I am stunned

I try to stay away from politics, but this is just too much. The usual post will be up on Monday.

The US supreme court (notice the lower case letters) just declared Obamacare (HR 3590, I have the full text if anyone's interested, as passed. All 1290 pages of it.) constitutional in a split vote that needed a tie breaker.

According to the wording of this new "law," the federal government now has the right to withhold funding on other items if the states do not comply, and everything is left entirely to the discretion of a presidential appointed official, a Secretary who remains otherwise unidentified. I can find no oversight by the congress in the law.

This Secretary has the right to shut down a company if the company does not comply, based entirely on the decisions of that same official or those s/he appoints. Any appeals will go to the Secretary who made the decision in the first place, and the burden of proof lies with the accused. If they shut your company down, it's up to you to prove that it shouldn't be shut down, and the Secretary makes the decision as to whether s/he will hear the appeal.

They have the right to dictate how any company does business, what insurance they carry and how much that insurance costs. Exceptions are made at the whim of "the Secretary."

They have the right to dictate to any and every organization what they will and will not cover for their plan participants. They have the right to tell people what kind of medical care they will have, who will administer it, and if people CHOOSE not to comply they can be jailed or fined.

Health care providers will be required to pay an additional fee each year to stay in business. They make it impossible for health care providers to function, but if they've gotten their education through federal loans they'll be socked with an additional 2% annual interest if they don't work in the field for ten years.

The only companies relatively unaffected will be those with fewer than 50 employees (they are exempt from certain provisions of the law). The rest will deal with fines, additional taxes and endless red tape from a bill that our DEAR representatives said they didn't have time to read!

Many of the mid-sized companies simply will not be able to afford to continue. They will shut their doors, fold, leaving their employees out of work. Or sell out to the big companies that will promptly send the work overseas.

Insurance costs will go up, even as employers and others gravitate to the lowest possible level of coverage--the minimum mandated by the law. I've seen this before.

I can pretty well guarantee that there will be a decrease in permanent employees and an increase in temporary employees or contractors, as temporary employees are treated differently under the law.

And they'll take money from Medicare and Social Security to pay for it all.

All we can do at this point is pray, because it's not in our hands any longer. Most of the people in the US DO NOT support this, but our lawmakers apparently don't care. Not about their constituents, not about ethics or morality or personal choice--none of it.