Here's an excerpt:
While the lawyers argue over hopelessly arcane points of law and the judges issue dueling opinions, Obama administration apparatchiks will be working furiously behind the scenes to implement Obamacare. They have already introduced a voracious tape worm of regulations that will wind itself so thoroughly around the entrails of the health care system that removal will be a virtual impossibility in a year or so.The landscape of medical practice is changing dramatically, as a result of such legal and economic pressures for doctors and hospitals to consolidate into large impersonal Accountable Care Organizations.
The latest example can be found in the rules promulgated by CMS administrator Donald Berwick concerning Accountable Care Organizations (ACO), the government's latest rebranding of the old HMO gambit. Although the section of the law calling for the creation of ACOs is a mere six pages long, Berwick's bureaucrats transmuted them into no fewer than 429 pages of regulations.
As the New York Times recently reported, this will lead to the withering away of solo and small primary practices.
Basically, the government is dictating the business model and the practice patterns of American medicine. And as Catron notes:
If Obamacare has another year to metastasize, it may well be impossible to eradicate the disease without killing or at least badly maiming the patient. In fact, it is conceivable that the DOJ will make that very argument when the case finally arrives before the Court, betting that the justices will be loath to strike down Obamacare -- or even the individual mandate -- knowing that such a ruling would create chaos in the midst of an election year.(Read the full text of "Supreme Court Allows Obamacare to Metastasize".)
Hence, the importance of continued grass-roots educational and political efforts to slow down and/or "defund" the implementation as much as possible in the upcoming year...
