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The Supreme Court healthcare opinion: The individual mandate survives as a tax. You can read the...
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Thursday, June 28, 2012, 10:10 AM ETThe Supreme Court healthcare opinion: The individual mandate survives as a tax. You can read the full opinion here.
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This news story has 88 comments:
Is the Supreme Court now writing legislation?
Can't have your cake and eat it too. Obama just passed one of the biggest "tax" increases in US history.
http://abcn.ws/MALyYl
Even crime wouldn't pay if it was managed by the Federal Government...
When you call to complain about the type of health care you receive, you will receive a similar experience that you get when you call the IRS with a problem.
The trick now for the productive people will be how to start avoiding the US system. You will want to take advantage of the subsidies as much as you can, but then when it starts deteriorating, you when will want find a way to get the same sort of care elected officials and their advocates have access to but not the average citizen.
Not that I buy your version of how this will play out but have you ever actually called the IRS? They're surprisingly easy to work -- certainly easier than my health insurer's billing office. Once I even sent them a hand written note in response to an official adjustment to my taxes. I pointing out to them that their instructions were unclear and said I should be able to rely on the apparent reading of their own instructions. I didn't really expect that to succeed but it did. They agreed and I received a letter in a couple weeks telling me the adjustment had been dropped. I phone the IRS from time to time asking for help and clarification and have always received prompt service and useful information. I've also had them autonomously make adjustments in my favor and send me a check. (My taxes are extremely complicated and I do them myself after having been ripped off one too many times by accountants.) I can only wish that my health insurer were so easy to work with!
It has actually come to this. To defend the indefensible, we now have someone going to bat for the IRS, with 'excellent customer service no doubt', even while they're robbing you.
Bwhahahaha.
What's next?
Hitler sure did 'hustle' as a bell hop?
Like an endless wind tunnel, just sucking in from the poor who subscribe to work.
Very efficient, like a giant mouth attached to a never ending belly.
Yes. Your state monopoly granted health insurer that doesn't have to compete for business. You are making my point for me.
Your blind adherence to you ideology of tyranny can only be supported by you selected anectodal evidence. I can offer just as many counter examples. I know of several people right now that have had to wait for over a year for a refund that they finally received after months and months of phone calls where they had to wait over an hour each call just to talk to a human being.
Look if you want to be a peasant that's fine, but when you require everyone to become a peasant, then that makes you a tyrannt.
What's going to happen here is that the insurance companies will do well initially. Then the rising costs due to the subsidies for consumers and restrictions on supply will bankrupt the insurance carriers. Then the insurance carriers will be nationalized, and since the gov has done nothing about increasing the supply of care, the gov will start denying people care. After all, you can't dole out what you can't create.
The trick now is to start thinking about ways to escape this system. Perhaps, offshore healthcare zones, setup by Americans on other sovereign soil. One thing that tyranny does is cause people to flee. We just have to figure out how that fleeing should manifest itself.
You've got it backwards. The hospital-financed subsidies that were forced by Reagan's EMTALA (http://bit.ly/Mrqz8u) just got replaced by personal responsibility. I like that.
The former can fine and jail you, while the latter simply drops you...
If personal responsibility had been practiced, health care costs would be 1/3 their current price and twice the quality. As such, there would be no need for a national police state attempting to force everyone into the corals that are considered the proper place for the troglodyte masses.
I've never advocated that ... as you well know. Yet again you're demonstrating your need to fabricate because reality is incompatible with your ideology.
Obviously no, it doesn't mean that at all. That's what we've had for 25 years thanks to Reagan and I'm glad we're moving away from it.
If your for that, then we are on the same page.
Kagan, is an absolute disgrace....May she rot in hell...
Next a tax on babies; physical attributes; all free speech?
Call a Gulag a tax and its legal in the US Soviet
Folks, the time to revolt is near...
I would like to add, that the trend for the past 50 some years, has been for
the Court to side with Government Units...
This is another blow to liberty..Could, Putin, be eligible to run as President?
I do have a SS number and birth certificate he could use...
That's identical to having an HSA. No difference at all. The only thing new here is that it's harder for individuals to avoid taking personal responsibility for their own health insurance -- whether paid through the penalty or by some other means. As it stands now, these individuals get free emergency care and the rest of us pay for that. I prefer the route of personal responsibility, which is why I support the ACA (aka, Obamacare).
On the contrary. No single piece of legislation in my lifetime has exacted such a high political price on those who supported it. It was a huge compromise between many opposing forces -- all of whom knew they were not going to please everyone and were certainly going to displease some powerful special-interest groups.
As for how it turns out downstream, that's why the U.S. system of government has many avenues for public participation. Use them.
Hardly, the US gov doesn't put people in prison for not contributing to the HSA. The advocates of tryanny always must leave out the important facts.
No important facts were left out of my statements. Neither the IRS nor the gov't is empowered to imprison anyone for not paying the penalty under the mandate. Anyone who claims otherwise is being dishonest. Of course, ideologues always value their ideology over truthfulness and facts, don't they. Perhaps that's why ideologues who gain power always end up becoming tyrants themselves.
The point of gov is not have it do what we wish it could do, but have it do what it can do. The populace can grant gov the use of force, thus gov can regulate things with regards to force. However, that grant of force must be limited and controlled or else gov becomes the very thing you were trying to guard against (like an entity that forces you to buy a product).
So by your logic all gov agencies should have total power to do whatever they want to whomever they want whenever they want. We should just let ourselves be taxed and let people in gov do whatever they want because they are gov and they said they intended to do good.
If you think a gov can control an economy, then you have to ask what an economy is. An economy is just the sum total of all human action that is engaged in for the goal of survival. To control an economy, means controlling people. What better definition of tyranny can there be than controlling people.
This is the basic problem with your ideology. Your ideology is one of coercion. You believing in using force to make people believe what you think they should believe. If they fail to contribute to your favorite charity, you want them thrown in jail. If they don't live their life the way you think they should live their life, then you want them thrown in jail.
I am not advocating for a gov that controls people by controlling the economy. You are. I am advocating for a gov that does the only thing it can do, which is protect the individual.
This is why the argument of forcing people to be responsible is illogical. People can't be forced to be responsible, they have to learn to be responsible. They way they learn this is via prices, and prices are just nature's signals about what is efficient and what is not. Gov has guns, thus gov is blind to prices. This is why the thief uses guns. The thief is blind to prices, thus the thief can control another making the thief a tyrant.
Isn't it ironic that in the process of forcing people to be responsible, we are going to punish the people who have been responsible by making them pay for other people's mistakes. Based on this logic, if you really wanted to punish people for not being responsible, you wouldn't need to make them pay a tax, all you would have to do is just let them suffer from their mistakes. What this really is about is taxing people by making them buy health insurance that they probably won't need, so someone else can have their health care consumption subsidized. Its just more thievery, and thievery is just more tyanny.
I don't have an ideology. Ideologies are for fools and charlatans. Which are you?
This act provides social justice, lowers costs and reduces the deficit over the long term. Win-win scenario for America.
People were being denied coverage because of pre-existing conditions, now they are provided with care.
Overall good step into reaching our goal of free healthcare.
This is a free market society that pays for goods and services that we use.
The only things this does is hurt lower middle income families that are now forced to pay for something they don't need.
Insurance is legalized extortion. The biggest protection racket in the world and now its is being mandated by our government. You will pay one way or another. When did we elect Al Capone?
The majority elected Obama ( as they did George W Bush 8 years earlier and Bill Clinton 8 years prior)
What Obama inherited was the mess Bush left us with, an economy in shambles, the Bank institutions had plundered the wealth of small investor and we the taxpayers footed the bill. Now Obama has done his part in creating his mess - the health care bill.
Both the conservatives and the liberals have expressed themselves resoundingly. Th populace will go to the polls. The outcome will be decided by the centrist leaning majority and we will find out hcih party will get the mandate to fix the old mess and to make a new mess.
My opinion is that four years are too long, this country is too big and the federal government has too much power. A breakup of the nation will mollify extremists or at least relegate them to inidividual states. Lets call this new union ASU instead of USA
Funny thing is the European model does not work either.
Not to defend Bush - but to point out: Glass-Steagall was repealed under Clintons watch - also everybody needs a house, don't regulate the derivatives mkt., BJ's from secretaries in the oval office, ETC
We'll be well served to find leadership who people look to for sustainable gov't that relies on the free mkt instead of this centrally planned crap and the handout vote grabbing politico's we've had for 20 years.
One of the funniest things I've read in a while. What is free for one is merely paid by another. Nothing -- utterly nothing -- in the entire world is free.
It does, however, fit modern America's mantra of the left that everything is a "right," for which you neither have to work nor pay.
Agreed. Before the ACA, a bunch of freeloaders were getting "free" emergency care that the rest of us had to pay for. The ACA fixes that.
No it doesn't; it just institutionalized the free care under a different name and program.
Wrong. Without the mandate (i.e, the requirement to take personal responsibility), we'd be back to Reagan's deficit-driving, unpaid for EMTALA in which no one is required to take personal responsibility for their own healthcare costs: http://bit.ly/Mrqz8u I prefer the route of personal responsibility and the ACA.
Personal responsibility means actually getting up & going to work on your own, without anyone having to tell you.
I would, however, agree with you that if we could move the goal posts in the other direction for once and say that 'personal responsibility' meant that those on welfare actually had to work to get their check.
I agree with that. Welfare recipients should work for their checks. I've always said so because I feel that everyone should have the dignity of earning their keep.
The poorest (most of whom are disabled) are already covered by medicaid. Nothing about the ACA changes that.
It's interesting how many people don't want healthcare coverage until they get sick.
Feeling pretty bummed out right about now. More than that...... actually considering retiring if Bummer is reelected. It's agonizing on the front lines of healthcare. Enduring all the socialist policies, mandates, regulations, procedures and payment methods of the failed European model now. Only combine that WITH all the stress, risks and costs associated with the mighty legal system of tort here in the US on the other end.
Doctors now burned on both ends and squeezed in the middle.
That sounds familiar doesn't it? Someone in the Eastern Bloc said that many moons ago.
All I'm reading here is knee-jerk, emotional responses from, so far as I can tell, Limbaugh/Glenn Beck fans parroting the same old far right content. I also wonder how many of the contributors above really understand what this legislation entails. In my experience speaking with the general constituency, those for whom this legislation elicits the most vitriolic response tend to know the very least about its specifics.
I don't know if this legislation is going to make everything better, or everything worse. I do know that America has a system, and the system has spoken. Go talk to the teachers in Wisconsin about sucking it up and dealing with change. It goes both ways, you know.
Oh and by the way, last time I checked, this nation does have a system to deal with legislation that isn't working. As such, I'll be enjoying a tall cold beer this evening.
Show me one provision in obamacare that either 1) cuts down healthcare costs/spending or 2) creates a path for the training of more medical students or physicians, something that we need more of, especially now with obamacare's mandates.
Obamacare has done nothing to solve the healthcare bubble. With all of these new "captive" customers, watch this bubble get even bigger. It's going to suck when it pops
Big business has been taking away employee benefits for years, first by putting you in an HSA that you have to fund an ever increasing percentage of, and then reducing the number of hours you can work to less than 40 so they don't have to pay any benefits at all.
The country is still sliding into the abyss, but at least the little guy has something to cheer about . . . for a day.
When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness
Our government officials have BECOME DESTRUCTIVE TO THESE ENDS.
Thanks SA for not letting me down!
I suppose in the end that works out because when the IRS takes all my money and I have nothing left then I can get on all the wonderful government programs and have everything paid for. Of course I have to do as I am told and be a good little slave if I want to eat.
B) How is this oppressive? The idea is to lower costs by forcing freeloaders to pay for their healthcare, where they are currently subsidized by responsible Americans. How is that oppressive? You like the idea that a contractor who refuses to buy health insurance ends up with a $20,000 emergency room bill that he will never pay? Which part do you like, the one where he declares bankruptcy to avoid paying the bill and ruins his credit or the part where the rest of us have to subsidize his care with higher premiums?
C) If you really want to affect the "nanny" mentality in this country, reform the welfare and u/e system in this country: stop paying lazy people. But we won't do that with double digit unemployment will we? Lord knows the middle class has to support the unmotivated and underemployed that the upper class laid off to move jobs to India and China. Now THAT makes perfect sense.
So in the end, the guy who doesn't have insurance pays a $2000 higher tax, gets a $20,000 ER bill and saves $18000.
Financially the plan makes no sense and further more the government does not have the right to force me to buy things.
In order to really modify our out of control health care cost, the cost needs to be reduced. There is no reason for me to end up owing $3000 because I had to spend 2 hours in an ER (2 hours of actually taking up bed space.) This insurance will do nothing to effect those outrageous cost. It will simply take more money from my pocket and I will still end up paying $35.00 a month until my insane ER bill is paid off, because whatever insurance I am forced to take will likely have a high deductible so I can still afford to put food on the table and gas in my car.
So what will happen is that more and more people go to the ER, and the price of the ER bill will be bid up to $50,000. The insurance companies wind up paying more and more, and wind up suffering more and more losses. They eventually go bankrupt, and then they will be nationalized. Then you will finally have a single payer system that has done nothing to improve the supply of healthcare, so then the gov will have no choice but to start denying people care.
Far more important is the basis of upholding the statute under the tax provisions. Most respondents here seem to think it's go to jail and don't collect $200. However, the penalty imposed for non-compliance is has virtually no power of enforcement. The Act prohibits the IRS from using any of it's criminal enforcement powers. In fact, the penalty can only be enforced from a tax refund. All one needs to do to opt out is increase exemptions or pay less estimated tax. You may incur a small underpayment penalty, but it will be far smaller than the opt out penalty.
Which brings up the issue of unintended consequences. If enough healthy people get wind of this HMO's could be affected by lower premiums to cover all the new mandates. Those without insurance can buy it when they get sick because of the pre-existing conditions clause.
How this will all play out is impossible to predict. One thing is certain. There will be dramatic changes in healthcare costs and administration.
He needed to write a 193 page opinion!!!
Is, SA, censoring posts again?
In the words of the Supreme Court on this ruling, "The payment is not so high that there is really no choice but to buy healthinsurance; the payment is not limited to willful violations, as penalties for unlawful acts often are; and the payment is collected solely by the IRS through the normal means of taxation."
They and their Leftocrats friends, are using the General Health & Welfare Clause, to spread collectivism throughout the land...
Wayne Gorsek
Founder, Chairman & CEO.
http://www.drvita.com
save the self promotin
In many ways, government is not much different than the welfare clients they service...