Gangster government, HHS edition--tyranny on installment plan

Gangster government, HHS edition by Scott Johnson/Powerline (use links for more info from sources)

Obamacare figures to be a fount of gangster government if and when it is ever fully implemented. Over time it will render us all subjects of the administrative state.

As Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius is giving us a preview of coming attractions. Jeffrey Anderson explains:

Not satisfied with the colossal amounts of power that she would acquire under Obamacare if it isn't repealed, Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary Kathleen Sebelius has issued a 136-page "rule" that will now give her (and her subordinates) largely unchecked power to pass judgment on the prices of health insurance throughout the United States. Notwithstanding the fact that 43 states already regulate and approve health insurance premiums, Sebelius claims that we need an additional, more centralized, protection against insurers' unseemly "profit motive." But a far greater threat to the future of American republicanism is posed by the impulse that animates Sebelius and the bulk of the Obama administration: the power motive.


It's staggering that one person would think that she should ultimately get to decide what a product, which Obamacare would soon require all Americans to purchase, should cost. Moreover, the Wall Street Journal writes that Sebelius's "rule" marks "an effort to end-run Congress, which by some miracle declined to give HHS the formal legal authority to explicitly block premium increases, despite a direct appeal from President Obama." Not having been granted that formal power, "Ms. Sebelius is creating by regulatory fiat larger de facto powers to achieve the same end."

The linked Wall Street Journal editorial concludes: "Politicized rate-setting is the new reality of the U.S. health insurance market, not that consumers will in any way benefit."

Anderson also links to Charles Kesler's Claremont Review of Books editorial. Kesler writes of Obamacare's administrative regime:

Faster than one might think, a government of equal laws turns into a regime of arbitrary privileges.


A "privilege" is literally a private law. When law ceases to be a common "standard of right and wrong" and a "common measure to decide all controversies," then the rule of law ceases to be republican and becomes despotic. Freedom itself ceases to be a right and becomes a gift, or the fruit of a corrupt bargain, because in such degraded regimes those who are close to and connected with the ruling class have special privileges.

Anderson concludes that Obamacare leads to "the politicizing of health care, the compromising of liberty, and the debilitating consolidation of power in the hands of the unelected few."

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2010/12/027993.php