Pete Nicolosi & Associates Blog

By not buying DI insurance, this cancer survivor lost everything he worked for.

 

At 35, my life couldn't have been better I was happy, healthy and successful, with a beautiful wife, two wonderful kids and a six figure income. Some days, it felt life my life had come straight out of central casting from a Hollywood film!

THINGS FALL APART!

But then, my beautiful life fell apart. In 2003 I was diagnosed with brain cancer. My surgeon removed the tumor, but the surgery set off epileptic seizures. A second surgery to correct these seizures caused a massive stroke, which left me partially blind and paralyzed in one arm and one leg. Brain cancer, epileptic seizures and a stroke followed.

After that, life got really difficult. And I was the only person to blame for my financial disaster. You see, "I didn't check the box..."

CLICK HERE for the full article.

FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES – Sunday, August 31, 2014

 

The opponents of the Affordable Care Act make no secret of their consuming hatred for the law that has already provided health care to millions of lower-income people.

From the beginning, they have tried everything they could to kill it. As one conservative scholar, Michael Greve, said in 2010: “I do not care how this is done, whether it’s dismembered, whether we drive a stake through its heart, whether we tar and feather it and drive it out of town, whether we strangle it.” Yet the challengers keep losing in Congress and in court.

The latest jerry-built effort to destroy health care reform could be defeated in the full federal appeals court in the District of Columbia. In July, a three-judge panel of that court — taking a ridiculously crabbed view of a section in the law — ruled 2-to-1 that tax-credit subsidies are allowed only for those buying insurance on a health exchange “established by the state.” Therefore, it said, no subsidies for people in 36 states where the federal government set up the exchange because the states refused to do so.

There is no evidence that Congress intended to make this distinction, which defies the law’s central purpose. In fact, this argument was rejected unanimously by a three-judge panel of the federal appeals court in Virginia.

Now the fight has shifted to an arcane legal debate over whether the full appeals court in the District of Columbia should rehear the case or allow it to be appealed directly to the Supreme Court.

The law’s defenders would prefer a rehearing. They are confident that the full court, with a majority of judges appointed by Democratic presidents, would overturn the panel’s ruling. The opponents want to fast-track the case to the Supreme Court, hoping that the five conservative justices will uphold the ruling. They argue that there should be no rehearing because the case is not of “exceptional importance,” one factor the appeals court considers in deciding whether to order a rehearing.

The stakes here are high, since the Supreme Court is almost certain to step in when different federal appeals courts reach opposing results on the same question. If the full D.C. appeals court were to overturn the panel’s ruling, there would be less reason for the Supreme Court to get involved. But the legal maneuvering should not obscure the fact that six of the eight federal judges who have considered the challengers’ subsidy claim have seen right through it.