Because the ruling needed Obama to sign off on it before it could be implemented, the President has just gone on record that he has flip-flopped on his earlier promise that he would not violate the “conscious clause” that allows the Catholic Church and it’s affiliates to follow Church teaching on the sanctity of human life.

Mz. Noonan believes that a significant percentage of this nation’s 35 million Catholic voters are outraged by this intrusion by a ham-fisted government into their private lives and into the practice of their faith.

For my own part, I could see this coming from the outset of the legislative circus that surrounded the passage of this un-Constitutional bill. Whatever his promises were at the time, I felt certain that as soon as he thought that the bill was out of the limelight for a sufficient period of time for the American people to forget about some of it’s especially toxic provisions, that Obama would allow this long anticipated assault on Catholics to be launched with a vengeance.

As to why he would do this nine months before a Presidential election…only Obama can answer that question.

Having said that, I am very grateful for the timing of this ruling and the President signing off on it when he did. It gives the Republican Presidential candidates plenty of time to incorporate this issue into upcoming debates and to make sure the voters know full well that, whatever their religious denomination, they will not be allowed to follow their consciences in this mater of the rights of the pre-born, if this law is not repealed.

So now its up to Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and Ron Paul to use this issue as one more in a long list of reasons why Barack Obama needs to be ushered out of the Oval Office in January 2013.

~~John Cronin~~

His decision on Catholic charities makes Romney’s big gaffe look trivial

BY PEGGY NOONAN

What a faux pas, how inept, how removed from the essential realities of America. Yes, I’m referring to President Obama. But let’s do Mitt Romney first.

He’s taken heavy fire for his interview with CNN’s Soledad O’Brien, in which he said, “I’m not concerned about the very poor.”
Every criticism has been true. It was politically inept, playing into stereotypes about Republicans and about his own candidacy. It was Martian-like in its seeming remove from the concerns of everyday citizens. We’re in a recession here! It was at odds both with longtime American tradition and with rising conservative concern over …

Read more @…….http://online.wsj.com/article/declarations.html?mod=WSJ_topnav_opinion

Monday, November 28, 2011

In the first Rasmussen Reports tracking poll since the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to review the constitutionality of the new national health care law, most voters to continue to favor the law’s repeal and think repeal is likely.

Fifty-three percent (53%) of Likely U.S. Voters at least somewhat favor repeal of the law, with 40% who Strongly Favor it. A new national telephone survey shows that 40% at least somewhat oppose repeal, including 28% who are Strongly Opposed.

EXCERPT ONLY: Ames, Iowa — This has been quite a week or ten days for Republicans.

Pundits will parse the Iowa results and the Perry polling to determine which candidate is up and which down or out. The
Iowa straw poll may prove to be the last stop for some Republican candidates, as it was in 1999 and 2007.

More important than the fate of individual candidates has been the rush of events going the Republicans’ way.

Barack Obama’s job rating has slid to record lows in the Gallup poll, and his job approval fell under 50 percent even in New York. His August 8 speech had a deer-in-the-headlights quality even as he turned mechanically from one teleprompter to another.

Standard & Poor’s has downgraded the government’s credit rating for the first time in history. The stock market went through a week of horrifying gyrations.

Then on Friday, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals struck down as unconstitutional Obamacare’s individual mandate to buy health insurance.

The president’s policies are in shambles. Things are not working out the way he and his advisers expected. His journalist cheering section has been voicing doubts and dismay.

But it’s not entirely clear where Republicans want to go, either, or whether they have candidates with the potential to take them there.

Yes, they have some quick answers. Repeal Obamacare? By all means. Approve a tax increase in return for genuine large spending cuts? All eight candidates at the Washington Examiner–Fox News debate August 11 dutifully raised their hands to say no.

Beyond that, not so much clear direction.

Read complete article at 

Projected costs escalate and tens of millions will lose their current coverage.

By: Karl Rove

A kerfuffle was stirred up last week by a devastating McKinsey & Company study that concluded up to 78 million Americans would lose their current health coverage as employers stopped offering insurance because of President Obama’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

The report contradicted Mr. Obama’s frequent pledge that under his reform, “if you like your health-care plan, you can keep your health-care plan.” And McKinsey’s was at least the fourth such analysis calling the president’s promise into question.

Pulitzer Prize-winner Joseph Rago tracks the White House effort to prevent the impact of its policies.

In May 2010, former Congressional Budget Office (CBO) Director Douglas Holtz-Eakin concluded that employers would drop coverage for about 35 million Americans because of ObamaCare. A month later, in June 2010, the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) pegged the number between 87 million to 117 million. And last November, Allisa Meade, a McKinsey analyst, told health-insurance company executives that 80 million to 100 million people might lose their employer-provided health insurance.

Simple economics is the reason. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation’s Employer Health Benefits 2010 Annual Survey, the annual premium for an average policy last year was $5,049 for a single worker, with the company picking up roughly $4,150 and the employee the rest. For a family of four, the total cost was $13,770, with the company picking up $9,773.

Yet under ObamaCare, businesses can stop providing health-care coverage, paying a $2,000 per-worker fine instead. For small businesses, the trade-off is even more attractive: They are given a pass on the first 50 workers.

Workers losing coverage will be moved into the “exchange,” a government-run marketplace to buy health plans. Those whose insurance costs were more than a specified share of their income (9.5% in 2014) could get subsidies. The exchange starts in 2014 and is fully operational by 2016.

Perversely, ObamaCare both drives up the cost of insurance with mandates and rules while making it attractive for companies to dump the increasingly more expensive coverage and pay a lesser fine. There will be huge ramifications for the country’s finances if more workers lose coverage than was estimated.

When Mr. Obama’s health-care bill passed in March 2010, the CBO and the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation predicted that 24 million workers would be covered by the exchange. Of these, nine million to 11 million would lose their employer-provided coverage, offset by six million to seven million who would be getting employer-provided insurance, for a net of three million workers losing company-sponsored coverage. The CBO said the exchanges would cost $511 billion over ObamaCare’s first decade.

But what if more people are dumped into the exchange than originally estimated? Costs from the increased subsidies will explode.

If Mr. Holtz-Eakin is correct that there will be 11 million more people in the exchange, then costs could be nearly 40% higher than the $511 billion price tag. If between 78 million and 87 million people are moved into the exchange, the tab could more than triple. And if NCPA’s upper-range estimate is right and 117 million people were dumped into the exchange, ObamaCare would cost nearly $2 trillion more than expected in the first decade alone. Much of this extra expense would come from workers losing their employer-sponsored insurance.

Mr. Obama’s health-care law has already put the country in bad financial shape. He claimed it reduced the deficit by $143 billion—but that was before the CBO added $115 billion to administer the legislation, including the hiring of bureaucrats and thousands of IRS agents to enforce the new mandates. This reduced Mr. Obama’s claimed savings to $28 billion.

The deficit-reduction claim also came before House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan drew attention to the law’s Ponzi scheme. It’s funded by borrowing $521 billion from the Social Security Trust Fund, Medicare, and new long-term care insurance premiums, and by ignoring the $300 billion cost over 10 years of the annual inflation increases in reimbursements to hospitals and doctors. These gimmicks hide the fact that ObamaCare is really $701 billion in the red in its first decade.

ObamaCare’s deficits in its second decade (2020 to 2029) will be even more horrendous as it continues borrowing from Social Security, Medicare and the long-term care insurance program to meet its much larger than anticipated expenses, including a much higher number of people who end up in the exchange.

On March 9, 2010, then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi famously told a meeting of county officials that “we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy.”

We are now, to our horror, finding out how harmful this measure is. More Americans are realizing that unless repealed, ObamaCare will sink America in a sea of red ink. This helps explain why the nation has turned so hard against it—and against its author whose slippery pledges so misled us.

This article originally appeared on WSJ.com on Wednesday, June 15, 2011.

In a copyrighted article, Mitt Romney discusses what he would to with Obamacare in USA TODAY.

Click over to their site and read this interesting take on our national healthcare predicament.

~~John Cronin~~

usatoday.com

By: Mitt Romney

Health care is more than just one-sixth of the American economy. It is a source of well-being for individuals and families. We are blessed with much that is good in American health care. But we have taken a turn for the worse with ObamaCare, with its high taxes and vastly expanded federal control over our lives. I believe the better course is to empower the states to determine their own health care futures.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/forum/2011-05-11-Romney-on-fixing-health-care_n.htm