Affordable Care Act is a RIGHT not a previllage!

Most civilized nations provide health care coverage for it's citizens. America is finally moving in a direction where it's citizens will have access to health care outside of their employer. The health care law we have is far from perfect, a single payer plan would have been better. The Supreme Court to my surprise did the right thing in upholding the law.  Therefore today is a historical day!  The health care decision announced this morning by Supreme Court and the Individual Mandate Survives: The individual health insurance mandate is constitutional, the Supreme Court ruled today, upholding the central provision of President Barack Obama's signature Affordable Care Act.

The Affordable Care Act, including its individual mandate that virtually all Americans buy health insurance, is constitutional. There were not five votes to uphold it on the ground that Congress could use its power to regulate commerce between the states to require everyone to buy health insurance. However, five Justices agreed that the penalty that someone must pay if he refuses to buy insurance is a kind of tax that Congress can impose using its taxing power. That is all that matters. Because the mandate survives, the Court did not need to decide what other parts of the statute were constitutional, except for a provision that required states to comply with new eligibility requirements for Medicaid or risk losing their funding. On that question, the Court held that the provision is constitutional as long as states would only lose new funds if they didn't comply with the new requirements, rather than all of their funding.

The president, for his part, used his address to detail the policy prescriptions within the law -- an implicit recognition that the administration has done a poor job selling it to date.

"It should be pretty clear that I didn't do this because it's good politics," Obama said. "I did it because it's good for the country." Barack Obama also addressed the court's decision to uphold the most controversial component of the bill, the individual mandate, arguing that it was essential to making the rest of the reforms work. He acknowledged that he himself had once opposed the idea, only to come around. The president added that conservatives, including Romney, had supported the concept in the past.

The biggest and most obvious remaining hurdle for the ACA is the uncertainty between here and 2014 in particular if Mitt Romney wins and Republicans wind up with unified control of Congress, there’s every possibility that he law could still be entirely repealed meaning none of the 30 something million Americans expected to gain coverage under the law get it. But even if that doesn’t happen: what remains is a lot of trench warfare. The Court supplied the states with even more room to fight against reform than they already had.  Insurance companies and other interest groups can appeal to regulators in the executive branch or to Congress to defeat specific provisions they don’t like — and that hasn’t changed today. Those two things could, together, wind up undermining the law, especially under a President Romney, even if the votes aren’t there for full repeal. But again the particular roulette wheel that began spinning when Republicans took to the courts to invalidate the Affordable Care Act has come to a stop. And the Richters have won. They can finally uncross their fingers. 

One last point to focus on now we are about to face with the largest middle class tax increase in history of our country, levied just because you breath.  This consequence will always form the questions around "is this the most intelligently designed legislation or not". Clearly it does not address the underlying causes of health care inflation. It does greatly empower the IRS to collect this tax.  The idea that you pay really high premiums because of the uninsured is BS and Obama, Pelosi and Reid know it but lack the integrity to be honest about it.