David Catron of the American Spectator highlights poll results linked to the recent court ruling declaring the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional.
One day after Nancy Pelosi and her modest but all too real Democratic majority in the House of Representatives voted to interfere in Texas v. United States, the lawsuit in which Federal Judge Reed O’Connor ruled Obamacare unconstitutional, a new survey found that nearly six in ten registered voters want O’Connor’s ruling to stand. Of that number, 27% say the law should be eliminated so we can return to the way things were before Obamacare was shoved down our unwilling throats, and 31% agree that it should be invalidated so it can be replaced by a program that works.
The Hill reports that 58% want to let Obamacare die. Yet Pelosi and her accomplices plan to ignore the will of the voters — yet again — to save a statute that has been a failure by every rational measure. For example, a study recently published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) suggests that it has increased mortality rates. Obamacare imposed arbitrary readmission rules known as the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program (HRRP) for Medicare hospitalizations, and the number of patients dying within a month of discharge has increased:
In this retrospective cohort study that included approximately 8 million Medicare beneficiary fee-for-service hospitalizations from 2005 to 2015, implementation of the HRRP was associated with a significant increase in trends in 30-day post-discharge mortality among beneficiaries hospitalized for heart failure and pneumonia.
Nonetheless, Pelosi’s newly-minted House majority and 17 Democrat-controlled states led by California AG Xavier Becerra are planning to send an army of lawyers to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in an effort to overturn Judge O’Connor’s ruling. If the Fifth Circuit upholds O’Connor’s ruling, the case may find its way back to the Supreme Court.
