This editorial will appear in Friday’s print edition.

Well, is it or isn’t it?

The question of whether the federal health care insurance mandate is constitutional is all but certain now to go where everyone knew it would eventually – the U.S. Supreme Court.

The mandate for all Americans with taxable income to purchase at least minimal health insurance by 2014 is part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act approved by Congress in 2010. It has been challenged by 26 Republican attorneys general – including Washington’s Rob McKenna.

Two federal appeals court panels have ruled on it: The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals panel (Florida, Georgia and Alabama) struck down the mandate as unconstitutional but upheld the rest of the law while the 6th Circuit panel based in Ohio upheld the law and the mandate. With two federal courts ruling in opposite ways, the mandate was going to get to the Supreme Court eventually. But separate requests from both the Obama administration and the AGs have speeded up the process. Read more »

This editorial will appear in Friday’s print edition.

Contraceptive use in the United States is an issue fraught with irony.

The women who can least afford to get pregnant – including the young, the poor and the uneducated – often have the least access to effective birth control. They may not have health insurance, but even if they do, it might be subject to a deductible or co-pay. So they’re more likely to use cheaper, less effective methods like condoms – or nothing at all.

Little wonder the United States has the highest rate of unintended pregnancies in the industrialized world. Almost half of all U.S. pregnancies are unplanned, and about 40 percent of those end in abortion. Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program alone spend more than $12 billion a year providing maternity care for low-income women and care for infants in the first year of life. Read more »

This editorial will appear in Sunday’s print edition.

Legally, the soft underbelly of “Obamacare” is its mandate that most Americans carry health care insurance. It got some much-needed armor last week from a federal appeals court.

Conservatives – who are otherwise big on personal responsibility – have locked onto that requirement as the most vulnerable target in the Affordable Care Act, which promises to extend health coverage to millions of uninsured Americans in 2014.

Trial judges aren’t supposed to decide cases on ideological grounds, but you’d never know it from the lawsuits against the individual mandate. According to Politico, the court decisions have split cleanly along partisan lines: Judges appointed by Republicans have all ruled against the law, and judges appointed by Democrats have all ruled for it.

That curious string of coincidences finally broke Wednesday when a respected conservative jurist – and former clerk to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia – upheld the constitutionality of the maligned policy. Jeffrey Sutton of the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals provided the pivotal vote in favor of the mandate in its first test at the appeals level.
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This editorial will appear in tomorrow’s print edition.

OK, Republicans, let’s see your health care bill.

The new GOP majority in the U.S. House of Representatives is poised today to repeal last year’s Affordable Care Act (or “Obamacare” – take your pick). It’s an empty gesture as far as lawmaking goes: The Democratic majority in the Senate won’t second the motion, and President Obama certainly wouldn’t sign a repeal of his signature legislation.

But Republicans hope to follow up with piecemeal attacks on the 2010 package that might eventually gut it. The fattest target is the law’s requirement that most Americans carry health insurance. It’s unpopular; it’s also a way to prevent freeloaders from buying insurance after they get sick, then dropping it as soon as they’ve had their babies or their hip replacements.

The Affordable Care Act promises to do the job of extending medical coverage to most Americans, but it is not a work of art. A repeal would be fantastic – if the law were being replaced with something better. The problem is, congressional Republicans aren’t offering a better bill. In fact, they’re offering no bill at all.
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This editorial will appear in tomorrow’s print edition.

President Obama appears to have slipped “death panels” back into federal health care law via executive authority. Good for him.

To paraphrase Mark Twain, there are lies, damn lies and the death panel scare. The ever-inventive Sarah Palin came up with the term last year in a drive to whip up fears about health care reform.

Section 1233 of the health care bill, she said, would allow “Obama’s death panel” to judge whether “my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome” are “worthy of health care.”

Others took up the cry – Section 1233 made a convenient target – and they were so successful that Congress eventually dropped the measure from the reform bill.

Back to the world of facts. Only a certified paranoid could have read the actual text of the section and concluded that someone was trying to pull the plug on grandma. It simply allowed Medicare funding for discussions, every five years, between doctors and patients about their end-of-life options. That’s it.

These conversations happen all the time right now. Patients dying of cancer, for example, already consult with their doctors about what treatments are available, whether they want aggressive medical intervention, what life-sustaining measures they are willing to accept, the value of advance directives and the appointment of health care “proxies” – typically family members – who can make decisions on their behalf if they are incapacitated.
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This editorial will appear in Wednesday’s print edition.

State Insurance Commissioner Mike Kreidler did what he had to do last week when he forced the state’s largest insurer to offer child-only health insurance plans.

The cease and desist order directing Regence BlueShield to “stop illegally denying insurance to children, effective immediately” buys consumers time and keeps the market for child-only policies afloat.

What it doesn’t do is resolve the concerns raised in the wake of a new federal health mandate that bars insurers from denying coverage to children with pre-existing conditions.

While Regence’s announcement last month that it would stop offering child-only policies was undoubtedly a shot at health care reform, it was not entirely unprovoked.

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This just in from state Sen. Don Benton’s campaign for U.S. Senate:

Benton Calls Murray Out on Supporting Viagra for Sex Offenders

TUMWATER, WA – The Benton for U.S. Senate Campaign today announced they have posted an educational video on the web designed to show Washington State voters how their tax dollars are being spent in Washington, D.C. The recently passed healthcare reform bill, supported by Senator Patty Murray, included provisions for registered sex offenders to receive government assistance for prescription drugs such as Viagra.

Now I will be the first to admit that I haven’t read every page of …

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Some tidbits I ran across today:

Washington Post
By Douglas E. Schoen and Patrick H. Caddell
Friday, April 16

We are Democratic pollsters who argued against the health-care that the Obama administration chose to pursue. Instead, we advocated incremental health-care reform. With the passage of health reform, some harsh political realities have emerged.

Recent polling shows that despite lofty predictions that a broad-based Democratic constituency would be activated by the bill’s passage, the bill has been an incontrovertible disaster. The most recent Rasmussen Reports poll, released on April 12, shows that 58 percent of the electorate supports a repeal of the health-care reform bill – up from 54 percent two weeks earlier. Fueling this backlash is concern that health-care reform will drive up health costs and expand the role of government, and the belief that passage was achieved by fundamentally anti-democratic means. …

Put simply, there has been no bounce, for the president or his party, from passing health care. …

Democrats can avoid the electoral bloodbath we predicted before passage of the health-care bill, but in one way: through a bold commitment to fiscal discipline and targeted fiscal stimulus of the private sector and entrepreneurship.

And (this is about a lawsuit against the University of California headed for the Supreme Court):

Washington Post
By Newt Gingrich and Jim Garlow
Friday, April 16

Americans like to think of their college campuses as marketplaces of ideas where students have the opportunity to freely browse a host of competing beliefs, attitudes and philosophies. Unfortunately, today’s academic marketplace is more like a company store. A single, humanistic, decidedly leftist worldview is sold in too many classrooms . . . and the customer refuses delivery at his or her own risk.

And I found it fascinating that this discovery was based on the observation of six atoms:
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