SCOTUS is going to take up the religious freedom issue.
I suspect they’ll come down on the side of Hobby Lobby. The real question is whether or not they’ll say it’s severable, or if Roberts decides to fix his previous screwup.
14 thoughts on “Another Legal Blow Against ObamaCare?”
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Don’t get your hopes up. Whatever dirt they had on Roberts is still there. And you know that the four liberals will never turn against socialized medicine.
I’m not so sure. Since Obama is such an idiot that he’ll petulantly force his failed program on everyone, utterly destroying the Democrats in the 2014 elections, some of the vulnerable Democrat legislators might be pushing, behind closed doors, for the justices to save them from inevitable doom because Obama is going to drive the bus right off the cliff.
If SCOTUS struck down the ACA in mid-2014 it’d be a huge mess. Millions would lose subsidies, Medicaid, and private insurance. People with pre-existing conditions would lose coverage, and be unable to get it back. Health insurers who had counted on the new enrollees, and invested millions to help implement the law, would feel betrayed. All of this would reflect terribly on the Democrats, and it’d be happening right as the 2014 campaign heated up.
I can’t imagine Democrats thinking that having SCOTUS overturn the ACA would be good politics for them. “Vote Democrat, we spent years on health care reform only to have it thrown out as unconstitutional” isn’t much of a campaign pitch. Democrats are inextricably bound to Obamacare — what’s bad for Obamacare is bad for Democrats.
Actually, you do have a valid point. There is a huge mess now with health care. If at this point, the Supreme Court strikes down Obamacare, then that means two things: the problem will be made even worse, and the Obamacare advocates now have something else to blame which in this case actually would be partly responsible for some of the problems.
Still, it’s a better outcome than letting Obamacare continue.
SCOTUS is under no obligation to protect Democrats from their own stupidity. If the clowns who passed this law didn’t include a severability clause, they have no one to blame except themselves if it goes down because of a foreseeable issue. Perhaps they should have read the damn thing in the first place.
If the Supreme Court toss Obamacare out, the Dems will say ‘and we would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for you meddling Judges,’ and everything will be back to normal. Rather than admit that they were the ones who destroyed the insurance business, they’ll blame the Supreme Court, and their solution, obviously, will be a complete government takeover of all healthcare, because, much as they hate to do it, otherwise people will die and stuff.
If it isn’t tossed out, those Dems still in power after the election will be faced with having to vote to eliminate a law that most or all wanted and voted for, or be tossed out themselves.
those Dems still in power after the election will be faced with having to vote to eliminate a law that most or all wanted and voted for, or be tossed out themselves
Or else the law will have gotten over its rollout problems, and voters will oppose anyone who tries to undo it and put them through another stormy transition.
That’s all happening because of Obamacare. People in the middle of cancer treatment are being dropped because their health insurance policy is suddenly illegal. Millions of people are having their policies canceled. Heck, a million just in California, and about a hundred million policies will get canceled next year. And for this, Medicare got raided for $700 billion dollars. All those people, especially seniors, vote. Meanwhile struggling young people, already cut back to part time, are getting the shock of their lives. Tens of thousands of people are going to needlessly die, and their spouses and children are going to go hunting for the Democrats directly responsible.
People in the middle of cancer treatment are being dropped because their health insurance policy is suddenly illegal
Why don’t they get a new policy?
Remember that before the ACA, insurers could drop cancer patients in the middle of treatment, and leave them without any way to buy a new policy.
Millions of people are having their policies canceled
And they’re being offered new policies, and (in 70% of cases) subsidies to help pay for them.
Tens of thousands of people are going to needlessly die
Yes, having health insurance is a matter of life and death. Doesn’t that seem like a good reason to expand Medicaid? There are 5 million people who’d qualify, but who aren’t getting it because their states have opted out. How many will needlessly die as a result?
More generally, isn’t that a good reason to try to achieve universal health insurance coverage?
Because the website doesn’t work, and even when it does, they can’t afford the inflated prices on the policies it offers. On top of that, the new policies likely aren’t accepted by their existing treatment physicians and hospitals, forcing the cancer patient to completely change their course of treatment.
No, they couldn’t. That’s another lie by the Obama Administration. That’s also why there are miles of state regulations on insurers, because insurance that takes your money and then drops you when you have an accident or injury (the whole point of insurance is that you pay them against the chance of such an outcome, so that if it does occur they cover you) is ILLEGAL, and would be fraud. However, if you’ve lied on your application forms, they can certainly drop you because then you were defrauding them, perhaps denying that you smoke to get a cheaper rate, and then getting lung cancer. Dropping such people is called “rescission”, and it can be easily fought in court if the insurance company doesn’t have a good case.
Obama would know these things if he’d ever bothered to look at insurance regulations, but he was so stupid he didn’t even realize that buying insurance was complicated. Thus he designed a system that is an utter disaster for everyone involved.
I’m not sure the issue of severability is at play here. I don’t think the law passed by Congress specifically required birth control coverage. I think the law didn’t exclude it, but it was subsequent regulation developed by the White House that required it. If the regulation is struck down as unconstitutional, then it would mean the regulation would go away and not the law that allowed for it.
Plus the Supreme Court already crossed the bridge on severability for Obamacare.
In return for the extra $2,500 a year you have to pay for insurance, you get $9 worth of free condoms. Woohoo!
Not a lawyer, but I don’t think that Obamacare as a whole is up for challenge here. The challenge is that the National Freedom Restoration Act should grant an exemption to the contraception requirement. If it does, ACA contraception is still standing but with an exemption. No severability should be needed.
The Supreme Court can overturn an act of Congress because of the Constitution, but not because of a previous act of Congress.