Feds want to force O-B-E-S-E Americans into Counseling

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If you’re a US citizen, there’s a one-in-three chance that you’re also obese. Now after failed attempt after failed attempt at slimming down citizens, a federal panel is pushing to force overweight Americans into counseling.

The US Preventative Services Task Force (USPSTF) introduced their latest plans to help push down the obesity rate in America this week, and their newest effort calls for more than just urging people to exercise. The federal panel of medical experts is asking primary care physicians to put obese Americans into intensive counseling programs in order to combat the epidemic.

“Obesity is a very serious health problem in the United States, and in the past 30 years, obesity rates have dramatically increased,” Task Force member Dr. David Grossman, a pediatrician at Group Health Research Institute in Seattle, says in the USPSTF press release put out on Monday. “The good news is that is that even modest weight loss can reduce health risks for people who are obese. And, there is strong scientific evidence that shows that intensive programs with 12 to 26 sessions in the first year can help people manage their weight.”

While experts have long argued for urging obese Americans into specialized programs to push healthier habits on them, the USPSTF is asking physicians to place any patient with a body mass index (BMI) of 30 or more into counseling. Currently more than one-third of adults meet that criterion, with non-Hispanic black adults more than 44 percent likely to be considered obese.

According to a report compiled earlier this year by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 42 percent of the US population will be obese within the next two decades. At the time of that publishing, the Institute of Medicine’s Shiriki Kumanyika told Reuters that “People have heard the advice to eat less and move more for years, and during that time a large number of Americans have become obese.” Advice, many argue, hasn’t been enough, though.

Read more HERE.

My Verdict: Obamacare UNCONSTITUTIONAL!

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Today’s shocking Obamacare decision caused me to reminisce about my time on the federal bench ten years ago.  When I was a United States Magistrate Judge, I took the same oath of office that every federal judge and justice in the country swears to.  I swore to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same. . .”

That oath is anchored to the phrase, “Constitution of the United States.”  If the Constitution changes over time by an activist majority of the Supreme Court, then my oath was essentially an oath to the Supreme Court, not to the Constitution.  Of course, that’s not what the Founders intended.  The Supreme Court was never designed to be the pinnacle of federal power.

But that’s where we are today.  Chief Justice John Roberts, appointed by President George W. Bush in 2005, wrote the 5-4 opinion saving Obamacare and causing President Obama to declare “victory” and pundits to say that his administration has been “vindicated.”  Incredibly, Roberts determined that the government, under its taxing power, has the right to “impos[e] a tax on those who do not buy [a] product,” in this case, health insurance.*

From the bench today, Justice Kennedy issued a scathing denuciation of Robert’s reconstruction of Obamacare:  “The majority rewrites the statute Congress wrote … What Congress called a penalty, the court calls a tax.”  He concluded, “The law is “invalid in its entirety.”

The chief justice’s rescue of the individual mandate is a massive expansion of federal power, now permitting the federal government to regulate, by taxation, its citizens’ “failure to act” or passivity.  I challenge you to go back to the first 150 years of U.S. jurisprudence and find any Supreme Court opinion that would suggest such a construction of Congress’s power to tax and spend under Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution.

In his powerful dissent, Justice Scalia agreed that this power grab was unconstitutional:

What is absolutely clear, affirmed by the text of the 1789 Constitution, by the Tenth Amendment ratified in 1791, and by innumerable cases of ours in the 220 years since, is that there are structural limits upon federal power—upon what it can prescribe with respect to private conduct, and upon what it can impose upon the sovereign States.

And then the zinger:

Whatever may be the conceptual limits upon the Commerce Clause and upon the power to tax and spend, they cannot be such as will enable the Federal  Government to regulate all private conduct and to compel the States to function as administrators of federal programs.

In other words, when the federal government is allowed to tax non-activity, what powers are left to the states and the people under the Ninth and Tenth Amendments?  Not much.

But even more basically, Roberts and the four more liberal members of the bench are all starting with the assumption that the federal government can tax and spend for things outside of its enumerated powers, misconstruing the “general welfare” clause of the Constitution.  James Madison apparently disagreed, suggesting the clause “amounted to no more than a reference to the other powers enumerated in the subsequent clauses of the same section.”

Not anchoring the general welfare clause to the enumerated powers enables virtually unlimited federal spending/taxation power and is completely contrary to the whole nature of the Constitution: a document designed to restrain the federal government, retaining all unspecified powers to the states and people.

The Roberts decision reflects that any faith in the Supreme Court to solve our nation’s problems is misplaced.  We must engage like never before.  Reject the LSM, rely on solid Internet news sources, support a Tea Party congressional candidate, engage in vote integrity efforts, and reflect upon the moral crisis we’re facing.   A massive victory in November will put today’s defeat in the proper dustbin of history.  But unless we rapidly correct the downward spiral, there won’t be much left for future generations.

***

Author’s note:  To his credit, Chief Justice Roberts did reject the Commerce Clause as constitutional authority for Obamacare.

PHOTO CREDIT: DonkeyHokey

VIDEO: ObamaCare and the Road to Serfdom

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Via AAPSOnline and John Stossel’s Fox News program:

Orthopedic Surgeon and AAPS President Lee Hieb, MD explains to John Stossel why restoring a free market in U.S. medical care will increase access to care, lower costs and improve quality. Government involvement in health care hurts patients.

Will the Constitution make it past 2012 ?

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Today was the final day for arguments at the Supreme Court for Obamacare, laughably officially known as the “Affordable Care Act”. But it is the signature strike of Obama and the left at the Constitution, which will literally be a historical document with little contemporary influence if Obamacare is ruled Constitutional.

As Bob Thompson writes at The American Thinker,

this case will determine whether there are any meaningful limitations on Congress’ power to mandate an individual’s life choices.

This should give all of us pause for concern, as states’ power will be forever subsumed under the “statist” power that the federal government will wield if Obamacare is ruled Constitutional. More from Thompson:

When Congress’ power under Article I, Section 8 — power to “regulate commerce … among the several states” (Clause 3) — has been paired with Congress’ power “to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into executing the foregoing powers” (Clause 18), the result has been the virtually unlimited power of Congress to dominate the everyday behavior of the American people, in direct conflict with the plain language of the Tenth Amendment reserving such powers to the state and to the people.

A linchpin of the government’s case is a 1942 ruling where interstate commerce was somehow invoked for a farmer who grew wheat for his family and livestock, yet the wheat never left the state:

the government relies heavily on the properly ridiculed 1942 Supreme Court case of Wickard v. Filburn, which upheld a bureaucratic decision dictating the amount of wheat that a farmer grew for his family and his livestock, even though the wheat never traveled in or had any connection to interstate commerce.

Thompson is optimistic that the court will actually look to the Constitution to determine its decision, rather than the bending road of following precedent in case upon case:
In the 2008 case of District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court re-examined the “prevailing wisdom” that the Second Amendment protected only a “collective right” which protected state Guards, and not a right that individuals enjoyed.  After an extensive textual and contextual analysis, the Court reached a decision consistent with the Founders, even if inconsistent with prior Court decisions.  In the Antoine Jonescase in January 2012, the Supreme Court re-examined over 40 years of Supreme Court jurisprudence that transformed the Fourth Amendment’s “right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects” into a judicially invented right to privacy, and returned the Fourth Amendment to its property foundation.  These were brave, principled decisions.
This has been a fascinating case from a legal and constitutional perspective, and the focus on the issues will only help conservatives, because it highlights the issues and educates a huge number of average Americans on what is happening to our great nation.

Reason.tv (via HotAir.com with excellent commentary by Ed Morrissey) lists three disturbing results if Obamacare is upheld:
a. it represents the end of limited government
b. the price tag is ballooning ($1.8 TRILLION), almost double the original projection
c. it’s not going to make us healthier

As conservatives, we will wait patiently but nervously for the Courts decision, but I will also pray for the Court  to clearly see the issues and rule appropriately.

Thompson’s entire article is worth your time

 

Obamacare heads to the Supreme Court – Your Freedoms at Issue

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Obamacare heads to the Supreme Court next week, for an unprecedented five+ hours beginning on Monday and finishing on Wednesday. This is a defining moment in our nation. Keep in mind that we are not at a fork in the road – we’ve long gone past the fork down the road to Big Government. Make no mistake, it’s not about “bending the cost curve”, or “insuring the uninsured”, or even helping women. It’s all about power, and it always has been.

The net effect of this abomination of a bill will be to reduce the quality and availability of health care in the US while increasing the costs – everything they said it would not do. Margaret Thatcher said that she could never do what her counterpart Ronald Reagan did in the US, all because of the albatross of socialized health care in the UK.

Most likely the justices have already made up their mind, but it’s important to hear what the lawyers have to say. Should the court overturn the individual mandate, Obamacare is essentially dead, though they will no doubt keep it on life support until either it dies or Obama finishes his first and only term.

The individual mandate, if upheld, will open a flood-gate of “mandates” that will continue to erode your liberties, and it will take us so far down the road of Big Government that it might be difficult or impossible to turn back. But turn back we must.

The Republican Study Committee provides 5 graphs to show how bad this law is – and will be, if upheld.

Obamacare in pictures paints a distressing future, mostly with the spotlight on the negative effects, along with the blatant lies promulgated by the President and his minions in government and the press. You should review the others at the above link.

 

As John Sparks says at The Center for Vision & Values,

If the Court upholds the individual mandate, it would effectively mark an end to constitutional restraint on Congress and usher in a new era of uncertainty, one whereby the federal government would be controlled only by the self-restraint of elected legislators. The Court, as it were, will have let the constitutional reins fall loose and the federal stallion will gallop forward at an ever faster and more frightening pace.

We all need health care, and we all need affordable health care, at all stages of life. Like most things, our health is our own responsibility. But when unexpected circumstances happen as they always do, then a robust health-care system will have the resources to help those who find themselves with a medical emergency. Our nation has the greatest health-care system on earth – let’s not forget that. I pray that the Supreme Court will strike down this individual mandate, and that the next Congress releases to the deep sea this ball of chain that’s been attached to the US health care system.

Also, hear what Star Parker has to say about Obamacare.