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DaveE

SCOTUS Health Care debate

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You are wrong about whether you can be forced to buy health insurance. You are paying for insurance now for when you are 65. It is called Medicare and it is well within the prerogative of the federal government to do this. The ACA differs only in involving the private insurance companies rather than it being federally run medicare for all.

Your hypocrite repubs talk out of both sides of their mouth. They are very eager to privatise medicare, yet they oppose Obamacare because it requires purchase of a service from a private company. If it were Medicare they could not oppose it on these grounds. Of course, one may rightfully wonder if their objective in seeing medicare privatised is so that they can then attack it on constitutional grounds and have it overturned. They have historically always been opposed to it as well as that other socialist program, Social Security!

I am not wrong. The SCOTUS will overturn om forcing of buying a product. Medicare (Which I personally think is unconstitutional) is an insurance through the Feds like Social Security. Here you have the Feds telling citizens must purchase a product from one of the many insurers. Now I personally think if the Feds had gone single payer then it might have flown but they didn't. Of course we know why. Want me to post the links again showing all the health coverage insurers money going to all the Socialists in campaign funds?

If SCOTUS does say that it is Constitutional then within a few years we will have the Feds forcing citizens to purchase other products.

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Not really...

You are right that there actually are some people that will never, ever seek health care for themselves or their families no matter what! Everyone has a right to be stupid I guess. That is why an idea I came to and that a lot of others are coming to as well might be the best solution. Stop allowing the free-loaders to get care in ER's if they have no insurance or the cash to pay at time of service! As has been pointed out there has been a mandate in place for many years requiring hospitals to treat emergency conditions regardless of ability to pay. This would no longer be necessary if the ACA, minus the individual mandate, were to be in full effect. Insurance would be available and affordable to all. Most people would not be so stupid and bull-headed about purchasing insurance if they knew health-care would not be available to them in an emergency until they could scrape together the thousands of dollars such care often costs! And for the ones that are that stupid, let them get Darwin awards!

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I am not wrong. The SCOTUS will overturn om forcing of buying a product. Medicare (Which I personally think is unconstitutional) is an insurance through the Feds like Social Security. Here you have the Feds telling citizens must purchase a product from one of the many insurers. Now I personally think if the Feds had gone single payer then it might have flown but they didn't. Of course we know why. Want me to post the links again showing all the health coverage insurers money going to all the Socialists in campaign funds?

If SCOTUS does say that it is Constitutional then within a few years we will have the Feds forcing citizens to purchase other products.

:no: So you actually believe your repubs would vote in favor of 'single-payer'?! That I find hard to believe.

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While I was so hoping for a single payer system like the U.K.'s, I knew that would not happen in the Land of the Brave and Free where more people go bankrupt due to medical emergencies than anywhere else in the world. What I was hoping for was the public option, where I and my family could buy affordable health care. Didn't happen either. What did happen, kind of, was Obamacare with the mandate. While that's just a very sad plan, it's a gazillion times better than what we have now.

Let me explain.

Because of one reading of high blood pressure when having a medical right after gulping down my quad grande mocha from Starbucks back in 2004, I am now in a "high risk" group. I don't think I have cost my insurance company more than $2,500 since 1991 (!), when I first purchased insurance in the U.S., yet I have to pay $1,247 per month. My wife, 49, pays $949, and my daughter pays $157. Together the three of us pay $2, 353.00 per month, or $28,236.00 per year. Can I afford this? No, but I also cannot afford not to have this, because if I get a heart attack or a stroke or anything really bad happens to any of us, I would lose everything: my home, my business . . . everything I own!

With the mandate of Obamacare in place, the same coverage would be limited to 20% of my income. That means, instead of $28,236 I "only" had to pay $10,000 if I made $50K per year, $12,000 if I made $60K per year, $16K if I made $80K per year, or $20K if I made $100K per year. In order to break even, my income had to be $140,118.00.

I wish!

Thus, you may understand that as much as I'm unhappy with many things Obama did, as unhappy as I am with the current form of Obamacare, I so very much hope that it will become law. Please imagine YOU would have to pay $2,000 per month for health care, despite the fact that you are healthy. Would you still curse the darn "Obamacare" that requires us to spend up to 20% of our income on full health insurance coverage? Really? Perhaps you do, 'cause you are in your mid-20s, or 30s. But you will get older, and eventually you may get sick. And eventually you'll risk to lose everything you had worked for so hard all of your life. And that's when you wish you had Obamacare!

There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. When I refer to hyphenated Americans, I do not refer to naturalized Americans. Some of the very best Americans I have ever known were naturalized Americans, Americans born abroad. But a hyphenated American is not an American at all . . . . The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian-Americans or Italian-Americans, each preserving its separate nationality, each at heart feeling more sympathy with Europeans of that nationality, than with the other citizens of the American Republic . . . . There is no such thing as a hyphenated American who is a good American. The only man who is a good American is the man who is an American and nothing else.

President Teddy Roosevelt on Columbus Day 1915

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While I was so hoping for a single payer system like the U.K.'s, I knew that would not happen in the Land of the Brave and Free where more people go bankrupt due to medical emergencies than anywhere else in the world. What I was hoping for was the public option, where I and my family could buy affordable health care. Didn't happen either. What did happen, kind of, was Obamacare with the mandate. While that's just a very sad plan, it's a gazillion times better than what we have now.

Let me explain.

Because of one reading of high blood pressure when having a medical right after gulping down my quad grande mocha from Starbucks back in 2004, I am now in a "high risk" group. I don't think I have cost my insurance company more than $2,500 since 1991 (!), when I first purchased insurance in the U.S., yet I have to pay $1,247 per month. My wife, 49, pays $949, and my daughter pays $157. Together the three of us pay $2, 353.00 per month, or $28,236.00 per year. Can I afford this? No, but I also cannot afford not to have this, because if I get a heart attack or a stroke or anything really bad happens to any of us, I would lose everything: my home, my business . . . everything I own!

With the mandate of Obamacare in place, the same coverage would be limited to 20% of my income. That means, instead of $28,236 I "only" had to pay $10,000 if I made $50K per year, $12,000 if I made $60K per year, $16K if I made $80K per year, or $20K if I made $100K per year. In order to break even, my income had to be $140,118.00.

I wish!

Thus, you may understand that as much as I'm unhappy with many things Obama did, as unhappy as I am with the current form of Obamacare, I so very much hope that it will become law. Please imagine YOU would have to pay $2,000 per month for health care, despite the fact that you are healthy. Would you still curse the darn "Obamacare" that requires us to spend up to 20% of our income on full health insurance coverage? Really? Perhaps you do, 'cause you are in your mid-20s, or 30s. But you will get older, and eventually you may get sick. And eventually you'll risk to lose everything you had worked for so hard all of your life. And that's when you wish you had Obamacare!

But why pay for health insurance if it isn't a necessity?

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:no: So you actually believe your repubs would vote in favor of 'single-payer'?! That I find hard to believe.

Many GOP pukes are Socialist. The GOP has no problem voting a Socialist program like single payer. If they had not stood together against single payer they would have lost the Mid Terms. As it stands now the GOP is hoping the Supreme Court overturns this issue. They could then hammer big time the Dems and would maybe take both houses and the Presidency. We will get single payer and SCOTUS will say that it is Constitutional. This is all a friggin game. Y'all are sheep and buying this ####### is what pisses me off. So get over it.

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But why pay for health insurance if it isn't a necessity?

I have always worked hard for everything and earned it. I always have a decent paying job with good to great benefits. I was raised to be this way. You apparently was raised differently. That is OK though.

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I have always worked hard for everything and earned it. I always have a decent paying job with good to great benefits. I was raised to be this way. You apparently was raised differently. That is OK though.

Wut?

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This is an interesting read from Duke University's Neil Siegal, a constitutional scholar. Ultimately, it won't matter what legal scholars think since this will be decided by SCOTUS, however, it does indicate that the argument is there to support the mandate on constitutional grounds.

Finding Commerce Clause support for the individual mandate

On the merits, the debate over the minimum coverage provision centers primarily on its constitutionality under the Commerce Clause, either alone or combined with the Necessary and Proper Clause. Under current doctrine, the Commerce Clause permits Congress to regulate the channels and instrumentalities of interstate commerce, and economic activities that substantially affect interstate commerce.

Considerable debate has centered on whether Congress has the authority to regulate "inactivity" in the health insurance market — that is, an individual's choice to not purchase something. The distinction between the regulation of "inactivity" and "activity" lies at the heart of the challenges to the minimum coverage provision and the current circuit split; the Eleventh Circuit ruled the purchase mandate unconstitutional, while the Sixth and District of Columbia Circuits upheld it.

"Critics who say Congress is improperly regulating inactivity are focusing on activity in the insurance market," Siegel says. "But Congress was focused on the health care market as well, and almost all people are or eventually will be active in the health care market. The two markets are closely connected — health care is overwhelmingly financed by health insurance. And you can be completely inactive in both markets for the time being and still benefit from the existence of the health care infrastructure." ACA critics agree that once an individual participates in the health care market, Congress can mandate insurance as a condition of participation, he adds.

But, Siegel argues, the emphasis should not be on the distinction between inactivity and activity. Congress is regulating economic subject matter with the ACA, he maintains, as an individual's decision to purchase or not to purchase health insurance is itself an economic decision about how to manage substantial financial risk.

The key federalism question, he says, is whether these economic problems are better dealt with by the states acting on their own, or via collective action among the states generally. "Are there good reasons to think Congress is better situated to deal with this than the states are? That's the central question under the Commerce Clause."

Reining in health care "free riders"

Siegel calls on earlier scholarly work to characterize the challenges in the interstate health care market as classic "collective action" problems worthy of federal intervention; the economic behavior of individuals — choosing not to purchase health insurance, for example — affects the welfare of others across state lines.

Congress, he says, sought with the minimum coverage provision to curb two problems of economic free-riding that spill over state boundaries: "cost-shifting" and "adverse selection" in the health care and health insurance markets.

"As a matter of federal and state law and as a matter of longstanding charitable practice, we don't let people die in the streets," he says. "When people come to the emergency room very ill or injured, we treat first and ask about insurance later." Each year, uninsured Americans obtain more than $40 billion worth of medical services, he points out. "Those costs are shifted from the uninsured to the insured, to federal and state governments, to insurance companies and providers, and other participants in the health care system."

The adverse selection problem arises when people delay purchasing insurance until they are ill. "Without the minimum coverage provision, people have every incentive to wait and delay getting insurance until they are sick," says Siegel, who adds that the ACA exacerbates the problem by prohibiting insurers from denying coverage based on preexisting conditions. "It's basically insurance on demand."

Addressing the "slippery slope"

Siegel disagrees with the assertions of ACA critics that "if Congress can make you buy health insurance, there are no limits to what Congress can do," but notes that the government will have to make that case to the justices far more effectively than he believes it has done thus far. "Defenders of the ACA can't spend all of their time explaining how [the minimum coverage provision] is easily and obviously constitutional under current doctrine," he says. "The justices can change the doctrine."

He recalls the government's 1995 oral argument in United States v. Lopez, when, in response to direct inquiries from the justices regarding the federal regulation of guns near schools, the solicitor general failed to identify a single possible regulation that would exceed the scope of the commerce power. Lopez marked the first time since the New Deal that the Court struck down a federal law as beyond the scope of the commerce power.

By contrast, Siegel says the ACA's insurance requirement leaves the commerce power limited in at least four ways: it does not regulate noneconomic subject matter; it does not violate other constitutional rights, such as the right to bodily integrity; it does mitigate a significant collective action problem involving multiple states; and it does not impose an economic mandate where Congress readily could have imposed an equally effective and less coercive alternative.

http://www.law.duke....ry?id=7383&u=56

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This is an interesting read from Duke University's Neil Siegal, a constitutional scholar. Ultimately, it won't matter what legal scholars think since this will be decided by SCOTUS, however, it does indicate that the argument is there to support the mandate on constitutional grounds.

http://www.law.duke....ry?id=7383&u=56

Whoop de doo.whistling.gif

It will be what the 5 male justices want. Say by bye to ACA.

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