
How The New Healthcare Bill Will Control Your Big Mac Urges
by ilene - March 24th, 2010 3:11 am
How The New Healthcare Bill Will Control Your Big Mac Urges
Courtesy of Tom Lindmark at But Then What
Joe Weisenthal asks why we didn’t know that embedded in the new healthcare bill is a provision that requires fast food chains throughout the country to post the calorie count of their offerings. To Joe’s credit, he takes some of the blame for the less than stellar analysis that the press offered on this historic piece of legislation:
Granted, the bill was over 2000 pages, so who knows what else is buried in there. But perhaps if the media were a little more interested in content, rather than the daily whip count (guilty) then this could have come up for debate while it was still being voted on.
Really, there was plenty of time for a lot of news organizations with big staffs to parse this bill and point out the gotchas. Joe is on the mark when he says that we ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
Remember, that now the bureaucracy starts writing the rules. The bill was an outline and now someone has to interpret the meaning and intent and transform them into regulation. Will all those bloggers who insist that credit card disclosures be restricted to one page hold the government to the same standard? I doubt it.
I particularly like this from the NYT article that Joe cites:
“The broader issue is that this firmly establishes the government’s role in improving the nation’s nutrition,” he said.
Something the Founding Fathers forgot to include in the original documents. Glad we finally got it right.
Just the beginning folks. Enjoy the joy ride.
The Future After Health Care
by ilene - March 21st, 2010 7:43 pm
The Future After Health Care
By Megan McArdle, The Atlantic
Regardless of what you think about health care, tomorrow we wake up in a different political world.
Parties have passed legislation before that wasn’t broadly publicly supported. But the only substantial instances I can think of in America are budget bills and TARP--bills that the congressmen were basically forced to by emergencies in the markets.
P>One cannot help but admire Nancy Pelosi’s skill as a legislator. But it’s also pretty worrying. Are we now in a world where there is absolutely no recourse to the tyranny of the majority? Republicans and other opponents of the bill did their job on this; they persuaded the country that they didn’t want this bill. And that mattered basically not at all. If you don’t find that terrifying, let me suggest that you are a Democrat who has not yet contemplated what Republicans might do under similar circumstances. Farewell, social security! Au revoir, Medicare! The reason entitlements are hard to repeal is that the Republicans care about getting re-elected. If they didn’t--if they were willing to undertake this sort of suicide mission--then the legislative lock-in you’re counting on wouldn’t exist.
Oh, wait--suddenly it doesn’t seem quite fair that Republicans could just ignore the will of their constituents that way, does it? Yet I guarantee you that there are a lot of GOP members out there tonight who think that they should get at least one free "Screw You" vote to balance out what the Democrats just did.
Pelosi Tactic for Health-Care Vote Would Raise Legal Questions
by ilene - March 18th, 2010 2:53 pm
Pelosi Tactic for Health-Care Vote Would Raise Legal Questions
By Greg Stohr at Bloomberg
March 18 (Bloomberg) — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi may be creating new grounds for a court challenge to the proposed U.S. health-care overhaul as she considers using a mechanism that would avoid a vote on the full legislation.
Pelosi said this week she might use a parliamentary technique that would “deem” House members to have passed the Senate’s health-care plan by voting for a more politically palatable package of changes.
Some legal scholars question whether that approach can be squared with the Constitution and the Supreme Court’s 1998 declaration that the two houses of Congress must approve “precisely the same text” before a bill can become a law.
“Any process that does not result in the House taking of yays and nays on statutory text identical to what passed the Senate is constitutionally problematic,” said Jonathan Adler, a professor who runs the Center for Business Law & Regulation at Case Western Reserve University’s law school in Cleveland… more here.>>
See Also Op-Toon’s Review:
With Polls Overwhelmingly Against Them, Democrats Invoke "Louise Slaughter Rule"
