To borrow the left’s nightmare rhetoric, Obamacare is Gitmo for all Americans.

Tucked into several pages of this epic monstrosity (H.R. 3200 is here—if you can get it to load) are various “limitation on review” provisions. They are designed to vest President Obama with unilateral, non-appealable control over available treatments and their costs. That is, Americans will have no recourse to challenge errant or capricious executive-branch decisions in the courts.

For example, let’s say you’re hospitalized for some condition or procedure and are discharged, but you relapse and need to go back to the hospital. Not so fast. Under Democratic health-care reform, the government will be rationing ho...

To borrow the left’s nightmare rhetoric, Obamacare is Gitmo for all Americans.

Tucked into several pages of this epic monstrosity (H.R. 3200 is here—if you can get it to load) are various “limitation on review” provisions. They are designed to vest President Obama with unilateral, non-appealable control over available treatments and their costs. That is, Americans will have no recourse to challenge errant or capricious executive-branch decisions in the courts.

For example, let’s say you’re hospitalized for some condition or procedure and are discharged, but you relapse and need to go back to the hospital. Not so fast. Under Democratic health-care reform, the government will be rationing hospital treatment. You will not be readmitted unless Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius (or one of her anonymous minions) has decided enough people suffering the same ailment have been discharged — freeing up whatever HHS, in its infinite wisdom, sees as adequate resources to allow you a second bite at the apple.

To what conditions or procedures does this rule apply? As Duke professor John David Lewis notes, it’s any “condition or procedure selected by the Secretary.” As if that weren’t bad enough: The bill states that “there shall be no administrative or judicial review” of the readmissions measures. It’s the Sebelius way or the highway.

Now, as Professor Lewis is the first to say, he’s not a lawyer or a physician. He’s just a concerned American who has actually read the bill, giving him two legs up on congressional Democrats. The latter are neither as concerned as they were when it was al-Qaeda’s wings being clipped nor of a mind that lawmakers should actually read the laws they make.


An unchecked executive tosses Americans into a legal black hole.