16 thoughts on “ObamaCare”

      1. I think that’s what happened here! Or rather, they are unmaking a law out of whole cloth. Did you read the NYT opinion piece (one of the co-authors thinks the law is unconstitutional)?

        Here is a key excerpt: “How can a court conclude that Congress never intended the rest of the statute to exist without an operational mandate, when it was the 2017 Congress itself that decided it was fine to eliminate the penalty and leave the rest of the law intact?”

        And here is another: Justice Brett Kavanaugh is an expert on statutory interpretation who has previously said that courts should “sever an offending provision from the statute to the narrowest extent possible unless Congress has indicated otherwise in the text of the statute.” To do otherwise would be for the court to substitute its own judgment for Congress’s.

        1. How can a court conclude that Congress never intended the rest of the statute to exist without an operational mandate, when it was the 2017 Congress itself that decided it was fine to eliminate the penalty and leave the rest of the law intact?

          By saying that Congress screwed up. Again.

        2. “We are under a Constitution, but the Constitution is what the judges say it is, and the judiciary is the safeguard of our liberty and of our property under the Constitution.” – Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes.

          Leftist law professors – which is almost all of them – have built their entire careers on that kind of thinking for about a century. The day Kavanaugh was confirmed everyone became a Textualist.

    2. An activist judge is the only reason Obamacare wasn’t tossed out years ago.

      Can you point to the part of the Constitution that allows the Federal government to force people to pay for health insurance?

      1. The method in which Obamacare was passed was also unconstitutional. What would have happened if the elites in the media and SCOTUS had pushed back against Obama’s lawlessness here? Would he have done the Iran deal? Would he have gone on to illegally spy on the Trump campaign and set up the coup attempt?

  2. “I disagree about pre-existing conditions, though. That requirement completely screws up the insurance markets. We need a different solution for that issue.”

    I agree with you on this aspect. We do need a different solution but I’m not sure what that is.

    You want to prevent gaming the system – i.e. living without health insurance for 25 years and then, when you get a serious illness, buying insurance. That skews the actuarial calculations.

    Perhaps a free market solution is one where your premium factors in your age and how long you have NOT had health insurance.

    So if you are 22 and haven’t had health insurance that YOU bought (not your parents – get rid of that 26 year old abomination), then your premium is a little more than if you had it.

    But if you are 40 and you haven’t bought health insurance contiguously for the last 10-15 years then your premium will go up quite a bit when you do go to buy it.

    Having bought catastrophic health insurance would count. That, too would push us more towards cheaper health care.

    After all, if Obama-Pelosi-Emanual liars will tell you that general health will go up because their wonderful plan will cause people to get yearly check ups then the opposite is also true – if you didn’t get yearly checkups then you are a higher risk.

    1. A waiting period between applying for insurance and getting it. So, if you have a pre-existing condition, you have to wait before getting insurance. In Washington, they could turn you down but not after a year of applying.

      1. One problem with your scheme (and mine) is that the Lefties want to protect people from their own stupid decisions.

        Like getting a mortgage they cannot afford
        Ir like having to pay lots of money for medical care during the waiting period.

  3. From the Washington Post

    Ted Frank, a lawyer at the Competitive Enterprise Institute who is critical of the ACA, called the decision “embarrassingly bad” because “you’re twisting yourself into knots” to reach a particular conclusion.

    Over the past two years, Frank said, he and other conservative lawyers have complained when district court judges did similar intellectual gymnastics to attack Trump administration initiatives. “It’s not appropriate in the other direction, either,” he said.

    Here’s more:

    https://twitter.com/tedfrank/status/1073756781355130881

    Not a fan of ACA or King v Burwell decision, and usually a fan of Texas, but this is an embarrassingly bad decision, and if a liberal judge had issued something like it goring a conservative ox, conservatives would be rightly up in arms.

  4. There is a fundamental problem with the solutions from both sides of the isle. Neither sides math works. You can argue which is better math, but math is cruel. If you get it wrong, your wrong. So if you want everyone to have insurance you need to mandate that everyone contributes. In the case of the less affluent you need to take away some of the largesse now earmarked for them. For everyone else you just have to make them pony up or the math will never work. So what’s it going to be, pick.

  5. I think there is plenty of room for innovation here short of full-on socialized medicine. On the other hand, will Washington be able to keep it hands off? Doubtful. In which case we probably ought to just bite the bullet go with full on Medicare for all. But I’d ONLY support that if there were also a constitutional amendment to the effect that:

    Amendment 28
    “The right of the people to secure healthcare by their own means, in addition to that provided by law, shall not be infringed by Congress or by the States.”

    There will some litigation over financing of snake-oil remedies and alternative medicine approaches. Let it be so. Rather that than only a single-payer mandate that won’t let you work around the death panel. Even if the poor won’t be able to…. But you must pass it (Medicare for all) before you can understand that.

  6. How about this, since we can’t just let people suffer from their mistakes:

    Every US citizen is given a voucher for $250/month of health care insurance. They can only spend the money on insurance. They don’t get any money back if they don’t spend it. They just choose the provider and plan.

    That way, everyone has at least some kind of insurance – but the market is skewed as little as possible. This “only” costs $1T/year.

    $250 of health care is not very much, but you would be free to buy more. $1T is a whole lot of money, but you wouldn’t have to pay for the first $250 of health care any more. If you eliminate medicare and medicaid in favor of this approach the plan is paid for.

    At the very least it would get people talking about the real numbers.

    1. The easiest way to achieve this is just allow people to deduct 100% of their health insurance premiums from their income tax. No vouchers needed. If their employers pay it, then no deduction, but then you weren’t directly paying it anyway. You already get health spending accounts free of income tax and now you can carry them forward year-to-year rather than losing them, that helps cover deductibles which are useful for keeping insurance costs down.

      But will Washington Progressives (the “free-lunch” crowd) be satisfied with that? No of course not. Let’s just be done with it, go with the death panels but with a built-in workaround that is too hard to remove, aka a Constitutional Amendment.

      Oh and in my proposed amendment you can just stop it at “infringed”. Seems good enough to have held up for the 2nd Amendment so ought to be good enough for the 28th.

      1. Not so much for the second amendment considering all the federal, state, and local infringements on my right to keep and bare arms.

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