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Air Date: July 29, 2014
Host: Jim Schneider
Guest: Twila Brase
Twila Brase is president of the Citizen’s Council for Health Freedom and is a certified public health nurse. She provides a daily commentary on the Health Freedom Minute and has provided testimony at the state legislature as well as impacting members of Congress. The Citizens Council for Health Freedom supports patient and doctor freedom, medical innovation and the right of citizens to a confident patient-doctor relationship.
Twila opened this edition of Crosstalk with news that the U.S. Appeals Court in Washington, D.C. has dismissed a lawsuit brought by the Pacific Legal Foundation which said that The Affordable Care Act is essentially unconstitutional because the Constitution requires all tax legislation to come out of the House of Representatives. The Pacific Legal Foundation has decided to appeal.
Halbig v. Burwell was a lawsuit brought by several businesses and individuals who felt that Obamacare has harmed them because the legislation says that there can be tax subsidies (advanced premium tax credits) only if they’re issued through state established health exchanges and not through the national exchange (healthcare.gov). In spite of this, in 2012 the IRS went ahead and issued tax subsidies through both state exchanges and the federal exchange.
The group that sued said they’ve been harmed because they don’t have a state-based exchange and therefore there can be no subsidies in their state. As a result, there can be no employer or individual mandates to purchase health insurance and therefore no penalties if you don’t.
Since the Obama administration said they were going to provide subsidies through healthcare.gov, that meant there are subsidies available in every state, therefore no state was protected from the mandates or the penalties. Halbig claimed this is illegal.
The problem is, the Obama administration didn’t give themselves funding to set up the federal exchange. According to Twila, they planned that all 50 states (and Washington, D.C.) would set up the exchange, pay for it and therefore the federal government would not have to pick up the costs for control centers in every state. 36 states refused this plan to allow the federal government to collect data on citizens by imposing Obamacare across America and this has stopped much of Obamacare from being implemented as the president wants it.
So now the Halbig case could be the undoing of Obamacare because it highlights the fact that there are 36 states where you cannot offer subsidies and where there will be no mandates or penalties.
Complicating matters is the fact that in the Virginia Court of Appeals an opposite decision was rendered in a case titled: King v. Burwell. Find out what the future holds for this apparent legal stalemate when you review this important edition of Crosstalk.
More Information
Citizens Council for Health Freedom
www.cchfreedom.org
651-646-8935
