Medicare at the point of a gun.

Something truly strange is happening with two supposedly conservative judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit: They are just making up facts on their own, in direct contradiction of the record before them, to protect a government power that no legislation and no formal regulation ever claimed authority to do. In short, these two judges are either incredibly sloppy or, sadly, flat-out dishonest.
The case involves efforts by five plaintiffs to keep private insurance rather than to accept Medicare benefits they do not want. Based on a mere administrative guideline adopted without any formal rule-making, the federal government will not allow somebody to renounce Medicare benefits without also renouncing all the Social Security benefits they earned through a lifetime of work.
Challenging this administrative guideline, the plaintiffs lost 2-1 before a three-judge panel of the appeals court, and then last week the entire court refused to reconsider. Concurring in that denial of review, the two allegedly conservative judges, Brett Kavanaugh and Douglas Ginsburg, wrote an explanation that is false in every respect:

What really seems to be going on in this case is that plaintiffs' private insurers are curtailing coverage because plaintiffs have another source of coverage -- namely, Medicare Part A. Plaintiffs are not happy that their private insurers are in effect penalizing them based on their entitlement to Medicare Part A benefits. Plaintiffs therefore want to "disenroll" from Medicare Part A. They claim a statutory right to "disenroll" and argue that the Department of Health and Human Services and the Social Security Administration have improperly denied them that right…. We obviously cannot do anything here about the coverage practices of private insurers. … To reiterate, no one is forced to take Medicare Part A benefits. But the key problem for plaintiffs is that their private insurers apparently will not ignore the fact that plaintiffs are able to obtain Medicare Part A benefits.

Read more: http://spectator.org/archives/2012/06/07/judges-in-wonderland