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Tuesday, January 22, 2013

The Time Bomb In Obamacare?

A willow, not an oak. So said conservatives of Chief Justice John Roberts when he rescued the Affordable Care Act (ACA) — a.k.a. Obamacare — from being found unconstitutional.

But the manner in which he did this may have made the ACA unworkable, thereby putting it on a path to ultimate extinction.
This plausible judgment comes from professor Thomas A. Lambert of the University of Missouri Law School, writing in Regulation, a quarterly publication of the libertarian Cato Institute.

The crucial decision, he says, was four liberal justices joining Roberts’s opinion declaring that the ACA’s penalty for not complying with the mandate to purchase health insurance is actually a tax on not purchasing it. With this reasoning, the court severely limited the ability of the new health-care regime to cope with its own predictable consequences.

What was supposed to be, constitutionally, the dispositive question turned out not to be. Conservatives said that the mandate — the requirement that people engage in commerce by purchasing health insurance — exceeded Congress’s enumerated power to regulate interstate commerce. Liberals ridiculed this argument, noting that since the judicial revolution wrought during the New Deal, courts have given vast deference to Congress regarding that power. The ridicule stopped when five justices, including Roberts, agreed with the conservative argument.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I want my Obama care now.I am paying almost $15,000 per year for insurance.

Anonymous said...

Anon: 12:32-unless you are extremely unhealthy you need to find a different provider.

Anonymous said...

Under Obamacare you have to purchase insurance unless your income is less than $9500 a year
12:32.
$15,000 does seem extreme unless of course you do have some serious health issues. Mine is just less than $4000/yr and spouse's is just over $10,000.
Ours was stable for years then when Obamacare was implimented we saw frequent and dramatic increases which now have nearly doubled the premiums from what they were 4 years ago, which was expected.
Insurers warned that this bill would bring a lot of volatility into the market and rates would increase contrary to what the Democrats (who had to pass the bill before they read it) said.
The younger people are being hit the hardest due to the immensely stupid provision in Obamacare that limits how much rates can vary based on a person's age.
Another brilliant Obama move-LOL!