TO YOUR HEALTH!

Prez salutes historic win on Obamacare

A LANDMARK SUPREME Court ruling Thursday upheld President Obama’s historic health care law — a stunning decision that will define the 2012 White House race.

The 5-4 decision, unexpected from a court led by conservatives, was a dramatic victory for Obama, who staked much of his term — and his promise to bring change — on passing a complex legislative solution to the nation’s staggering health care woes.

The law’s controversial heart — the individual mandate requiring the overwhelming majority of Americans to have health insurance or face a financial penalty — was deemed a tax and held to be constitutional.

In the decision’s greatest surprise, the tiebreaking vote came from Chief Justice John Roberts, a conservative jurist appointed by President George W. Bush.

“Because the Constitution permits such a tax, it is not our role to forbid it, or to pass upon its wisdom or fairness,” Roberts wrote.

In a televised speech afterward, Obama was measured in discussing the law’s importance.

“This is a victory for people all over the country whose lives are more secure because of this law,” Obama said, acknowledging that his signa

ture domestic achievement is loathed in many quarters.

“It should be pretty clear by now that I didn’t do this because it was good politics,” he added.

“I did it because it was good for the country,” he continued, pivoting to call on Capitol Hill lawmakers to focus on the crucial election-year issue of righting the struggling economy.

The Supreme Court’s decision, predictably, was immediately denounced by the Republican who wants Obama’s job. “Obamacare was bad policy yesterday, it’s bad policy today,” said presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney.

He charged that the bill, the main parts of which go into effect in 2014, “raises taxes on the American people by approximately $500 billion.”

Later, senior Obama administration officials told reporters that the vast majority of Americans would see their taxes go down after the full law is implemented.

Obama’s victory, which sent hospital stocks rising, was a rallying cry for both campaigns — one that was immediately waged through frenzied fundraising efforts.

Disappointed conservatives started pouring money into Romney’s campaign, which said it raised more than $2.5 million by early evening Thursday.

Romney, despite overseeing similar health care legislation while he was governor of Massachusetts, reiterated his pledge to repeal the bill on his first day in office, if elected.

“Our mission is clear,” Romney said. “If we want to get rid of Obamacare, we’re going to have to replace President Obama.”

In the meantime, Romney’s staff needed to tweak his campaign website — it read: “As President, Mitt will nominate judges in the mold of Chief Justice Roberts.”

The justices’ decision — the most important Supreme Court ruling since it decided the contested result of the 2000 presidential election in Bush’s favor — had been awaited for months.

Pundits had wrongly predicted the mandate would fall.

It was designed to remedy a central problem of medical care costs — the shifting of bills racked up by the estimated 50 million uninsured Americans to the insured, inevitably raising premiums.

The required buy-in to the health care market — or fine imposed by the Internal Revenue Service — was the linchpin that promised to raise

enough money to pay for the various other reforms, including a regulation blocking insurance companies from denying coverage to people with preexisting conditions.

The majority rejected the Obama administration’s argument that the mandate was legal under Congress’ power to regulate interstate commerce, reasoning that lawmakers forcing people not involved in commerce to buy something would open a Pandora’s box.

Instead, the majority saw it as a permissible tax levied against the uninsured.

There was initial confusion about the ruling. Obama, watching on CNN, initially believed the mandate was defeated until he was told otherwise by his staff, according to Politico.

The majority backed almost the entire law, which was passed in 2010 and will dramatically change an industry worth $2.7 trillion.

It only knocked down a provision related to the bill’s expansion of Medicaid. The majority held that Congress could not threaten to withhold a state’s current Medicaid funding if it failed to agree to the terms of the program’s expansion.

The ruling will allow millions of people to retain their benefits.

In New York State, more than 150,000 residents under the age of 26 can stay on their parents’ insurance.

And officials in the Empire State said they will continue implementing an insurance exchange, under the law, that is meant to help extend coverage to some 2.9 million New Yorkers now without it.

Yet as Obama hailed the decision as a nationwide victory, the partisan criticism it set off will only increase as the presidential race builds to November.

Most Republicans joined Romney in criticizing the decision.

“Today’s decision makes one thing clear: Congress must act to repeal this misguided law,” said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY).

Sarah Palin tweeted that the mandate-is-a-tax decision showed Obama lied about the bill.

“He said it wasn’t a tax,” she charged. “Obama lies, freedom dies.”

On the other side, one Democrat t went overboard in his exuberance.

“It’s constitutional. B-----s,” tweet--ed Patrick Gaspard of the Democratic c National Committee. He later apolo--gized.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi called the widow of former Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy, who championed health care reform.

“Now, Teddy can rest,” Vicki Kennedy told Pelosi.

Exhibitionist ex-congressman An-thony Weiner also chimed in. In his s first substantive interview since re--signing a year ago, the disgraced d Brooklyn Democrat dropped Fbombs while touting his own work on behalf of the act and blasted Obama’s handling of the debate.

“I think you can count on one hand d the number of barnstorming kind of f events (the White House) did after the e health care law was passed,” Weiner r told The Observer’s Politicker blog.

Meanwhile, Obama said problemsolving must trump politics to implement the bill. “We’ll work together to improve on it where we can, but what we won’t do, what the country can’t afford to do, is refight the political battles of two years ago, or go back to

the way things were.”