When the Supreme Court decided to uphold the constitutionality of Obamacare last June, conservative commentator George Will became the target of Mark Levin’s rage, when he wrote:
Conservatives won a substantial victory Thursday. The physics of American politics — actions provoking reactions — continues to move the crucial debate, about the nature of the American regime, toward conservatism. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has served this cause.
The health-care legislation’s expansion of the federal government’s purview has improved our civic health by rekindling interest in what this expansion threatens — the Framers’ design for limited government. Conservatives distraught about the survival of the individual mandate are missing the considerable consolation prize they won when the Supreme Court rejected a constitutional rationale for the mandate — Congress’s rationale — that was pregnant with rampant statism.
Levin rebuffed such observations, and said that this is “the dumbest George Will article, certainly among them, that I have ever read” Jeff Poor of The Daily Caller, who penned this story, added that Levin said
…conservatives are so used to losing — particularly conservatives inside the beltway that have been here for decades — then when we really, really lose, they claim that we’ve won. I don’t know if this is a psychological thing — I don’t know.
[...]
Well gee, they might as well start rounding us up because that will rekindle the effort that the framers started, too,” Levin declared. “This is so asinine that I’m stunned. This is as stunning to me as the John Roberts opinion.”
However, in Will’s January 18 piece, he noted that Chief Justice Roberts may have sealed the bill’s fate into the ash heap of history. Citing Thomas A. Lambert’s piece on Cato’s Regulation, Will wrote that the problems will come between the “community rating” and “guaranteed issue” provisions in ACA.
The former forbids insurance companies from denying coverage because of a person’s preexisting health condition. The latter, says Lambert, requires insurers to price premiums “solely on the basis of age, smoker status, and geographic area, without charging higher premiums to sick people or those susceptible to sickness.”
The point of the penalty to enforce the mandate was to prevent healthy people — particularly healthy young people — from declining to purchase insurance, or dropping their insurance, which would leave an insured pool of mostly old and infirm people. This would cause the cost of insurance premiums to soar, making it more and more sensible for the healthy to pay the ACA tax, which is much less than the price of insurance.
Roberts noted that a person earning $35,000 a year would pay a $60 monthly tax and someone earning $100,000 would pay $200. But the cost of a qualifying insurance policy is projected to be $400 a month. Clearly, it would be sensible to pay $60 or $200 rather than $400, because if one becomes ill, “guaranteed issue” assures coverage and “community rating” means that one’s illness will not result in higher insurance rates.
Alas,we see liberal dynamics at work. They create a bill that puts the “tax” so low that no one will be forced to buy health insurance. This comically undercuts the whole goal of not having elderly and patients that are highly susceptibility to illness dominating the insurance market, which drives up premiums.
Congress can’t increase the “tax,” for the purpose of keeping ACA intact. In fact, it must be kept at it current rates since Chief Justice Roberts said, “by statute, it can never be more.” The only way to keep the tax constitutional is to make it as least effective as possible, thereby, making the entire bill virtually dysfunctional.
It comes down to control. Pick any issue on the table – gun control, green energy, taxes, and health care – liberals are only set on centralizing more power in Washington. To make matters worse, they’re hyper-emotionalism incentivizes them to pursue legislation that satisfies their ideological appetites, rather than making decisions that are what’s best for the country. Will says that since liberals are:
unable to increase penalties substantially, Congress, in the context of “guaranteed issue” and “community rating,” has only one way to induce healthy people to purchase insurance. This is by the hugely expensive process of increasing premium subsidies enough to make negligible the difference between the cost of insurance to purchasers and the penalty for not purchasing. Republicans will ferociously resist exacerbating the nation’s financial crisis in order to rescue the ACA.
So, it’s the same as it ever was in liberal America.
So, what is the mechanism for exploiting this “flaw”? It seems this will have to play out over years, creating more confusion, more debt, causing health care to decline, making doctors retire, making more treatments scarce or unavailable and improving nothing.
Precisely. As an MD and hospital board member, this entire endeavor makes me quite depressed.
No one knows how this is all going to shake out- I am just very, very lucky to have retired already. Among other things, I now have plenty of time now to sit in meetings and watch the whole thing go to hell.
And here I thought merely slamming the doors shut on Interstate Commerce, Necessary and Proper and General Welfare penumbras with full acceptance from the Left was enough to earn Roberts the title Sly Dog of SCOTUS. This is simply a work of art as legal constructs go!
Roberts didn’t use his discussion of the Commerce Clause to support his ruling — it was dictum, and lacks the power under stare decisis that his idiotic “tax” logic carries because he did use that to support his ruling.
He may have tried to be clever, but it doesn’t work when you try.
Well yes some of us have seen this coming for quire awhile, that premiums were going to go up by orders of magnitude when this thing kicked in, but the question is, is this a flaw of a feature for the liberals? Remember that when a person who chooses to go without insurance pays the mandate tax, that money goes directly to the government, but when they sign up for the guaranteed issue insurance, get treated, and drop it, the cost falls squarely on the insurance companies. One possible outcome is driving the insurance companies bankrupt, another is making the premium cost so astronomically high that nobody can afford it, then the companies go bankrupt. Either way the liberals get to step in and say “see, we told you single payer was the only option” and by that point they’ll be right. Once they’ve destroyed the private insurance market even the people who were against government run healthcare will be begging for single payer just to make the pain stop. The liberals are relying on most people not saying “you commie fools got us into this mess, we’re going back to the old system instead of turning the whole thing over to you” and with the help of the media, that will not be the dominant narrative. Instead they’ll blame the “greedy” insurance companies, or blame the Republicans of Tea Party of something, blame for ruining the system will never be allowed to fall squarely on Obama and the Democrats where it belongs.
Make no mistake, Obamacare was never about fixing the private healthcare system, it was always about destroying it so thoroughly that single payer would become the only option. They know that people flock to big nanny government in time of crisis, even if the government’s policies were the cause of that crisis. Once the last private insurer sues for bankruptcy and 90% of people are going without insurance the table will finally be set for achieving their 70+ year goal of single payer.
I don’t think so. If it were to take decades rather than years for the costs to explode, i would agree with you. But support for the ACA was never strong, and it is declining. Unlike the government, insurance companies, hospitals and businesses don’t hand out bennies without initiating a plan to pay for it. Prices are shooting up now, and people will remember why.
People may well remember that the ACA is to blame, but that won’t stop the Democrats from blocking any and all efforts at its repeal. The only possible hope for repealing it comes with a Republican house, 50 seats in the senate, and a Republican president. The earliest that’s possible is 2017. What happens when the Democrats simply block any changes to the ACA until every private insurer has gone bankrupt? Then the government will have to step in as an emergency measure and people will welcome it, again just to make the pain stop. Once the infrastructure of the private healthcare system has been destroyed it will be a long and difficult process to get it back. The Democrats know that once it’s gone it’s gone and the only remaining alternative will be something administered by the only entity remaining with the power and resources to administer something like that, the federal government. Once the tentacles of a single payer system have taken root, uprooting it and returning to the private model will be all but impossible, and this is what they’re counting on. Furthermore, once it becomes apparent that the ACA is in crisis, the Democrats will propose a number of “fixes” such as substantially raising the mandate penalty tax. When the Republicans block this the Democrats and their pet media will use it to paint the Republicans as being responsible for the ensuing disaster. The narrative will change from “how did we get this monstrous disaster of a bill in the first place?” to “The Republicans wouldn’t let us fix it, so it’s all their fault”. After the last election I believe the people will be dumb enough to buy it.
The solution to that is the Republican states become self-insured and simply refuse to cooperate with the US. Stop participating in Medicaid, convert state employee health insurance to a healthcare benefit available to all citizens of the state and self-pay under the state’s rules. Make anyone eligible participate in Medicare and make Medicare primary, but cover the rest up to the state’s limits with a state plan.
I don’t know how many other states do it, but the State of Alaska self-pays for most of its State employee benefits and just hires the low-bidding insurance company to administer the payments. We could easily extend the thing to the whole population but we’d rather have the US pay for the Indians and welfare recipients. I understand it would be expensive to a lot of states, but what is your sovereignty worth?
Well Alaska has a lot of oil revenue with which to fund their state government, most other states aren’t so lucky. Vermont has voted to create a state single payer system, but even they have no idea how they’re going to pay for it. IMO a state single payer or “universal” coverage is just as bad as at the federal level, with the only exception being that it’s easier to flee a state’s taxes than federal ones. I seriously wish that a few blue states had gone single payer before something like the ACA came along, that way they could go bankrupt while levying outrageous taxes on their few remaining residents, providing a nice example to the rest of the country of why such things are a very bad idea.
Yep! Nothing like a single payer government run health care system for all the citizens of a State.
The Obama health Care Act at least, leaves the reforms in the hands of private sector insurance companies and a lot of that framework was conceived from previous republican intellectual special interests going as far back as the 80s.
Health care costs for both the public and private sectors, is on course to becoming unsustainable and will effect even great health and economic consequences, if not brought back down to some sustainable level where ‘more’ people can benefit rather than less.
The entire problem stems from greedy, arbitrary inflation of goods and services, by the full spectrum of the health care industry in America. When ti comes to doctors there are two camps. Those who commit to medical practice based upon their moral convictions. Then, there are those majority of doctors who practice soley for wealth accumulation. The rest of the broad industry, by a majority, fits well in the the camp of the latter group of doctors!
Sure, theres a lot of wrinkles in the new reform to be worked out, but why not go through it with objective minds and motives to provide real solutions to the out of control health care problems in America? Maybe means testing government paid programs to make those who have adjusted incomes above poverty level of their State be responsible for their health care by paying all or a part of any premium support provided? Maybe provide law that requires all employers to provide only insurance sources for individuals to purchase their health care insurance from and nothing more, placing the mandates on the individual rather than an employer? Maybe a federal law capping all medical liability law suites to ZERO dollars unless criminal ‘negligence’ has been established. Theres a long list of things that can be considered in ironing out the wrinkles of the Act — which primarily remains in and with the private sector insurance companies!
Or I supose, your single payer government run insurance by the States is an option.
Oh, so the resident leftist’s response is….drum roll please…..even more government involvement to unscrew the mess they screwed up to begin with?
This, ladies and gentlemen, is what we will be seeing from the rest of the leftists as Obamacare inevitably begins a long, slow and painful implosion that ultimately deprives a huge chunk of the population of affordable and prompt health care.
From the beginning, I realized there was absolutely nothing in the ACA to try to bring the cost of care down, except that the requirement of electronic medical records will reduce duplication and costly errors some day- but right now that provision is costing the health care system billions in IT costs and lost productivity.
Everything else in the bill contributes to skyrocketing premiums- the emphasis on first-dollar coverage of preventive care (contrary to the magical thinking of Obama’s advisors, comprehensive preventive care RAISES the overall cost of healthcare), guaranteed-issue, elimination of lifetime caps. It’s a wish list of unlimited care that is provided no where else in the world, in the country that already has the highest cost per unit of health care delivered.
It’s madness. The ACA is utterly doomed. The question is, how will we deal with its implosion?
You’re right; it is like a union “wish list” proposal, the proposal they knew they weren’t going to get and the union leadership didn’t want. Sometimes the worst thing you can do to lefties is give them what they want. The key to understanding lefties is understanding that seven year-olds really, really, really need somebody to say “NO!” to them.
art, what the heck happened to schwartzenegger? I read the book, other people answered, and honest to goodness, it still doesn’t make sense.
Second, that whole ‘state integrity’ thing: texas has enough mexican nationals that perry actually makes sense when he talks about a texas- mexico insurance pool. I don’t know how much integrity the identity of citizens thing works in other states, but here? the registration clerks speak spanish- and have family in mexico, or further. front-page articles in the lifestyle section are about montagne guatemalans walking to texas to get care for their kids here. I mean, they stayed put for, what, centuries, but now?
“Republicans will ferociously resist exacerbating the nation’s financial crisis in order to rescue the ACA”
suuuure they will. With the Defender of the Constitution, John Boehner, as the fierce chief resister, provided that tears and helpless bluster are considered fierce.
I have no idea what you’re talking about, whatever mechanism imposed this tax could certainly raise it, and you’ve explained exactly why it will be used to do so ASAP.
Repeal of ACA will not happen until after 2016 only if RINO’s take back Congress and the Executive followed by growing some semblance of a spine. Meanwhile four years of healthcare system destruction will have taken place.
I think it’s more likely that mandate fines will be increased to equal premium costs, i.e., “paying their fair share”. Look for this to happen before the end of the year hidden as part of some other monstrous piece of legislation that nobody reads. The “fines” will be changed to something that’s indexed to premium costs and annual income in some progressive fashion. It’ll be “fixed” so it doesn’t outright collapse until many years down the road.
http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/01/dr-feel-good/
“Some $210 billion is wasted annually on overtreatment, according to the Institute of Medicine, while a Medicare study found that overly aggressive treatment kills some 30,000 people a year. As a result, the number of U.S. adults who die from too much medicine is now higher than the number who die for lack of it.”
210 billion is a gross understatement. It’s more likely that unnecessary procedures and medicine is well over half the money spent on medical care.
If you go to a mechanic with a perfectly running car, he will find several hundred dollars of high priority maintenance that must be done or your safety will be impaired. Same for doctors. A small part of that is self-serving deceit on the part of the practitioners. A much greater portion is that they are trained for life to believe that their services are critical to your well-being and are nearly impossible to over perform.
hey Art Chance, I have not seen any of your commentary lately and have missed it. I remember we discussed you having a master’s certificate with the USCG. As to your comments, someone noted that Alaska has an advantage over most states….much revenue and few residents. A happy circumstance as far as government services go. And I pity the ATF guys who come to confiscate your rifles. regards.