In other words, free riders continue to ride free!
— Or, in other other words, the putative (though always disingenuous) reason for ObamaCare is not fixed by ObamaCare. CNS:
President Barack Obama has justified the mandate in his health-care law that requires individuals to buy health insurance by arguing that it will eliminate free riders—that is, people who get health care (often from emergency rooms) but, lacking insurance, never pay anything back into the health-care system.
“So that’s why the individual mandate’s important,” Obama explained in a speech on Aug. 15, 2011.
“Because the basic theory is, look, everybody here at some point or another is going to need medical care, and you can’t be a free-rider on everybody else,” said Obama. “You can’t not have health insurance, then go to the emergency room, and each of us, who’ve don the responsible thing and have health insurance, suddenly we now have to pay the premiums for you. That’s not fair. So, if you can afford it, you should get health insurance just like you get car insurance.”
However, in the Supreme Court on Monday, Justice Samuel Alito forced President Barack Obama’s solicitor general, Donald Verrilli, to admit that under Obamacare these free riders will not be eliminated despite the individual mandate.
For an elite group—including people eligible for Medicaid who don’t sign up for it and people whose health care expenses exceed 8 percent of their income—the Obamacare mandate is no mandate and the penalty is neither a penalty nor a tax because they are not required to pay it, period.
Under Obamacare, Verrilli conceded, these people can continue to receive free health care care, not sign up for health insurance, not sign up for Medicaid, and not pay a penalty.
Case closed.
Just because everyone may need it at some point doesn’t imply anything, but it certainly doesn’t mean that the government must obviously decide exactly who can get what and who else will pay how much for it (or who will get waivers).
It is mind-boggling that this has to be explained to people.
There has been a lurking suspicion that the “solution” to the free-rider problem cost more than the problem itself, which does make for a strange usage of the term solution to start.
You may want to listen to today’s Coffee and Markets podcast where they discuss how striking down the individual mandate may actually take Obamneycare off the table as an issue for the election. Remember, the rest of the miserable legislation remains in place, most likely; a feast of bureaucratic delicacies for politicians both Democrat and Republican, that they can savor and claim for their own. We may soon have a president who has a long history of tinkering with administrative progressivism… in order to manage it better.
At any rate, consider the SCOTUS today. If the hairy-palmed, gap-toothed unserious conservatives had shut up as they were told by folks like Hugh Hewitt back in 2005 (I personally remember him defending Miers), we would not have Alito on the bench today.
It’s going to take an army of the hairy-palmed to prevent Romney from letting Sununu sell us another Souter.
http://coffeeandmarkets.com/2012/03/27/a-review-of-obamacare-at-the-supreme-court-day-one/
Seems like only yesterday that Very Smart ConLaw Experts were telling me that Constitutional complaints about ObamaCare were frivolous and would be thrown out at the district level. I’m thinking the next legislation out of Congress should be the requirement that these Very Smart ConLaw Experts all get “Mendouchous Twatwaffle” tattoo’d on their foreheads.
[…] 2: Oh wow – Verrelli admits not everyone will be required to comply with Obamacare! However, in the Supreme Court on Monday, Justice Samuel Alito forced President Barack Obama’s […]
BREAKING: Nancy Pelosi stormed into the courtroom, and started howling into Alito’s face “Are you serious? Are you serious?”
I was one of those taking him — and people like Beldar and the Powerline guys — to task on Miers.
And then later, on kicking people like Cain and Santorum off the stage in the debates early on, because only Romney, Pawlenty, and Huntsman were viable.
no it doesn’t. the proggs didn’t put a severability clause in barackycare. see
Severability Clause at Heart of Judge Vinson’s Ruling That ‘Obamacare’ Is Unconstitutional
no it doesn’t. the proggs didn’t put a severability clause in barackycare.
That is one argument, but another postulates that they can excise the mandate but leave the remainder in place. They can do this, apparently. It’s not necessarily that simple.
The Court has scheduled ninety minutes of oral argument for the “severability” issue, and the possible outcomes are legion. The act could be tossed out in its entirety, as held by the trial court; or the remainder of the act could be allowed to stand as is, without the individual mandate, as held in the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals. But the Court could also take a middle road, stripping the act of some combination of core provisions—probably those focused on health insurance reforms, Medicaid expansion, and the exchange related subsidies—and allowing the rest of the law to stand.
http://www.the-american-interest.com/article.cfm?piece=1224
I could see the Court leaving the rest of ObamaCare standing, despite the early claims that it was central to the whole thing and its absence would cause it to collapse.
I could see the Court taking the view that “fixing” the parts of ObamaCare that can’t work without the individual mandate isn’t the Court’s job, but that of Congress.
What I can’t see is a GOP headed by the Etch-A-Sketch in the 2012 fall campaign making a coherent case for how they, if they had control of both houses of Congress, would fix the damn thing by shooting it in what remains of its head and burying it in a deep pit filled with quicklime.
Without anywhere else to place this comment, I ask: Tell me again about B. Hussein Obama’s brilliant political instincts.
He blurts out that he’s flexible on missile defense after his reelection… to Putin’s errand boy.
He is killing coal jobs in swing states with new EPA CO2 emission strictures.
He’s telling people Trayvon looks like his son, if he had one. Which he doesn’t.
He’s selling t-shirts saying “I love Obamacare.”
—
And this was merely in the last week. The appalling thing is this proto-tyrant stands a good chance of reelection despite all of this.
I could see the Court taking the view that “fixing” the parts of ObamaCare that can’t work without the individual mandate isn’t the Court’s job, but that of Congress.
That is precisely what the Court is likely to conclude. The SCOTUS doesn’t want to be responsible for actual sausage making. Too dicey politically and too complex.
They made sausage in Roe v Wade. Perhaps they will do so again this time.
Incidentally, I should remark here that though I’m not a lawyer, I strongly disagreed with Scalia on the Raich decision now being cited, along with Wickard, as precedent for the Commerce Clause argument in favor of the individual mandate on offer from defenders of ObamaCare.
Granted, one has to define (as certain lower courts did) inactivity as a form of activity — the positive act of doing nothing — for the argument to fly. But still, in Raich, the SCOTUS had the chance to beat back expansion of the Commerce Clause, but some conservatives seemed more thrilled with a minor defeat of medical marijuana.
I submit this while referring you back to the Wetzel article linked earlier. Thomas, incidentally, dissented.
George, you may be being a bit too hard on Sununu. As I recall it was NH Sen. Warren Rudman who was Souter’s primary backer.
They made sausage in Roe v Wade. Perhaps they will do so again this time.
That was a far simpler decision than the whole of Obamneycare. All Roe v. Wade did was prevent the criminalization of abortion.
Roe v Wade talked about what could be done in various trimesters. They made law.
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The crazy, it burns!
Wickard was, as we have discussed here before, an incredibly bad decision that makes no sense whatsoever. It was the result of a court afraid for its own future.
It really needs to be overturned.
Still, if the SC somehow upholds ObamaCare, we really don’t need to worry about that pesky constitution any more, so all those bad decisions would be made moot.
My criticism of Sununu is as chief of staff to Bush 41, and hence the man who should have known better before letting Bush make the nomination. I am not referring to Senate backers. I am worried about Romney’s choices of advisors such as Sununu.
http://www.nytimes.com/1990/07/25/us/bush-s-court-choice-sununu-tells-how-and-why-he-pushed-souter-for-court.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm
R. W. APPLE Jr., Special to The New York Times
Published: July 25, 1990
John H. Sununu, the White House chief of staff, said today that he had assured President Bush that David H. Souter would uphold conservative values on the Supreme Court. He also said he had given ”strong personal support” to Judge Souter at a key moment in the President’s decision-making.
Frankly the differences in scale between Roe and Obamneycare are vast. SCOTUS will not have either the time or resources to rewrite 2000+ pages of sausage recipes. If they order a limited version of severability, we’ll have to expect Congress to sort out the details.
zereXer’s WRITING! stYle reminds me that I should go back and re-read my copy of The Book of the Subgenius one of these days…
I could see the Court taking the view that “fixing” the parts of ObamaCare that can’t work without the individual mandate isn’t the Court’s job, but that of Congress.
That is precisely what the Court is likely to conclude. The SCOTUS doesn’t want to be responsible for actual sausage making. Too dicey politically and too complex.
————————————————————————–
And if things go according to the GOPE’s plan we will have Mitt Romney stepping in to make sure that we are securely on the path to socialized medicine in bi-partisan fashion.
The crazy, it burns!
tHe cRAZy:: 1T bernSS!!
FIFY.
I would not be popping the champagne off yet…
But if Toobin is right this will be a very big F’n deal!
Romney will fix it for us! Yay!
Indeed. They used a challenge to the most stringent state abortion law in the country to strike down all 50, and moved abortion — without congressional authority — into the federal sphere.
BTW, cranky, you could be right too. Who knows what sort of crap SCOTUS will hand down on top of a narrow abolition of the mandate. What ought to worry us is that the outcome may make the pretzel of bureaucracy no less convoluted, and in fact may sprout even more bureaucratic weeds. Just the sort of thing a president Romney Gardener may love to dawdle over and tend.
I would say that the only solution SCOTUS has available to it — constitutionally or politically — to avoid leaving Zombie ObamaCare in place, is to find that a lack of severability clause dooms the whole thing.
Which they should do — but there are other rulings where lack of explicit severability didn’t prevent the courts from severing, and SCOTUS might regard the damage to those precedents as less acceptable.
Agree with everyone who thinks the Mandate will be found unconsitutional but severable —despite the fact that Congress deliberately made it nonseverable— leaving us with a regulatory and bureaucratic nightmare and no way to pay for it.
I sense a bi-partisan blue-ribbon commission in our future.
They should do it McGehee,
but Kennedy won’t.
View the sausage ingredients and mixing instructions here. [pdf]
I sense a bi-partisan blue-ribbon commission in our future.
Nothing else is so beloved of Republicans within commuting distance of the Capitol. And somehow, a bi-partisan commission sounds very much like something a skilled, savvy pragmatic corporate turnaround consultant would love. More consultants.
View the sausage ingredients and mixing instructions
I’ve seen diagrams of the Standard Model of elementary particles that was ten-fold simpler.
I was more disputing the notion that the SC won’t make sausage than anything else. I’m contrary that way.
I think this is way too massive a bill for them to consider altering. I hope they simply throw it all out, and then Republicans can start talking about market-based methods to lower the cost of health care insurance AND health care.
I don’t hold out much hope for any of that. It’s more of a tenuous notion.
More likely, they will conclude that it’s severable, and turn the whole mess over to congress to frel up some more.
Here’s a transcript of today. And the solicitor general was punchy five minutes in.
Hope and Change Gen44, just don’t look behind the curtain.
For the 99% of Americans that do not live on a self-sufficient farm, participation in the food market is pretty mandatory. And I don’t know what’s for dinner either.
Verrilli is getting walloped and Ginsburg is propping him up with every ounce of her 98 pound body.
He has no kids right?
I’m surprised Kagan didn’t climb down and spell him.
…hammena hammena hammena…
I’m surprised Kagan didn’t climb down and spell him.
Heh. Indeed!
Is it wrong that I have this mental image of Alito, Scalia and Thomas in chambers, repeatedly saying “Elena, you ignorant slut!”
Where does Sonia fit on that scale then?
I hope McGehee is right! But all our hopes are pinned on Tony Kennedy. He is like Frodo, Samwise, and Gollum all rolled into one.
One might reasonably wonder whether the Justices come down with awful headaches after listening to blithering nonsense parading about as the height of political wisdom the better part of the day, no? It’s almost enough to cause a twinge of sympathy. But then, not, since they all chose to take the job.
oh it was only a couple hours and their chairs are probably top of the line
Lord of the Mandates…
Local talker had Pam Bondi, Florida’s AG, on yesterday afternoon after the hearings had wrapped up and when she was asked if Verrilli was as bad in Court as being reported, she giggled. Apparently, he’s lucky cameras were banned from the Court room.
[…] the constitutionality how when it’s Congress who has required others into the market?” Protein Wisdom notes the part where it’s its admitted that the mandate actually solves nothing: However, in […]
I don’t often feel pity for members of federal workers’ unions, but the guys that had to mop up the flop sweat from the chamber floor last night had a lousy job. I won’t begrudge them if they want to pad their pay with a little extra overtime, just this once.
The spin from the left is making me dizzy!