisy because he, too, has called the payment a tax at times.

And it, again, points out the difficulties Romney has in distinguishing his state health care law from Obama’s overhaul.  

I'm feeling overtaxed at this point.

In a rare moment when he could not draw a sharp contrast between the two candidates, Fehrnstrom instead blasted the president’s vacillation, saying Obama changed his tune when the time came to defend the law before the Supreme Court.

“In order to get it past the Congress, he insisted publicly and to the members of Congress that the mandate was not a tax,” Fehrnstrom said.

“After it passed the Congress, he sent his solicitor general up to court to argue that it was a tax. Now he is back to arguing that it’s not a tax. So he’s all over the map,’’ he said

Since the Supreme Court upheld the health care law in a 5-4 decision last Thursday, on the premise that the payment is a tax, the Obama administration has struggled to reconcile its winning argument with the president’s repeated insistence that the payment is not a tax. Ironically, it was Chief Justice John Roberts’s disagreement with Obama on that point that saved the president’s signature domestic achievement from invalidation.

Top Republicans have claimed Roberts’s reasoning as a small victory: Obama won, they say, but only by presenting a case that contradicted his public rhetoric....  

I think the public is numb and jaded to the lies now.

In an op-ed published in USA Today in 2009, before the national health care law passed, Romney used the word “tax” when describing what federal lawmakers could learn from Massachusetts.

“Using tax penalties, as we did, or tax credits, as others have proposed, encourages ‘free riders’ to take responsibility for themselves rather than pass their medical costs on to others,” Romney wrote.

And on the day of the Supreme Court’s health care ruling, Romney at a news conference in Washington repeated his familiar assertion that “Obamacare raises taxes on the American people by approximately $500 billion.”

That tax estimate is a favorite of conservative super PACs and has featured prominently in some ads. The estimate comes from a report by the Heritage Foundation, which counted mandate payments as one of the health care law’s largest tax increases.

To the extent that Romney discusses his Massachusetts record, it is critical for him that the shared-responsibility payment be considered a penalty. Romney points to his early-term closure of a $2 billion budget gap, saying proudly that he balanced the state budget with no tax hikes.

In recent weeks, the Obama campaign has fiercely attacked Romney’s no-tax claim. One ad airing in swing states points to a long list of fees that Romney raised.

“Fees are an increase out of the pockets of every Massachusetts resident. That’s a tax,” said Mayor Rob Dolan of Melrose, a Democrat, in a separate Obama campaign video. “Let’s call it what it is.”

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Related: Romney now says health care fee is a tax

Whatever.

"Poll finds many want health law stalemate put in past

WASHINGTON — Most Americans now say they would like to see the critics of the health care law stop trying to block its implementation and move onto other national problems, a poll released by the Kaiser Family Foundation on Monday found following last week’s Supreme Court decision upholding the overhaul.  

Yes, like the EMPIRE and ECONOMY!

As was the case before the historic decision, public opinion on the law to expand health care to tens of millions of Americans remains about evenly split — with 47 percent in favor of the court’s ruling and 43 percent against. Not surprisingly, the split occurs along partisan lines. Eighty-three percent of Democrats say the law’s opponents need to move on to other issues, as do 51 percent of independents and 26 percent of Republicans — overall, 56 percent of Americans feel this way.

However, 69 percent of Republicans say they want to see efforts to stop the law continue, a sentiment shared by 41 percent of independents and 14 percent of Democrats.

Most voters, no matter their political affiliation, say the ruling will not affect whether they vote in November.

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Let's give you a little look at the future:

"Thousands in Massachusetts still forgo health care insurance, pay penalty" by Chelsea Conaboy  |  Globe Staff, July 06, 2012

Francisco Machado of Lowell had long gone without health insurance. Strong and healthy, he preferred to save the money or send it to family in Brazil, until pain and buzzing in his ear sent him to the emergency room. The $600 bill persuaded him to enroll in a plan offered by his employer, a cleaning company.

Having coverage meant that the 45-year-old would no longer be hit with a state fine — he paid $406 in 2011 — for being uninsured. But this spring Machado moved to a part-time job and became uninsured again.

Massachusetts had the nation’s highest rate of health coverage even before passage of a pioneering 2006 law requiring most residents to have insurance. Yet tens of thousands of people like Machado go uncovered each year and pay a fine. Starting in 2014, when much of the national ­Affordable Care Act kicks in, millions of other Americans could face a similar fine, putting Massachusetts in the spotlight as a possible indicator of what lies ahead for the country.

The federal plan mimics the state’s law in its basic approach to expanding coverage: Make health insurance more affordable through new subsidies and a state-run insurance market. Then compel most people to buy plans and penalize those who do not.

Policy advocates say the Massachusetts law lays out a finan­cial and moral incentive to get coverage. But it is not clear that this approach can be effectively replicated nationally.

“Massachusetts is culturally more open to that kind of a bargain,” said Alan Weil, executive director of the National Academy for State Health Policy.

Many more of the uninsured in other states could decide to pay the penalty than have in Massachusetts, where the vast majority of residents already had insurance before passage of the state law.

People may be less persuaded to purchase a plan in states where politicians and others deride the federal law and ­encourage people not to comply, Weil said....

Much has been made about what to call the fine imposed by the national law. The Obama administration repeatedly has said it is not a tax. But the ­Supreme Court upheld the law on the basis that it is a tax.

A spokesman for presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who claims as a hallmark of his time as governor of Massachusetts that he did not raise taxes, said after the decision that Romney disagreed with the court’s tax label. But Romney reversed course Wednesday and said the court got it right: The federal fine is a tax, while the state’s is not.

Whatever it is called, the fine for not having insurance in Massachusetts is collected by the Department of Revenue through tax filings. Nationally, the Internal Revenue Service will handle collection through tax filings.... 

It's a tax.

In Massachusetts, the penalty is set at up to half the cost of the lowest-priced plan available through the state-run insurance market. 

Yeah, that's another difference: Massachusetts has a public option.

It kicks in when someone has been uninsured for more than three consecutive months. Annual penalties for 2012 range from $228 to $1,260, depending on income and age.

Nationally, the penalty is ­determined through a more complicated formula. It will start in 2014 at $95 or 1 percent of an individual’s income that year, whichever is higher, rising in the following years but with certain caps. In 2016, the tax penalty will be the higher of $695 or 2.5 percent of a person’s income.

That means federal penalties will be larger than the state’s for many people. The state has not determined what will happen to its penalty structure under the federal law, said Richard Powers, spokesman for the Massachusetts Health Connector Authority, one of the agencies overseeing compliance with the Affordable Care Act. The Legislature may decide the issue, he said.

For many across the country, paying the penalty may be less expensive than buying coverage. But the penalty is money lost, while people ostensibly get something in return for buying coverage.

Plus, people in this “God-fearing, tax-paying society” are prone to obey the law, said ­Amitabh Chandra, a health economist at the Harvard School of Public Health.

“It’s really the moral suasion of the mandate and the fear of the tax that gets people to comply with it,” Chandra said.... 

I'm sorry, but it smells like fascist persuasion to me.

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Speaking of persuasions:

"Roberts can reclaim conservative bona fides; Court to review laws on voting, affirmative action" by Greg Stohr  |  Bloomberg News, July 06, 2012

WASHINGTON — Chief Justice John Roberts, whose majority opinion upheld President Obama’s health care law, won’t have to wait long for a chance to reassert his conservative credentials.

In the nine-month term that starts in October, the Supreme Court will consider rolling back university affirmative action and may take up same-sex marriage and the Voting Rights Act, the 1965 law that protects minorities at the polling place.

On the race issues in particular, Roberts is a good bet to rejoin the wing of the court that has been his ideological home since he became chief justice in 2005. He has taken a leading role on such questions, pushing for a color-blind Constitution.  

From what I've read they ain't talking to him!

‘‘With respect to race, I don’t think Chief Justice Roberts will have the same hesitation to advance a conservative agenda,’’ said Kermit Roosevelt, a constitutional law professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School in Philadelphia.

Opponents of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act criticized Roberts for joining with the court’s four Democratic appointees to uphold the health care law. Roberts, 57, was accused of ‘‘arrogance’’ by columnist Michael Gerson and ‘‘judicial betrayal’’ by economist Thomas Sowell. The Wall Street Journal said in an editorial that he ‘‘behaved like a politician.’’  

That's why they are so unpopular.

What bothers me the most is pre$$ure can be brought to bear on supposedly untouchable judges.

The criticism escalated after CBS News, citing two unnamed people, said Roberts originally voted to strike down the part of the law that requires Americans to get insurance — an idea once championed by the Heritage Foundation and leading Republicans — then switched sides during the court’s internal deliberations.  

So the AmeriKan media, on a Slow Saturday nearly two weeks later, confirm what bloggers were saying before the decision was even announced.

That led to speculation among some Republicans that the chief justice had sought to first protect the court from charges of flagrant partisanship instead of deciding on the constitutionality of the law, which is intended to expand coverage to at least 30 million uninsured Americans.

Some commentators praised Roberts for parts of his opinion that may limit Congress’s power in the future.

Even so, the ruling has left some legal conservatives questioning Roberts’s reliability on other issues. The decision came three days after he joined a 5-3 majority to strike down most of an Arizona law designed to crack down on illegal immigrants.

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