Supreme Court rules insurers can collect $12 billion under health care law

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that insurance companies can collect $12 billion from the federal government to cover their losses in the early years of the health care law championed by President Barack Obama.

Insurers are entitled to the money under a provision of the “Obamacare” health law that promised the companies a financial cushion for losses they might incur by selling coverage to people in the marketplaces created by the health care law, the justices said by an 8-1 vote.

The program only lasted three years, but Congress inserted a provision in the Health and Human Services Department’s spending bills from 2015 to 2017 to limit payments under the “risk corridors” program. Both the Obama and Trump administrations had argued that the provision means the government has no obligation to pay.

But Justice Sonia Sotomayor said in her opinion for the court that the congressional action was not sufficient to repeal the government’s commitment to pay. “These holdings reflect a principle as old as the

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/supreme-court-rules-insurers-can-collect-12-billion-under-health-care-law

U.S. Policy for Gitmo Lawyers Is Abusive to Detainees, Judge Finds

How long are "We" going to keep them?
Until they die?

A federal judge slammed the Obama administration on Thursday for its "untenable" exercise of executive power with regard to Guantanamo Bay detainees.
"Eleven years after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center and the subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, 168 people captured in the Global War on Terrorism remain detained at the United States Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba," the 32-page opinion begins.
U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth called it a "sad reality" that "not a single one of has been fully tried or convicted of any crime" for more than a decade.
"Despite this, the government has fought to deny detainees the ability to challenge their indefinite detentions through habeas proceedings," Lamberth wrote. "In a litany of rulings, this court and the Supreme Court have affirmed that the federal courts are open to Guantanamo detainees who wish to prove that their indefinite detentions are illegal."
In 2008, the Supreme Court's watershed ruling in Boumediene v. Bush guaranteed habeas proceedings for detainees to challenge their detentions.
As a result of that ruling, U.S. District Judge Thomas Hogan, Lamberth's colleague, issued a "Protective Order and Procedures for Counsel Access to Detainees" outlining how lawyers for detainees could access classified information.
"Despite the fact that the government never opposed the protective order or brought

Obama administration backs Vatican in pedophile case

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=CNG.48ccbdeaaf685b4c112dc4554a808ca0.961&show_article=1

Holy Hypocrites
All take and no give

The Obama administration in a brief to the Supreme Court has backed the Vatican's claim of immunity from lawsuits arising from cases of sexual abuse by priests in the United States.
The Supreme Court is considering an appeal by the Vatican of an appellate court ruling that lifted its immunity in the case of an alleged pedophile priest from Oregon.

In a filing on Friday, the solicitor general's office argued that the Ninth Circuit court of appeals erred in allowing the lawsuit brought by a man who claims he was sexually abused in the 1960s by the Oregon priest.

The unnamed plaintiff, who cited the Holy See and several other parties as defendants, argued the Vatican should be held responsible for transferring the priest to Oregon and letting him serve there despite previous accusations he had abused children in Chicago and in Ireland

But the Vatican plans to argue that Catholic dioceses are run as separate entities from the Holy See, and that the only authority that the pontiff has over bishops around the world is a religious one, according to Jeffrey Lena, the Vatican's US attorney.

In recent months, large-scale pedophilia scandals have rocked the Roman Catholic Church in a number of countries, including Austria, Ireland, Pope Benedict XVI's native Germany and the United States.

Senior clerics have been accused of protecting the priests involved by moving them to other parishes -- where they sometimes offended again -- instead of handing them over to civil authorities for prosecution.

The pope, who has himself faced allegations implicating him in the scandal, has repeatedly said priests and religious workers guilty of child abuse should answer for their crimes in courts of law.

Fed Shouldn’t Reveal Crisis Loans, Banks Vow to Tell High Court

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=ax8ulGXswn4E

Now I ask myself, what is it that the FED and friends have hidden that will still cause a run on the banks 3 years later, for them to be going to all of this trouble to keep it hidden.
With the outing of repo 105 and the fraudulent accounting methods of Washington Mutual and Lehman, I can't help but thinking what's hidden under the FED's bed is very distasteful and definitely not a socially acceptable practice, and as taxpayers who bailed them all out I believe we have a right to know, exactly what that practice was.

April 14 (Bloomberg) -- The biggest U.S. commercial banks will take their fight against disclosure of Federal Reserve lending in 2008 to the Supreme Court if necessary, the top lawyer for an industry-owned group said.

Continued legal appeals will delay or block the first public look at details of the central bank’s $2 trillion in emergency lending during the 2008 financial crisis. The Clearing House Association LLC, a group that includes Bank of America Corp. and JPMorgan Chase & Co., joined the Fed in defense of a lawsuit brought by Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News, seeking release of records related to four Fed lending programs.

The U.S. Court of Appeals in Manhattan ruled March 19 that the central bank must release the documents. A three-judge panel of the appellate court rejected the Fed’s argument that disclosure would stigmatize borrowers and discourage banks from seeking emergency help.

“Our member banks are very concerned about real-time disclosure of information that could cause a run on the banks,” said Paul Saltzman, the group’s general counsel, in an interview yesterday. “We’re not going to let the Second Circuit opinion stand without seeking a review.”

Regardless of whether the Fed appeals, the Clearing House will take the next legal step by asking for a review by the full appellate court, Saltzman, 49, said at his office in New York. If the ruling is unfavorable, the bank group will petition the Supreme Court, he said.