By Tony Messenger

If Proposition C passes — and based on very early returns it looks like it will — the national campaign against President Barack Obama’s health care law will gain momentum.

In November, Arizona, Florida and Oklahoma will hold similar votes to the one Missouri is holding tonight. If Proposition C passes, Cunningham, a Republican state senator from Chesterfield, expects good things to happen in the other states as well.

“If the heartland, the bellwether state, the Show-Me State sends a message to Washington, it’s going to encourage other states to do the same,” Cunningham said.

In early results, with 262 of more than 3,300 precincts reporting, Proposition C was winning with more than 73 percent of the vote.

Cunningham and other supporters of Proposition C are following the results at a home in Town & Country.

By Karen Ball

Missouri voters go to the polls Tuesday for the first-in-the-nation referendum on President Obama’s health care plan. It is likely to give Republicans a chance to brag about the unpopularity of Obamacare, but the vote will be largely symbolic. Courts will eventually decide whether Missouri and other states can legally trump federal law and exempt citizens from the mandate to buy insurance. But sending a signal to Washington will be victory enough for the Republicans and Tea Party activists pushing Proposition C.

“You don’t need to worry about the courts when the people are trying to have their say,” says Lloyd Smith, executive director of the Missouri GOP. “The people are saying this is going too far. It’s a referendum on the overreach of the Obama Administration and the liberals in Congress.” The vote is as much about “anger and frustration” at all things Washington as it is about health care, explains Representative John Diehl, a Republican from St. Louis County who was one of the chief proponents of the referendum when it passed the Missouri legislature.

If you want to know which news item will be making Gibbs look constipated at tomorrow’s briefing, look no further. It’s the first time voters from any state have addressed the mandate at the polls.

Results coming in: Missouri voters tackle ObamaCare mandate in referendum; Update: 76% voting “yes” early

Things are looking good!

source: HotAir.com

Comment by American Grand Jury:

I can’t wait for Arizona, Florida and Oklahoma to vote on this too. Are there any other States out there with Obamacare referendums on the ballot in November?

By Sarah Lyall

LONDON — Perhaps the only consistent thing about Britain’s socialized health care system is that it is in a perpetual state of flux, its structure constantly changing as governments search for the elusive formula that will deliver the best care for the cheapest price while costs and demand escalate.

Even as the new coalition government said it would make enormous cuts in the public sector, it initially promised to leave health care alone. But in one of its most surprising moves so far, it has done the opposite, proposing what would be the most radical reorganization of the National Health Service, as the system is called, since its inception in 1948.

Practical details of the plan are still sketchy. But its aim is clear: to shift control of England’s $160 billion annual health budget from a centralized bureaucracy to doctors at the local level. Under the plan, $100 billion to $125 billion a year would be meted out to general practitioners, who would use the money to buy services from hospitals and other health care providers.

The plan would also shrink the bureaucratic apparatus, in keeping with the government’s goal to effect $30 billion in “efficiency savings” in the health budget by 2014 and to reduce administrative costs by 45 percent.

Tens of thousands of jobs would be lost because layers of bureaucracy would be abolished.

[yeah, but tens of thousands of jobs would be created in the PRIVATE medical sector.. the NY Times are such communists.. always trying to push socialism]

And back on the homefront, even in light of the news coming out of England about trimming socialized medicine, our dear old communist friend, Harry “Ding-bat” Reid has announced new plans for Obamacare:

Reid to Netroots: “We’re Going To Have a Public Option”
by Phillip Klein

LAS VEGAS — Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, seeking to console liberal activists who were disappointed by the final version of the national health care law, assured them that there would eventually be a public option.

“We’re going to have a public option,” Reid said. “The only question is when.”

Reid’s general comments reflected the same overall message to progressives that President Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi delivered earlier today. It essentially boils down to: We’ve done a lot of stuff, but we still have a lot of unfinished business, so campaign for us again.

Comment by American Grand Jury:

If we get rid of Reid in November he will not have a chance to approve the public option. Reid can be voted out and Obama can be impeached. After that we will move to arrest Pelosi for treason. After all, she was the DNC Chairman that committed fraud by sworn affidavit when she failed to truthfully notify the Election officials in 49 States that Obama was ineligible to run [as Obama is NOT a "natural born" citizen].

By Robert Pear

WASHINGTON — When Congress required most Americans to obtain health insurance or pay a penalty, Democrats denied that they were creating a new tax. But in court, the Obama administration and its allies now defend the requirement as an exercise of the government’s “power to lay and collect taxes.”

And that power, they say, is even more sweeping than the federal power to regulate interstate commerce.

Administration officials say the tax argument is a linchpin of their legal case in defense of the health care overhaul and its individual mandate, now being challenged in court by more than 20 states and several private organizations.

Under the legislation signed by President Obama in March, most Americans will have to maintain “minimum essential coverage” starting in 2014. Many people will be eligible for federal subsidies to help them pay premiums.

In a brief defending the law, the Justice Department says the requirement for people to carry insurance or pay the penalty is “a valid exercise” of Congress’s power to impose taxes.

Congress can use its taxing power “even for purposes that would exceed its powers under other provisions” of the Constitution, the department said. For more than a century, it added, the Supreme Court has held that Congress can tax activities that it could not reach by using its power to regulate commerce.

While Congress was working on the health care legislation, Mr. Obama refused to accept the argument that a mandate to buy insurance, enforced by financial penalties, was equivalent to a tax.

“For us to say that you’ve got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase,” the president said last September, in a spirited exchange with George Stephanopoulos on the ABC News program “This Week.”

When Mr. Stephanopoulos said the penalty appeared to fit the dictionary definition of a tax, Mr. Obama replied, “I absolutely reject that notion.”

source..

When Linda O’Boyle was diagnosed with bowel cancer, her doctors told her she could boost her chances of survival by adding the drug cetuximab to her regimen. But the rationing body for Britain’s National Health Service, the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), had previously ruled that the drug was not cost-effective and therefore would not be paid for by the government. So O’Boyle liquidated her savings and paid for the drug herself. But this is not allowed under NHS rules. When government bureaucrats found out that O’Boyle had purchased the drug with her own money, she was denied NHS treatment and died within months.

Defenders of Britain’s health care rationing system may try to claim that this tragic death is an outlier in an otherwise acceptable government run health care system. They are wrong. It is the point of the system. As socialized medicine and infanticide advocate Peter Singer has argued in The New York Times, the NICE bureaucrats must ration care or else free government health care would bankrupt the British economy. “NICE had set a general limit of £30,000, or about $49,000, on the cost of extending life for a year,” Singer writes. Following this logic, Singer supported NICE’s decision not to allow British citizens the kidney cancer fighting drug Sutent. As a result of this, and many other rationing decisions Britain, has one of the lowest cancer survival rates in the Western world. While 60.3% of men and 61.7% of women in Sweden survive a cancer diagnosis, in Britain the figure ranges between 40.2% to 48.1% for men and 48% to 54.1% for women. And NICE’s rationing has not just hit cancer patients. Doctors have warned that patients with terminal illnesses are being made to die prematurely under the NHS rationing scheme. And according to the Patients Association, one million NHS patients have been the victims of appalling care in hospitals across Britain.

Most Americans would find this harrowing. But not President Barack Obama. Yesterday he bypassed the Senate confirmation process and used a recess appointment to install Dr. Donald Berwick to be the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS is the agency that runs the Medicare and Medicaid programs). Dr. Berwick said of Britain’s health care system: “Cynics beware, I am romantic about the National Health Service; I love it.” And his love for Britain’s health care system is not in spite of its rationing, but because of it. In 2009 Dr. Berwick told Biotechnology Healthcare: “NICE is extremely effective and a conscientious and valuable knowledge-building system. … The decision is not whether or not we will ration care - the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open.”

The fact that the White House chose to empower Dr. Berwick by recess appointment is particularly audacious. The recess appointment power was intended to be used for occasions when the Senate is out for moths at a time. The Senate is currently out of session for just 11 days. Worse, the Senate majority has never even scheduled a hearing so that Dr. Berwick’s rationing views could be given an “open” forum. In fact, Dr. Berwick has not even returned Senators’ written questionnaires. The White House defends the move by claiming “there’s no time to waste with Washington game-playing.” But then why did the Obama administration wait until April 2010, a full 15 months after President Obama was sworn into office, to nominate Dr. Berwick? Is it because they did not want Dr. Berwick’s well known and public support for rationing health care to affect the debate over Obamacare?

In a 2005 interview with Health Affairs, Dr. Berwick said: “(G)overnment is an extraordinarily important player in the American health care scene, and it has inescapable duties with respect to improvement of care, or we’re not going to get improved care. Government remains a major purchaser. … So as CMS goes and as Medicaid goes, so goes the system.” And that was before Obamacare gave far reaching new powers to government bureaucrats.

In June of 2009, President Obama told the American Medical Association that “identifying what works is not about dictating what kind of care should be provided.” Moreover, the president has assured the public time and again that the government will not get between patients and their doctors. His nomination of Don Berwick for Director of CMS, however, tells a different story.

Comment by American Jury:

The Usurper is a chronic lier. America leads the world in modern healthcare. The Usurper wants to change that. He is a Marxist. He believes in population control.. it is called Obamacare [code word for genocide].

by Bill Weckesser

Conventional wisdom has it that entitlement programs cannot be repealed. Iowa Republican Steve King didn’t get the memo. The Daily Caller reports that his discharge petition is gaining momentum among GOP lawmakers. It would force a floor vote on the legislation.

Today Rep. Tom Price, Georgia Republican and chairman of the Republican Study Committee is circulating a request that members support the petition. To date 74 representatives, all Republicans, have affixed their names to the document which, if a majority sign, would force House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to bring King’s bill, H.R. 4972, to repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act by bringing it to an up-or-down vote. If a majority sign the petition it is likely that King’s bill will pass, as those who sign will vote for his repeal.

King is urging the 34 Democrats who voted against the health-care legislation to sign onto the petition. He was enthusiastic about the support his motion has received.

King: I am optimistic that we will be able to attract the 218 signatures we will need to force a vote on repealing Obamacare. The past week has seen significant momentum building for repeal. Signatures on the discharge petition have come more quickly than I had expected. This has been partly due to a large number of co-sponsors on the repeal bill, but it also demonstrates the effectiveness of the efforts of the Heritage Action Team and a boost from the Club for Growth. I have asked for a national cooperative effort by all organizations interested in restoring liberty by repealing Obamacare.

One can only imagine the economic stimulus such a move would have. Repeal would be a shot in the arm for small businesses that have been reluctant to hire new employees, many have been adding only 1099 workers out of fear of Obamacare. Where’s your rep on this issue?