The ACA Laughtrack

Starting today and for the next two days, we will witness the legal showdown of our times over the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

According Fox News, the 90-minute argument today has nothing to do with the government’s in regulating how health care is administered.  Today, the justices will decide whether an obscure, Reconstruction-Era tax law – the 1867 Anti-Injunction Act – prohibits challenges to the ACA.

“That statute says now lawsuit can be filed challenging a tax provision – in this case, the individual mandate requiring Americans to buy health insurance – until after it’s been implemented.  All parties in the cases before the Court agree the act isn’t applicable to health care law.  Still, at least one lower appellate court ruled that current lawsuits against the controversial law must wait until someone has actually been forced to pay a penalty for non-compliance, which can’t happen until 2015.”

What is at issue right now is whether ACA is constitutional.  Nothing in the Constitution requires individuals to purchase especially at exorbitant rates.  The only remedy for the potential costs is to enroll in a government wellness program, at which point the government will basically rule your life.

The text of the Affordable Care Act is available online in PDF form:

 http://housedocs.house.gov/energycommerce/ppacacon.pdf

The document has been pared down from its original, nearly 2,000 page heft to the length of a really long novel at 874 pages.  Be prepared for a good deal of boring legalese and bureaucratese with some crucial threats to your freedom sandwich into the morass.

In regard to sex education:

YOUTH.—The term ‘youth’ means an individual who has attained age 10 but has not attained age 20.  The definition of childhood used to be as high as 12.The government considers your 10 year-old old enough to comprehend such things as condoms.  The ostensible object is to prevent teenage pregnancies.  The result of sexual education since the 1960s has been that teenagers were impregnated with ideas they hadn’t yet thought of. 

TITLE III—IMPROVING THE QUALITY

AND EFFICIENCY OF HEALTH CARE

Subtitle A—Transforming the Health Care

Delivery System

REQUIREMENT OF CAMPAIGN.—The campaign implemented

under paragraph (1)—

(A) shall be designed to address proper nutrition, regular exercise, smoking cessation, obesity reduction, the 5 leading disease killers in the United States, and secondary prevention through disease screening promotion;

(B) shall be carried out through competitively bid contracts awarded to entities providing for the professional production and design of such campaign;

(C) may include the use of television, radio, Internet, and other commercial marketing venues and may be targeted to specific age groups based on peer-reviewed social research;

(D) shall not be duplicative of any other Federal efforts relating to health promotion and disease prevention; and

(E) may include the use of humor and nationally recognized positive role models.

This last item is truly risible.  The government has given itself permission to be funny and will give certain nationally-recognized “positive role models” that same license.  If we are to take this legislation seriously, you now must have a license, government approval, to be funny.

Thou must not joke.  What will happen to those who are not government jokers?  Will they be sent to the Funny Farm?  What will happen to those who laugh at an unapproved joke?  Will they be sent to re-education centers to learn what is deemed to be funny and what isn’t?  Will kids be taught what to laugh at and when?  Will youthful offenders be ordered to run 20 laps around the laugh track?

We’d heard that there were some unbelievable regulations in the Affordable Care Act (what happened to the word “Health”?).  The ACA is a serious threat to our freedom.  This ridiculous presumption of power to regulate humor notwithstanding, the ACA is no joke.