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.
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