From the Wall Street Journal: (Subscription)

Dear Patients: Vote to Repeal ObamaCare
Don’t believe Democrats who promise to fix the bill once they’re re-elected.

By Dr. Hal Scherz – a pediatric urological surgeon at Georgia Urology and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, serves on the faculty of Emory University Medical School and is president and cofounder of Docs4PatientCare.

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To My Patients,

Section 1311 of the new health care legislation gives the US Secretary of Health and Human Services and her appointees the power to establish careguidelines that your doctor must abide by or face penalties and fines. In making doctors answerable in the federal bureaucracy this bill effectively makes them government employees and means that you and your doctor are no longer in
charge of your health care decisions.

This new law politicizes medicine and in my opinion destroys the sanctity of the doctor-patient relationship that makes the American health care system the best in the world.

In addition to also badly exacerbating the current doctor short age, the law will bring major cost increases, rising insurance premiums, higher taxes, a decline in new medical techniques, a fall-off in the development of miracle drugs as well as rationing by government panels and bureaucrats like passionate rationing advocate Donald Berwick forcing delays of months or sometimes years for hospitalization or surgery. Finally, studies show the legislation will adversely affect the elderly, the poor and rural residents.

Despite countless protests by doctors and overwhelming public opposition — up to 60% of Americans opposed this bill — the current party in control of Congress pushed this bill through with legal bribes and Chicagostyle threats and is determined now to resist any “repeal and replace” efforts.

This doctor’s office is non-partisan — always has been, always will be. But the fact is that every Republican voted against this bad bill while the Democratic Party leadership and the White House completely dismissed the will of the people in ruthlessly pushing through this
legislation.

In the face of voter anger some Democratic candidates are now trying to make a cosmetic retreat, calling for minor modifications or pretending they are opposed to government-run medicine. Once the election is over, however, they will vote with their party bosses against repealing this bill.

Please remember when you vote this November that unless the Democratic party receives a strong negative message about this power grab our health care system will never be fixed and the doctor patient relationship will be ruined forever.

I will be glad to discuss this with you at the end of our consultation.

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A message in consultation with Docs4PatientCare – a 501(c)6 national organization of of concerned physicians committed to the establishment of a health care system that preserves the sanctity of the doctor-patient relationship, promotes quality of care, supports affordable access to all Americans, and protects patients’ personal health care decisions. Learn more online at www.Docs4PatientCare.org.

Real Doctors taking matters into their own hands fighting Obamacare, fighting government run healthcare. Fighting Marxism, indeed!

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Doing business is very difficult. Having everything in place to hire people, pay them and keep them employed is a daunting task, especially for the small business owner. Government regulates and taxes businesses, which puts untold strains on the ability of small business to function and remain a going concern.

One business owner from New Jersey writes a small case study in the Wall Street Journal providing a real life example of one employee out of eighty-three in his small business and the total cost of keeping that person employed. I have adapted the business owners numbers to a table for easier reading and analysis below.

Paycheck	Employee	Employer
Gross Pay	$59,000
Medical and Dental Insurance	2,376	9,561
Unemployment Insurance	126
Disability Insurance	149	149
Medicare	856	856
State Income Tax	1,893
Federal Income Tax	6,250
Social Security Tax	3,661	3661
Life and other Insurance Premiums		153
Federal Unemployment Converage		56
Worker’s Compensation		300
State Unemployment Insurance		505
Net Income/Company Expense	$43,869	$15,241

When you add it all up, it costs $74,000 to put $44,000 in the employee’s pocket and to give her $12,000 in benefits. Bottom line: Governments impose a 33% surtax on the employee’s job each year.

I have worked for large companies and owned more than one small business with employees. Businesses are assigned the job of tax collector for the government, free of charge, while also paying taxes into the system. All a part of the cost of doing business but seldom seen by people looking from the outside.

The small business owner accurately states:

“To offset tax increases and steepening rises in health-insurance premiums, my company needs sustainably higher profits and sales—something unlikely in this “summer of recovery.” We can’t pass the additional costs onto our customers, because the market is too tight and we’d lose sales. Only governments can raise prices repeatedly and pretend there will be no consequences.

And even if the economic outlook were more encouraging, increasing revenues is always uncertain and expensive. As much as I might want to hire new salespeople, engineers and marketing staff in an effort to grow, I would be increasing my company’s vulnerability to government decisions to raise taxes, to policies that make health insurance more expensive, and to the difficulties of this economic environment.”

The government also raises the cost of doing business by imposing regulations on other businesses such as those in the health care industry.

Mr. Small Business owner is correct in his final assessment of owning and operating a business.

“From where I sit, the government’s message is unmistakable: Creating a new job carries a punishing price.”

Government punishes the small business owner and the employee. Government does not create jobs, it destroys them. Indeed!

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Taxes – the never ending political football and never ending burden on the middle-class and small business owners, sometimes referred to as the “rich.”

Obama campaign stop in June 2008 – Wisconsin

“If you’re a family that’s making $250,000 a year or less, you will see no increase in your taxes.”

September 2009 press conference:

“The middle-class will realize greater security, not higher taxes.”

The fact is, Obamacare is a taxing, job-killing machine.

Obamacare forces all Americans to purchase a product or face sanction from the Internal Revenue Service.

ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos during a September 20th interview with Obama himself. Stephanopoulos pressed Obama to admit his individual mandate was a tax.  Obama refused to acknowledge reality and denied it. Stephanopoulos read the definition of “tax” straight from Merriam Webster’s Dictionary. Obama refused to come clean:

“George, the fact that you looked up Merriam’s Dictionary, the definition of tax increase, indicates to me that you’re stretching a little bit right now. … Nobody considers that a tax increase.”

That is spin if ever there was spin but the Justice Department is working overtime to spin the mandate as Constitutional. Justice is prepared to defend the constitutionality of the Obamacare individual mandate in court, an Obama Justice Department legal brief argues that the penalty used to enforce the mandate is “a valid exercise” of Congress’s power to impose taxes.

Under penalty by the Internal Revenue Service citizens must report it on their tax returns, and that the Congressional Budget Office estimates that it will cost Americans $4 billion a year.

Jack Balkin, professor at Yale Law School, told a meeting of progressive activists last month that Obama “has not been honest with the American people about the nature of this bill. This bill is a tax.”

Could the Supreme Court find Obamacare unconstitutional? Heritage Foundations suggests:

In the bill itself, Congress identified the Commerce Clause as the source of their authority to force all Americans to buy health insurance. But as our legal team has made imminently clear, the mandate does not purport to regulate or prohibit commerce of any kind. To the contrary, it purports to “regulate”—and penalize—inactivity. If the Supreme Court allows the Obamacare individual mandate to stand, then Congress could do anything it wanted. They could: require us to buy a new Chevy Impala each year to support the government-supported auto industry; require us to buy war bonds to pay for the Iraq and Afghan wars; or force us to eat our vegetables.

However, Obama and his ilk are suddenly admitting the “mandate” is really a “tax.” Instead of operating as a tax on income, the mandate is a tax on the person and is, therefore, a capitation tax. Congressional Budget Office, The Budgetary Treatment of an Individual Mandate to Buy Health Insurance, (1994) states:

A mandate requiring all individuals to purchase health insurance would be an unprecedented form of federal action. The government has never required people to buy any good or service as a condition of lawful residence in the United States. An individual mandate would have two features that, in combination, would make it unique. First, it would impose a duty on individuals as members of society. Second, it would require people to purchase a specific service that would be heavily regulated by the federal government.

Examining the 16th Amendment of the US Constitution the power of Congress to impose tax isn’t applicable. The Constitution does allow Congress to assess a capitation tax, but that requires the tax be assessed evenly based op population. That is not how the Obamacare mandate works. It exempts and carves out far too many exceptions to past muster as a capitation tax.

Defined, a capitation tax is an assessment levied by the government upon a person at a fixed rate regardless of income or worth. Since it is a tax upon the individual, and not upon merchandise, a capitation tax is frequently labeled a head tax. A poll tax is a capitation tax.

The Constitution provides:

“No Capitation, or other direct Tax, shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or Enumeration herein before directed to be taken…” Art. 1, Sec. 9, Cl. 4.

In the book The Legal Process (1994), Albert M. Sacks and Henry M. Hart explained how, “Humpty Dumpty said that words mean whatever you want them to mean. In the world of nonsense he may have been right. But in the world of sense, he was wrong.”

One would have to conclude that the government’s chief legal scholar on the definition of words would have to be Humpty Dumpty as the government has manufactured a new meaning for the word “income.”

In an 1823 letter to Supreme Court Justice William Johnson, Thomas Jefferson made an observation for us to consider as we strive toward tax truth today:

“On every question of the construction of the Constitution, let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in its debates and, instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed.”

Mr. Jefferson also warned:

“That judges, always eager to expand their own jurisdiction, would “twist and shape” the Constitution “as an artist shapes a ball of wax.”

Words mean something but in the case of Obama and his Leftist administration the meaning of words can be shaped and constructed and reconstructed to fit the meaning of those who wish to deceive the American people. Indeed!

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Remember the gulf oil spill? The oil is still gushing, BP is still figuring things out with a hardy, “This should work this time,” while trying to cap the well below the former Deepwater Horizon rig.

If your paying attention to Barack Obama, you wouldn’t even know an oil spill is occurring in the Gulf. He hasn’t spoken publicly about the oil spill since June 22 when he announced it was on a laundry list of items discussed at a cabinet meeting.

Before that, on June 16, he spoke briefly after negotiating his secret liability deal with BP. Other than those two instances, the president hasn’t spent another public moment focusing on the spill since he began fighting the “battle” against “the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced” from the Oval Office four weeks ago.

Don’t worry, the “Progressives” aka Marxists have that control and conquer thing down to a science.

The Columbus-based family owned restaurant chain – known for serving small square hamburgers called “sliders” – says a single provision in the bill will eat up roughly 55 percent of its yearly net income after 2014.

Starting that year, the bill levies a $3,000-per-employee penalty on companies whose workers pay more than 9.5 percent of household income in premiums for company-provided insurance.

White Castle, which currently provides insurance to all of its full-time workers and picks up 70 to 89 percent of their premium costs, believes it will likely end up paying those penalties. The financial hit will make it hard for the company to maintain its 421 restaurants, let alone create new jobs, says company spokesman Jamie Richardson. White Castle employs more than 10,000 people nationwide, and more than 1,200 in Ohio.

IHOP will not be spared the Nanny State dictum:

George Ebinger of New Jersey, who owns several International House of Pancakes restaurants, says the penalties for not insuring his 140 workers will cost roughly half as much as insuring them. He figures he will have to raise prices and possibly lay off workers to come up with the $220,000 he anticipates the penalties will cost.

Some beg to differ. White House spokeswoman Nancy Ann DeParle characterized such concerns as a bunch of cranky big businessmen whining about their profit margins.

“I understand that they don’t like it and believe it will cut into their profits, but it is a relatively small contribution to defray costs to taxpayers.”

However, the National Restaurant News painted a different picture in its April coverage of the health care battle, featuring many personal stories that were far more Main St. than Wall St.

“I voiced concerns about the effect health care reform might have on our margins,” said Willis, owner of Ruby’s Diner on the Square and two Beth Marie’s Old Fashioned Ice Cream and Soda Fountains in Denton. “Most restaurants are run on very slim profit margins these days, and the costs [associated with mandated health care] could definitely hurt us.”

When the government starts getting into the private business sector bad things happen. Mary Katherine Hamm points it out over at The Weekly Standard:

Adding new menu boards, drive-through menus, a menus is an expensive prospect, especially when even advocates of menu labeling can point to no evidence that it actually works.White Castle has been offering health care to its employees since 1924. It pays 70-90 percent of health-care costs for those employees. The company cannot be considered one of the health-care system’s bad actors, even by the most ludicrous lefty’s standards. But when good behavior is punished, you will not get more of it. Now, the company says it will consider dropping employee-based coverage and putting employees in federal exchanges— a scenario which, before Obamacare passed, was considered a paranoid right-wing talking point.

The Center for Science in the Public Interest are continuing to get into your life and tell you what to eat. Their latest target was McDonald’s Happy Meal. They wanted to sue McDonald’s to remove the toys from the Happy Meal package because the toys were incentive to parents to go out and buy Happy Meals, which the Center for Science in the Public Interest determined was unhealthy and unwise and in fact is none of their business. From the Chicago Sun-Times:

“McDonald’s use of toys undercuts parental authority and exploits young children’s developmental immaturity–all this to induce children to prefer foods that may harm their health,” the group’s litigation director, Stephen Gardner, said at the time. “It’s a creepy and predatory practice that warrants an injunction.”

Finally, a corporate CEO is standing up to a bunch of leftist statists who are in the minority.

“Those Hot Wheels and Polly Pocket dolls aren’t going anywhere. The Happy Meals toys are staying, according to a letter McDonald’s brass delivered last Wednesday to a health watchdog group.”

“The Center for Science in the Public Interest last month threatened a lawsuit against the fast-food giant to get it to dump the toys that accompany Happy Meals. Forget it, McDonald’s CEO Jim Skinner said, defending Happy Meals in the written response sent to the Washington, D.C.-based group. ‘Internet sites, blogs and network surveys suggest that public opinion is running overwhelmingly against your premise,’ Skinner wrote. ‘Our customer websites and phone lines at McDonald’s are also busy, with more than 9 out of 10 customers disagreeing with your agenda.’”

‘CSPI is wrong in its assertions, and frivolous in its legal threats,’ Skinner said, calling the group’s claims ‘over-the-top rhetoric.’

“‘CSPI’s twisted characterization of McDonald’s as ‘the stranger in the playground handing out candy to children’ is an insult to every one of our franchisees and employees around the world,’ Skinner wrote.

‘When CSPI refers to America’s children as ‘an unpaid drone army,’ you similarly denigrate parents and families, because they are fully capable of making their own decisions. You should apologize.’ ‘Parents, in particular, strongly believe they have the right and responsibility to decide what’s best for their children, not CSPI,’ he wrote. ‘It’s really that simple.’”

This is the Nanny State, Marxist regime and their pals attacking private-sector business on all fronts. Not happy with losing jobs at a faster pace Obama and his ilk wish to destroy the fabric of American society and culture while running businesses into the ground. Promising more jobs the liar Obama is only out to destroy more jobs and get additional citizens on the public dole at taxpayer expenses.

Taxing the so-called “rich”, many who own the private businesses and create jobs, is a no-win policy.  The Administration and Congress apparently believe that “the rich” are an inexhaustible political resource; only those same policy makers can know whether “the rich” are similarly regarded as an inexhaustible tax resource.

Margaret Thatcher once famously said that the trouble with such policies is that “eventually you run out of other people’s money.” Indeed!

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