/PRNewswire/ -- Some argue that ObamaCare isn't ripe for legal challenge, since the most onerous requirements won't be in effect until 2014. By then, the machinery for implementation, and associated "stakeholders," will be cemented in place and much harder to dislodge.
The effect, however, is already being felt, argues attorney Andrew Schlafly, writing in the summer issue of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons (http://www.jpands.org/vol15no2/schlafly.pdf). Schlafly is general counsel for the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), which filed suit in the District of Columbia on March 26, three days after the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA or "ObamaCare") was signed into law (www.aapsonline.org/hhslawsuit).
"By analogy," he writes, "if we knew that a giant meteor would crash into the Earth in 2014, it would have a huge immediate impact on behavior today."
After enactment of PPACA, there was a 10 percent drop in the value of health-related stocks, while the rest of the stock market was rising.
Some physicians are planning an early retirement, and bright students will forgo a medical career because they want to practice "innovative medicine in the free market rather than Post Office-style medicine controlled by government bureaucrats."
Likely physician shortages may keep businesses from relocating to rural areas, and anticipated new costs may keep businesses from expanding.
AAPS argues that it is an unconstitutional "taking" to force individuals to buy insurance they do not want, and which may not cover the medical care that they eventually do need.
Mandatory insurance has failed in Massachusetts, where there have been relatively few uninsured, and imposing that approach on a nation 50 times as large as and less wealthy than Massachusetts is likely to be a still bigger failure.
Schlafly cites a reason for cautious optimism: free enterprise could still expand "amid the rubble and ruins wrought by this legislation."
In addition to overturning the insurance mandates, the lawsuit asks the Court to demand an honest accounting of the solvency of the Medicare and Social Security programs, and to invalidate a rule that seniors must forfeit all Social Security benefits if they decline to participate in Medicare Part A, with its increasingly draconian restrictions.
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