Instead of reducing SS benefits for everyone, maybe we could lower the retirement age to 62 with full benefits. This will open up jobs for the unemployed and allow older people to enjoy their retirement.

“This is not about direct religious institutions, such as a church, for which there are already special exemptions”

Why do Religious institutions get special exemptions from this mandate?

How many Catholic Hospitals, schools and charities are self insured?
In other words the Catholic Church is the insurance company that provides insurance for its employees and students.

What is the difference between a Church employing a person as a book keeper, and being able to offer that employee health insurance that is NOT covered by this new mandate. And a Catholic school that hires a book keeper and is self insured, by the Catholic Church but is now required to buy insurance for that employee that IS covered by this mandate?

Aren’t Abortion pills required to be covered by this new mandate?
Abortion is pretty low are your list of acceptable moral behavior.

Is it better to have health insurance that pays for everything except birth control, or to have no insurance at all?
Because if the Catholic Church loses this law suit, it’ll just stop offering health insurance.

I thought President Obama promised if we like our health insurance we could keep it, but now it seems like more and more employers are no longer offering the health insurance we liked.

Wow, so much hate.
It’s a very simple case, which I’m sure the Catholic Church will win.
The Obama Administration has over stepped the line of freedom of religion.
The church is saying we serve all people with our hospitals, schools, and charities, if the government likes the services we provide then they can fund them, if not don’t fund them, but the government can’t tell us to change what we do.
The article takes about control.
Why would President Obama want to fight this battle?
Women can buy birth control pills, or condoms at any drug store.
Is this fight worth the cost of birth control?
or is President Obama the one who wants to control what everyone in this country can do, including religious institutions.
As for the compromise solution, many Catholic organizations are self insured. So saying the insurance company will pay the cost, doesn’t help them, they will still pay the cost. But even if they are not self insured, by offering a health insurance plan that included birth control would be the same as endorsing the use of birth control.
Can you imagine if the Government said cigarettes are bad for you and will cause cancer, and then mandating that cigarette companies give free samples to everyone in the country everyday of the year, forever!
Do you think smoking would go up? or down? after all some people already smoke, and the government is telling them not to do it.
kind of a mixed message isn’t it?

You’re so right.
I think President Obama is just holding another fundraiser, but this time it’s in the White House! How many fundraisers are enough???
Why isn’t the Senate voting on these Judges?

At least the GOP says what their priorities are, I have no idea what President Obama is going to do if he wins this election. Clearly the Senate Dems need a plan to move Forward. I wonder if we’ll see it before the Election.

Capper good job on reporting the actual numbers! . . .
Although I must admit I’m a little baffled. You’re saying that Walker cut income taxes a little bit, but he more than made up for that by increasing fees and property taxes, Then you say he cut spending on a bunch of programs.
So how does it all add up? if he cut spending and raised taxes and fees, shouldn’t the State be running a surplus by now?
Where is all this new tax money being spent?
Do you have a pie chart showing where the budget was cut and where it was increased?
I think that would help us make sense of it all.
Thanks for the report, and the real numbers.

The decision was made today! all 9 judges meet in a room on the Friday after oral arguements and vote, then it takes 2 or 3 months for the decision to be written. The rumor today is that they voted 6-3 in favor of the ACA being consitutional. This will shock the nation when it’s read in late June.

This is going to be a very strange article when we read in June how the Supreme Court upheld the ACA as legal!
Kennedy and Roberts are going to side with the Liberals to make it a 6-3 decision in total support of Obamacare.
All the so called news networks missed the point of the questioning of what to do if the mandate is removed. They wanted to hear that the law would fall apart, so therefore they WON’T rule it unconsitutional.

As for the Mandate being a Republican idea, that’s true, but the Dems in the house and President Obama twisted it into a way to spend more money on healthcare.
The GOP Mandate idea was that if everyone bought some form of healthcare policy from a private insurance company, the cost of insurance would drop, because some of the newly insured would not use their healthcare insurance.
The Dems and Pres Obama said Okay, if the insurance industry is going to get increased profits from this mandate, then we will require the insurance to cover more things for free (birth control, preventive care, etc.) so now the insurance companies are realizing they can’t cut their cost and provide the free coverage, so they are increasing the cost.
The ACA doesn’t have a way to stop the insurance industry from raising the cost of insurance whenever they think they are not making enough of a profit. . . I’m not sure why there was not cost containment put into the law, but maybe that will come in the future.

Don’t you people know this problem was already solved???
June 3, 2008.
“We will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on earth.”

I think it’s pretty simply. Taxes are applied to things to “do” and a “penalty” is applied to things you “didn’t” do. So I believe the Court will rule that not buying insurance is a penalty.

This is a honest budget from the GOP point of view, it slowly brings the budget into balance (35 years) while cutting tax Rates, not tax Revenue. What we need now is a honest budget from the Dems in the Senate or from President Obama that brings the budget into balance.
Then the congress can hammer out a middle path to a balanced budget.
We have to stop growing the debt!
The interest we pay on that debt is going to bankrupt this country!
We all know that Obamacare is already going to cut medicare by 500 billion over 10 years, and that only the oldest and sickest people will be left on medicare, so it’s actual cost will rise out of control, causing a big problem in the near future.
We need a single payer system that allows for flexiblity in healthcare plans!

The ACA is a very bad law, it’s thousands of pages, and all it does stift the payments to insurance companies from the government to the people.
It could’ve been written in one sentence.

“Everyone must buy health insurance, and health insurance policies must cover all basic healthcare needs.”

What we really need is a single payer system.

The Church is still against civil unions.
“HB 437 falls into a category of legislation which the US Bishops have previously considered: bills in civil law which may not reflect the fullness of the Church’s teaching, but which nonetheless provide an “incremental improvement” in the current law and a “step toward full restoration of justice.”

It is crazy that the president can’t get a program together to help underwater borrowers. The banks have way to much power, it’s time to reign them in. . . No money to either party until this mess is fixed!

The logic used in this article is all backwards. . .
1) the Catholic Church is stating their position very clearly. They are against changing marriage.
They predicted exactly what would happen if civil unions were made legal, so they were against them. Now that civil unions have turned into same sex marriage, the Church is supporting a bill that will reverse same sex marriage, and reinstitute civil unions as one step in the right direction. Then as judy replied above the Church will support a bill to remove civil unions. They are very consistant. As for the arguement that “Christ preached against the man orchestrated laws of the Pharises and the scribes” an arguement can be made that the Natural law of marriage is heterosexual, and the “man orchestrated laws” are these new same sex marriage laws.

The polygamy arguement used in this way is new to me, usually I see people who are against same sex marriage saying that the next step will be to legalize polygamy. Now you’re arguing that polygamy is legel in some countries, and the Catholic Church doesn’t try to change those laws, so same sex marriage should also be legal, and the Catholic Church should not say anything against it.
This issue of same sex marriage is being discussed and voted on in many US States today, so the Catholic Church is letting their position on this issue known.
As for polygamy, the Catholic Church is against it, and makes that stand public when that issue comes up for a vote in any country in the world.

I’ve seen on this web-site and at the Huffington post, and at different Newspapers all across the country that 98% of women use birth control at some point in their life. . .
How is it possible that 98% of women use bith control, yet “access” is so limited that we have to mandate that it be covered in every health insurance policy? This will increase the cost for everyone, even people that don’t want this coverage (old people, people under 10 years old, married couples trying to get pregnant, asexual people… etc).
Why doesn’t the President just mandate that all Drug Stores have to give condoms and birth control pills to all their customers?
Can’t you see that the Drug stores would have to increase their prices on everything else or go out of business?
In California we can go on-line and order “free of charge” 10 condoms per month, delivered to your home (State and Federal funded program).
Public Schools give away condoms, Planned Parenthood provides free birth control.
I stand by my statement that access to birth control is not a problem in this country, and this new policy will only serve to increase the cost of insurance.

you have to be joking, right?
Right now everyone has access to birth control, correct?
Can we all agree on that?
I mean how can you have 98% of women using birth control if they can’t get it?
Now the President wants to change the law, and demand that every employer in the country provide birth control in all their insurance plans.
I’m not sure what sense this makes to him or anyone else, but that is the fact of the matter.
Some people are old, I mean way past the age of needing this in their health insurance plan, but it’ll be there because this President says it has to be, and those people will have to pay extra to have it there.
Again you are all being blinded by religion!
Please try to remove your blinders and see the true issue here.

Are you kidding me!!! . . . What has become of the defenders of Freedom? Has the fact that this is about religious freedom blinded you???
How can you say it’s unfair that some employees will recieve health care insurance that covers birth control and other employees of religious run companies won’t?
Should we also due away with Labor Unions because they negotiate better health care coverage for their members? Isn’t that unfair to the non labor union workers? or even to the workers who belong to a different Labor Union that isn’t as good of a negotiator???
And how about conscientious objectors??? should they be forced to fight in our wars to?
This is about our freedoms, not just religious groups, but everyone must not be forced by the government to pay for something we don’t want, or to buy something we don’t want.

This problem is easy to solve:
Didn’t President Obama just tell the Health insurance companies they would have to provide some services for free?
Why can’t he just tell the Oil companies they will have to provide gas at $3 a gallon?
Another thing the President can do is nationalize the Oil industry, why are they allowed to make such large profits?