Transcript of David Rivkin’s appearance on Bill Bennett’s Morning in America radio show on November 18, 2013.

BILL BENNETT: David, it looks like the President lied [when he said], “if you like your plan you can keep it.” Is there any way to take legal action against the President’s administration or HHS [Dept. of Health and Human Services] for this deception?

DAVID RIVKIN: Well no, if somebody in the private sector has done that, there will be all sorts of criminal and civil options, but you cannot prosecute the President under any of those statutes. The price that he has to pay is the political price and, unfortunately, he’s not going to pay the full price, given the way the media and national Democrats are looking at it. It also, frankly, further undermines the trust of the American people in the government.
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David Rivkin appeared on the Opinion Journal Live to further discuss his previous Wall Street Journal article that explained President Obama’s suspension of the ObamaCare employer mandate.  Specifically, in the video Rivkin spoke about how this suspension will open the door to millions of Americans incurring a legal standing to sue.

To watch the video directly on the Opinion Journal, CLICK HERE >>

By: David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey

President Obama’s announcement on July 2 that he is suspending the Affordable Care Act’s employer health-insurance mandate may well have exposed his actions to judicial review—even though that is clearly what he sought to avoid.

The health-care reform law’s employer mandate requires businesses with more than 50 employees to provide a congressionally prescribed set of health-insurance benefits or pay a penalty calculated at about $2,000 per employee. The law was to take effect on Jan. 1, 2014, but Mr. Obama has “postponed” its application until 2015. His aim, the administration said, was to give employers more time to comply with the new rules. But it was also seen as a way to avoid paying at least part of ObamaCare’s mounting political price in the 2014 congressional elections.

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David Rivkin appeared on Bloomberg TV with infectious disease and public health specialist Celine Gounder, and Bloomberg’s Shannon Pettypiece and Pimm Fox to talk about the future of Medicaid expansion and the Affordable Care Act.

To watch the entire clip on Bloomberg TV, CLICK HERE >>

The ‘death panel’ is a new beast, with god-like powers. Congress should repeal it or test its constitutionality.

By David B. Rivkin Jr. and Elizabeth P. Foley

Signs of ObamaCare’s failings mount daily, including soaring insurance costs, looming provider shortages and inadequate insurance exchanges. Yet the law’s most disturbing feature may be the Independent Payment Advisory Board. The IPAB, sometimes called a “death panel,” threatens both the Medicare program and the Constitution’s separation of powers. At a time when many Americans have been unsettled by abuses at the Internal Revenue Service and Justice Department, the introduction of a powerful and largely unaccountable board into health care merits special scrutiny.

For a vivid illustration of the extent to which life-and-death medical decisions have already been usurped by government bureaucrats, consider the recent refusal by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to waive the rules barring access by 10-year old Sarah Murnaghan to the adult lung-transplant list. A judge ultimately intervened and Sarah received a lifesaving transplant June 12. But the grip of the bureaucracy will clamp much harder once the Independent Payment Advisory Board gets going in the next two years.

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By defining the mandate as a tax, one that will not be uniformly applied, the Supreme Court ran afoul of the Constitution.

By David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey

ObamaCare is being implemented, having been upheld as constitutional by the Supreme Court in June in a series of cases now known as National Federation of Independent Business v. HHS. It is becoming increasingly clear, however, that the court took a law that was flawed but potentially workable and transformed it into one that is almost certainly unworkable. More important, the justices also may have created new and fatal constitutional problems.

ObamaCare, or the Affordable Care Act, was conceived as a complex statutory scheme designed to provide Americans with near-universal health-care coverage and to effectively federalize the nation’s health-care system. The law’s core provision was an individual health-insurance purchase mandate, adopted by Congress as a “regulation” of interstate commerce. The provision required most Americans to buy federally determined minimum health-care insurance, or to pay a penalty more or less equivalent to the cost of that coverage.

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