Health Care Bill Passes 219-210Follow

At the expense of making life worse for everyone else.

And I love how you lumped welfare in with unemployment benefits, and with VA benefits, and then tossed equal opportunity laws in to boot? Other than welfare, none of the programs have anything in common with this health care bill other than that they are all government programs.

Don't think Thomas, Alito and Roberts aren't just sitting at their desks salivating over the chance to shove that line back up Obama's *****

After all, if the government is not allowed to tell any woman what she can or cannot do to her body when it comes to one aspect of healthcare, then it cannot tell anyone what they can or cannot do to their bodies when it comes to ANY aspect of healthcare. Can't have it both ways kiddies.

I just want to know how many of you honestly, truly believe they will be able to fund this bill without raising taxes significantly on something.

Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli plans to bring up the state's new law preventing the federal government from imposing mandates on its citizens. The supremacy clause, and virtually all recent precedent, should dispatch that argument easily.

The stronger argument is that the requirement for individuals to purchase insurance is an constitutional expansion of Congress's ability to regulate interstate commerce.
[...]
Even as conservatives have narrowed the Commerce clause in recent decades, the key recent precedent would be Raich v. Gonzales [...] Interpreted: when localized decisions have nationalized effects, then it is "squarely within" Congress's purview to regulate it. (Wrote Justice Antonin Scalia in a concurring opinion: "Congress may regulate noneconomic intrastate activities only where the failure to do so "could ... undercut" its regulation of interstate commerce.") Congress believes that the mandates, by creating a pool of healthy and unhealthy folks, will help contain the cost of health care. That's their intent; the court would be hard pressed to argue policy with Congress.
[...]
A secondary argument is that government can't fine people for failing to purchase an insurance plan; this would violate the "Tax and Spending" clause because it is not a valid reason to impose a tax. Trouble here is that there are numerous instances of taxes being levied by Congress but called something else -- like a penalty or a fee -- that would already violate the clause if every fee or fine were deemed a tax. Still, this argument seems to have a slightly stronger foundation -- and this is, in part, what Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum will base his argument around the idea that the requirement for this tax is simply being alive. The basic response is that Congress has the power to decide how to fund what it wants to fund.

As an example of involuntary payment into a health plan, yes.

Second problem: the damn gubbmint keeps pillaging the funds.

Well, in point of fact both funds are pretty efficiently run

the damn gubbmint keeps pillaging the funds

The people voting to borrow against the funds are not the same ones administering the funds.