Sensible Erection | Supreme Court weighs historic Obama healthcare law

Monday, 26 March 2012

Supreme Court weighs historic Obama healthcare law

quote [ Two years after President Barack Obama signed into law a healthcare overhaul, the Supreme Court on Monday takes up a historic test of whether it is valid under the country's Constitution. ]

This is anybodies guess how this will all turn out.

At the heart of all of this is Anti-Federal forces of the right doing anything they can to limit the power of the government. They are allied with a huge multibillion dollar healthcare industry who feels their power and profits threatened.

Here is how much money we are talking about

Health Care: 16% Of GDP?
http://www.forbes.com/2010/01/31/health-care-gdp-reform-opinions-columnists-john-tamny.html

and how much it is growing
Health Spending Hits 17.3 Percent of GDP In Largest Annual Jump

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505123_162-43841117/health-spending-hits-173-percent-of-gdp-in-largest-annual-jump/

Health care costs doubled from 1996 to 2006, and are projected to rise to 25% of GDP in 2025 and 49% in 2082.4

First of all this problem is at the heart of most of the financial problems the country faces. It is the reason for most of the federal deficits that are projected.
The constant rising cost of medical care will bankrupt some of the most essential programs to the population if they are not controlled, medicare medicaid.

Secondly those cost are a drain on every business. Nowhere else in the world are employers expected to provide healthcare for their employes.

Health care costs add $1,525 to the price of every General Motors vehicle. The company spent $4.6 billion on health care in 2007, more than the cost of steel.

http://www.healthreform.gov/reports/inaction/

It is reasonably well known that the United States spends more per capita on health care than other countries. What may be less well known is that the United States still has one of the highest growth rates in health care spending.

http://www.kff.org/insurance/snapshot/oecd042111.cfm

+++++++++++++++++++++++++

The affordable healthcare act is not going to do much about alleviating that problem. In the first place it is not so much healthcare reform as it is insurance reform, But it is a step in the right direction and has done some good thing already.

http://www.boston.com/lifestyle/health/articles/2012/03/25/healthcare_graphic/

And it set to do much more.

What’s Changing and When

View items by selecting blocks on the timeline, or click the arrows.
You can also see all of the timeline items on one page in printable format.
Read the Affordable Care Act in full or browse it section by section.

Americans who earn less than 133% of the poverty level (approximately $14,000 for an individual and $29,000 for a family of four) will be eligible to enroll in Medicaid. States will receive 100% federal funding for the first three years to support this expanded coverage, phasing to 90% federal funding in subsequent years.

http://www.healthcare.gov/law/timeline/

++++++++++++++++++++++

The legal arguments are pretty much as follows.

At the law's core is the requirement that most people buy health insurance by 2014 or pay a tax penalty.

First of all is it A PENALTY - OR A TAX?

Will Supreme Court weigh health mandate at all?

http://www.latimes.com/health/la-na-court-qa-20120326,0,588358.story

Secondly does the federal government have the right to tell you to purchase any product.

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2012/03/26/120326taco_talk_toobin

It will all come down to the question of the political bias of SCOTUS. It is pretty obvious the the SCOTUS has ruled that the government can over rule state law even in the case of instate commerce.

Gonzales vs. Raich

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonzales_v._Raich

So this is all about the money and the politics not about the rights of federal authority in the states .

[politics] [by bbqkink@7:51amGMT] [+3 Interesting]

Comments

kylemcBitch said @ 8:09am GMT on 26th Mar
There is really no guesswork involved. It goes down party lines, just about every time.

bbqkink said @ 8:22am GMT on 26th Mar
That is my worry that this will go 5/4 like many other political decisions have gone.

chold_numa said @ 8:49am GMT on 26th Mar [Score:1 Insightful]
Which is why having a Democratic president for the next 8 years is critically important for the US. Justices Scalia and Bader-Ginsberg are likely to retire in that period.

sanepride said @ 3:27pm GMT on 26th Mar [Score:1 Interesting]
Bader-Ginsburg is 79 and has had serious health issues.
Next oldest is Scalia at 76, but not far behind is Kennedy, 75, and Breyer, 73. Any of these guys could last another ten years. Clarence Thomas, however, though only 63 is apparently now quite overweight and suffering various related health problems. Wouldn't surprise me if he were next to retire after B-G.

verycleanteeth said @ 6:55pm GMT on 26th Mar [Score:2 Insightful]
The fact that this information is important and relevant to voters shows just how stupid lifetime tenure is.

sanepride said @ 7:18pm GMT on 26th Mar
Probably didn't seem like such a bad idea when the framers came up with it...of course back then people didn't live so long.

zarathustra said @ 11:31pm GMT on 26th Mar
It is kind of silly. The only thing worse that I can think of is electing judges.

How about a long but limited term? 20 years? 30?

LeavemeAlone said @ 12:31am GMT on 27th Mar
I like the "At least every two years, a new justice gets nominated," idea. If one didn't retire or die in that two years, pick the oldest one remaining.

sanepride said @ 12:56am GMT on 27th Mar
One idea floated is that every president gets to nominate at least one or two per term, and the justices serve 8-10 year rotating terms.

LeavemeAlone said @ 1:11am GMT on 27th Mar
If you give two Supreme Court Justices a term, that gives once every two years. Therefore, that would mean that the Supreme court would theoretically refresh every eighteen years given current staffing. This could change as Congress decides the size of the Court.

zarathustra said @ 5:04am GMT on 27th Mar
All these possibilities sound like they have some advantages over the current system at the cost of a bit of stability and judicial independence. The other problem that comes to mind is I really want the court to be the last job a justice will ever hold. While there are already some problems with suspected corruption, how would it look if a justice left the court at age fifty and took a job with a big firm that benefited by his votes?

lilmookieesquire said @ 3:21pm GMT on 26th Mar
Ya. Remember when people were like "There's nodifference between republicans and democrats" when Bush was being elected?

The stacking of the SCOTUS was the difference.

You're welcome!

conception said @ 5:41pm GMT on 26th Mar [Score:1 Underrated]
People who say there's no difference aren't paying attention. Are both side corrupt? Sure. But are they the same? I'm sorry but no chance in hell.

13ullet said @ 8:29am GMT on 26th Mar
"Secondly those cost are a drain on every business. Nowhere else in the world are employers expected to provide healthcare for their employes. "

Because elsewhere in the world the government does that.

"Health care costs doubled from 1996 to 2006, and are projected to rise to 25% of GDP in 2025 and 49% in 2082.4"

I want you to revisit this statement, is this a rational projection?

DuncmanG said @ 9:42am GMT on 26th Mar
Clearly not. If it doubled from '96 to '06, then clearly it will double every year, putting it at about 65% of GDP in 2025 and somewhere around 4,160% in the early 2080s.

Hell, I'm going into the health care business.

bbqkink said @ 9:57pm GMT on 26th Mar
Clearly no one in their right mind can let the system go on like it is. These are projections of what will happen if there are no changes made. Like you suggested the logical answer is.. Because elsewhere in the world the government does that.

ComposerNate said @ 12:23pm GMT on 26th Mar [Score:1]

GordonGuano said @ 4:48pm GMT on 26th Mar
Warning: rape trigger.

atter_cob said @ 6:55pm GMT on 26th Mar [Score:3 Interesting]
I find that irritating. There are LOTS of reasons that people can develop very strong adverse reactions to many different things. If we respected all of them then every joke we told, every story we related, every statement made in any form would come with a slew of "warning XX trigger". Heck the warnings would need warnings.

If someone is raped, that is terrible. It's also terrible if your friend drowns or your brother commits suicide, or your mom is kidnaped. It's also terrible if your are trapped for 3 days in a small closed space, or if you are tortured. All of those things can create stress triggers and honestly none of them is more or less traumatic than rape.

Instead of going around saying "rape trigger" witch is probably itself a rape trigger for some people, I suggest honest compassion so that traumatized people can regain their mental strength and don't need such ineffective warnings. But the more you tell people "oh you need to be protected by people saying rape trigger" the harder it is for them to regain their mental robustness.

It's like someone who loses their legs and has to be in a wheel chair: you don't treat them like they can't do anything because if you do they will never adjust. Instead you let them open the door themselves and take care of themselves.

DuncmanG said @ 8:41pm GMT on 26th Mar
Warning: coherent argument trigger.

GordonGuano said @ 11:34pm GMT on 26th Mar
Thanks for unpacking that for me, have a +1. Truth be told, we'd probably be better off if there were fewer rape jokes. But people who act like somebody saying "grape" without a warning and apology is basically holding the victims down need to get outside more, or find a better counselor.

kylemcBitch said @ 4:37am GMT on 28th Mar

theolypse said @ 4:53pm GMT on 27th Mar
You have a good point, as far as it goes, but you're missing the additional complication that rape carries, as a trauma, relative to the other things you've named. As a result, your claim that none of them are differentially traumatic could only be true in a culture-vacuum, which exists only in a hypotherical one-person reality, which precludes rape entirely. I can make a really long and compelling argument, if you'd like, but it'll have to wait until I'm not squeezing comments into the seconds PSPP takes to get mathy on a database.

In short, then:

Next to no one tells you it was your fault your brother committed suicide.

Being trapped in an elevator for days, as a child, doesn't statistically magnify the likelihood that you will be so trapped again, and again, later on.

When your brother commits suicide, the legitimacy of your status as a respectable person is generally not called into question.

Your mother's kidnapper, if caught, isn't likely to avoid a criminal conviction by convincing a room full of your nominal peers that your mother was a degenerate who invited the attack.

Your drowned friend can't give you a disease that ruins your health and kills you.

If you run into your torturer at a party where all his friends are congratulating him on torturing you, you are at an extremely bad kind kind of party, as opposed to potentially any of them.

Each of your examples does carry one or more of the additional burdens and lingering effects rape does, but none of them have them all, and none of them are tied directly into part of the basic construction of people's social identities the way sexual violence is. I get what you're saying, and excessive guilt-theater is obstructionist and patronizing and demeaning. Really. But it is also many orders of magnitude less common than social stigma applied to rape victims, legal protection for rapists, and incidents where the construction of sexual scripts takes for granted things that are very, very much like rape. Those things are just harder to see, because they are the dominant paradigm, rather than resistance to it.

atter_cob said @ 7:52pm GMT on 27th Mar
I won't argue all of your points because that will degrade into trying to see if rape is or isn't worse than other bad things that could happen to you. That seems like a pointless debate.

I'll point out that right off the bat you are making assumptions: For example when you say that "next to no one tells you it was your fault your brother committed suicide" that just shows that you've never had the misfortune to have someone you love kill themselves and never had to deal with the irrational guilt of wondering why they did it when you loved them so much and wondering if it's your fault or if you could have somehow stopped them.

Anyhow, I'm not advocating a lack of compassion for rape (or other) victims. I just don't believe that prefixing cartoons like the one above with "rape trigger" should be required any more than would prefixing a suicide cartoon or Vietnam war cartoon with similar warnings.

theolypse said @ 8:29pm GMT on 27th Mar
I didn't address guilt you feel, with that point, either explictly or implicitly. On the other hand, you are quite directly stating that my father's overdose was not a suicide. I disagree.

atter_cob said @ 1:54am GMT on 28th Mar
Honestly, I'm sorry to hear your dad killed himself. However, your own experience does not make you an expert on how traumatic it is on isn't for other people. Although I am surprised that you might think it's less traumatic than rape... my friend who had her brother kill himself was so effected that she ended up trying to kill herself about a year later from the guilt. (Luckily she did not die and is still alive and now well today.)

Even if you were both raped and had a loved one kill himself you can't then assert that you know which is worse. The circumstances are unique in every case.

theolypse said @ 3:59am GMT on 28th Mar
Yeah. Look, instead of moving farther in the scornful asshole direction I'm inclined to, I really want to actually make this point stick, and maybe I put it poorly.

Trauma is not a monodimensional scale. What's more, there's no clearly predicting the amount of any given dimension of it for a specific case. My dad died inside seven years before that. Didn't really move me when the body caught up. So while a general ranking of degrees of life disruption could probably be done, even that would probably vary from culture to culture depending on the context and implications of the events of the trauma. Saying none of them are more or less traumatic is wrong, but the truth is a churning agnosia.

My first comment was an attempt to shift your focus from the rape itself to the reason for trigger warnings, which is not a drily clinical response to PTSD. It is because part of the reason people feel such pain in response to the topic of sexual violence is the diffusion of the power structures it engages throughout the culture. It's because these particular trauma survivors tend to have to conduct their healing surrounded by a world that, for the most part, isn't very strongly opposed to what was done to them and only usually stops short of explicitly saying so.

atter_cob said @ 4:48am GMT on 28th Mar
And a Vietnam vet that came back from war was told "I don't care how horrible your experience was, you need to be a man and tough it out. Also, everyone is going to call you things like baby-killer and rapist."

Anyhow, feel free to act like a scornful asshole if you want. I've already have a fairly low opinion of you so there is nothing to lose.

theolypse said @ 8:40pm GMT on 28th Mar
Right. And the Vietnam vet is basically our cultural go-to example of PTSD, as a result. The drowning case, the torture victim, the family of a suicide victim, these are not. They are known to exist, but if you mention "flashbacks" in a room full of people, the example you just provided is going to hold a plurality of their associations, if not a majority.

atter_cob said @ 11:17pm GMT on 28th Mar
You're still talking?

theolypse said @ 5:07am GMT on 28th Mar
Way to not finish my point. I need more sleep.

So. As a result of that diffuse approval, rape survivors can often remain sensitized for quite a long time. Think of it like developing an allergic response to something you were poisoned by an excess of, once. If the part of their emotional backdrop that is processing the trauma remains near capacity because of that incessant trickle, it may take a comparatively small push to overload it.

So there's that.

The communities where this practice developed and became commonplace, however, are acting on more than that mathematical analysis, generally. One of the common components of a feminist social praxis is opening up every socially constructed element of their area of focus for review. It is, after all, a region of the social sciences that was born of an awareness of paradigm and its ability to blind, and has indeed shown itself able to turn that lens inward from time to time. Examining communicating norms in such a fashion not only immediately encourages an openness to the legitimacy of multiple perspectives at once, it also invites questioning whether the delivery of messages about paradigmatic bias might not be, themselves, composed from within that very paradigm. The consensus appears to be a strong affirmative, and things and stuff happened that my remembered timeline is fuzzy on.

Whenever it might have arrived, the baseline of feminist social praxis generally now recognizes that delegitimizing emotionality in public speech is an act of hegemonic masculinity, identifiable by the exception for anger. In the spaces created to develop and later use a new set of public speech norms, you will generally find a strong one demanding respect for the subjective and emotional perspectives of everyone who may encounter any given utterance. Accordingly, their thresholds for how much distress an utterance might cause to how many people before it requires inspection for real necessity and possibly a caveat to warn anyone feeling particularly vulnerable will be lower than in other spaces.

That said, I'm pretty sure Gordon was joking and additionally that there's enough of rape culture behind the subject of the cartoon that it doesn't even count of making light of a serious topic.

atter_cob said @ 6:10am GMT on 28th Mar [Score:-1 Flamebait]
You should have prefixed your posting with the warning "Verbose Load of Crap Trigger". But it is nice to see that you now realize that you're wrong... I mean why else would you being trying to obfuscate your point behind all that jargon? A sure sign of someone feeling threatened by superior logic is that they fall back to terminology that they expect others to be unfamiliar with.

kylemcBitch said @ 6:39am GMT on 28th Mar
Fuck, I hope you are being facetious.

Aside from praxis, I don't see any thing an 8th grade education wouldn't cover. While I think theo is way off base here, I am fairly sure he admitted to making his point poorly, and has been communicating verbosely since the first line of this thread. If you are serious about his being threatened by your superior logic, and thus being grandiloquent as a defense holds any water... wouldn't have have not even reply to you?

atter_cob said @ 8:18pm GMT on 28th Mar
Actually, I just checked and my 6th grader does indeed know what praxis means.

In any case, I do think the bombast in his replies has been ramping up throughout the argument. But that's just my opinion... the quantification of bombasticness is not a precise science.

theolypse said @ 8:45pm GMT on 28th Mar
I'm interested in hearing why I might be off-base from someone with a perspective that isn't atter's generally sneering dismissal. You'd have gone to a really unusual middle school to have all of that in eighth grade, though.

theolypse said @ 8:37pm GMT on 28th Mar
I communicate to be understood. If I switch to jargon, it means I judged my audience to have a fair chance of understanding it and that it would probably make my point better. I can stop expecting you to be able to parse stuff from that field, if you'd rather.

For the record, now, I've said there is a reason for the prevalence, where they are prevalent, of those warnings. I'm not sure how you expect you're going to turn "Here is why that's done, for better or worse" into a hard stance I can be made to back down from by you claiming the "for worse" position, but that must be a failing of my inferior logic.

theolypse said @ 8:51pm GMT on 28th Mar
And since apparently I didn't clarify myself well, I'll repeat:

I agree that that particular cartoon needs no special flagging, except if it is reproduced in spaces meant to be the social equivalent of an ICU's clean room. I think most of the people who would provide that flagging in that context would also agree that, here, it's not necessary. I also think Gordon was being facetious about offering it.

Your hostility is building with no enemy to direct it against, dude. Cool off.

scojam said @ 2:36pm GMT on 26th Mar
It's a good thing that anti-bodies aren't split down party lines.

backSLIDER said @ 2:46pm GMT on 26th Mar
As far as I can tell it's a ruling on wether some obscure law means that it's illegal for our government to mandate the use of a market. Forcing company's to buy something. aparently forcing them to be certified and there for paying for that is somehow different? Sorry for the lack pf spell check... cellphone.

KingPellinore said @ 6:36pm GMT on 26th Mar [Score:1 Interesting]
I feel fairly strongly pro-PPACA, as I've noted in previous posts, due to my wife's Type One Diabetes (the one you get from genetics, not poor eating habits; that's Type Two).

Without her insulin, my wife would die pretty quickly. I have personally, several times helped her with high or low blood sugars and the helplessness she experienced during them. My greatest fear is that she will experience a bad low blood sugar while I'm not around to help her, as they are disorienting to the point of delirium and can strike quickly and end in coma or death.

Until 2014 at the soonest, there is no way in hell we could get my wife insurance that isn't through an employer. If, god forbid, my wife lost her job at the hospital where she works, we'd be up shit creek without a paddle. Insulin is batshit expensive already, but the cost of supplies for her insulin pump can dwarf the cost of insulin pretty quickly.

If you're wondering why she uses a pump instead of just injecting insulin with a syringe, the answer is increased quality of life. Using an insulin pump allows for a more gradual intake of insulin rather than one huge dose, the former being easier on the body. Her risk for diabetic complications later in life is reduced through using the pump. Possible complications include, but are not limited to: blindness, heart disease, and limb amputation, as well as kidney failure.

Basically, without PPACA, my wife is pretty well fucked without a damn good job. We are fortunate she has one, but it's scary walking this tightrope without a safety net.

sanepride said @ 7:29pm GMT on 26th Mar
There's a lot of right-wing chatter about how unpopular the ACA actually is, polls indicate anywhere from 47% or higher are anti.
Basically the vast majority of those opposed fall into three categories: the ideologically convicted (not much you can do about these folks), those who still don't comprehend the benefits (many of which have yet to kick in), and those on the left who feel it doesn't go far enough (like single-payer).
Assuming it withstands the SCOTUS challenge, in 10 years people will just take it for granted and the current fuss will be a distant memory.

KingPellinore said @ 7:51pm GMT on 26th Mar
Feminists generally aren't fans due to womens' health issues getting jettisoned from coverage, especially regarding abortion.

sanepride said @ 8:46pm GMT on 26th Mar
I don't know about that-
Abortion was never seriously on the table and I don't think even the most ardent feminists realistically expected it to be. But the contraceptive clause remains largely intact despite the onslaught from the puritan right.
This endorsement from Goria Steinem speaks volumes:

KingPellinore said @ 9:45pm GMT on 26th Mar
I should amend my comment. "many of the feminists I know IRL have several times expressed dissatisfaction with the exclusion of abortion in the PPACA."

LeavemeAlone said @ 12:37am GMT on 27th Mar
That was the most glowing description of a man I have ever heard Gloria Steinem ever say.

scojam said @ 7:09pm GMT on 26th Mar
If you are interested here is a pretty good description of Universal Healthcare in Canada. The thrust for healthcare came not from the Canadian government but from what was the third party, (CCF) the one without a hope in hell of ever forming the government. They did negotiate with the minority party to form a colition government the price being healthcare. The CCF is the precursor to the NDP.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_Canada

I hadn't heard of the involvment providing vital stuff in the US before. The primary complaint in Canada is wait times. Three years or so ago my girlfriend had an exploded disk and was told she'd be layed up for three months before she could get an operation. She told her Doc she could afford to go to the US and would if he couldn't get it done faster. She had the operation in three days. I tend to think delayed wait times are a planned issue.

sanepride said @ 9:11pm GMT on 26th Mar
The Barbarism of the Health-Care Repeal Crusade

bbqkink said @ 9:39pm GMT on 26th Mar
I think it is time to look at the pure political ramifications of any of the SCOTUS decisions that could come out of this.

First it is obvious that the tax part of this question was answered today. Both sides of the court said that this is not a tax issue and it can be addressed, so there will be a decision.

In the main post here I was just considering the politics of the supposedly non political SCOTUS....That aside, there are three different ways this could be decided. All of which look to me to be wins for the Democrats..let me explain.

First is that the decision is to let things stand just the way they are.

That would give the Dems a political win but do precious little to reform the system.

Now let me skip to the third option.

They could decide that the entire law is unconstitutional it will have to be scraped. That would affect Millions and millions of people.

http://www.boston.com/lifestyle/health/articles/2012/03/25/healthcare_graphic/

It would take away coverage for people with pre-existing conditions, kids who are on their parents coverage, and workers who now have coverage from their employers who would lose it due to the tax credit no longer available.

Those people will be wildly upset and would start gathering their pitch forks and torches. Every political add would now show how the SCOTUS took away your healthcare.

This would shine a light on SCOTUS that I want more than anything. Hell it might even help with citizens united.

Now for the second possibility.

They could decide that the mandate is unconstitutional but the rest of the law can stand. To me this is the most desirable of all of the outcomes, and here is why.

First of all remember this is a GOP idea. It is designed to keep dead beats from not being part of the system. By not forcing people to purchase coverage you would take away 90% of peoples objection to the law, and remove it as a campaign issue. A great percentage of the electorate is in favor of every part of the law but this.

Now here is the part of that I like the best.

Who does not making it a mandate hurt? The insurance companies.
If this happens they would be forced to cover everybody and would not have the windfall of all those new customers and would not make those billions of dollars of profit.

The other result of this would be big corporations now screaming for what should have happened in the first place a public option or Medicare for all. You would hear them crying "Oh we can't do this the government has to take care of all those people"

No matter how this turns out it benefits the Democrats in November.

sanepride said @ 10:04pm GMT on 26th Mar
So under either of these scenarios, what happens if the Republicans win the presidency and retain control of the House (and even take the Senate)?

bbqkink said @ 11:08pm GMT on 26th Mar
Well most of the law doesn't take effect until Jan. 1 2014 if they have control of all three they could start the whole process over on day one, which would be Jan 14 2014.

But and here is the big but, they would have to have 60 votes in the Senate unless they change the filibuster rule. If they don't take the Presidency veto. If things stay the way they are stalemate as usual.
If the Dems have control of all three Big question will they change the filibuster rule?

bbqkink said @ 11:22pm GMT on 26th Mar
they could start the whole process over on day one, which would be Jan 14 2013. not 14

bbqkink said @ 11:30pm GMT on 26th Mar
Oh by the way I never said what i think will happen. i think they SCOTUS will say that the congress does have the right to enforce the mandate for this reason , it is interstate commerce because people travel from state to state and there for take the liability with them.

If you live in Illinois like me and travel to Indiana and have a heart attack there, that is interstate commerce.

sanepride said @ 12:53am GMT on 27th Mar
No doubt they would look for ways to repeal, or at least chip away the law in ways that would only require a simple majority. True that without the individual mandate only the 'good parts' remain, but no doubt the insurance companies would be happy to scrap that and go back to their previous model, which was plenty profitable. I get the feeling a GOP president and congress would be only to happy to oblige them, regardless of popular sentiment.

But another, alternate scenario is that President Romney would seek to remake 'Romneycare' on a national scale- at least if the popular will demands it. If SCOTUS shoots it down, perhaps President Romney would ironically have a better chance of bringing it back than President Obama. Just a crazy thought...only Nixon could go to China after all.

bbqkink said @ 1:32am GMT on 27th Mar [Score:2 Funny]
I don't what they would be able to do now that the law has passed other than try not to fund it.

But what you said about Romney reminded me of this.

King of the Hill said @ 10:33pm GMT on 28th Mar
"They could decide that the mandate is unconstitutional but the rest of the law can stand. To me this is the most desirable of all of the outcomes, and here is why."

The problem with that is that it means the SCOTUS is then crafting legislation - which is not their role. That is the role of the house, senate and the office of the president. By striking down the provision they have become legislative in nature... their proper role is to strike down the entire bill.

ENZ said @ 9:44pm GMT on 26th Mar
I'm required-by-law to purchase car insurance, how is this any different?

sanepride said @ 9:56pm GMT on 26th Mar
It's different in two important ways:
Auto insurance requirements are state, not federal mandates.
You are theoretically not really required to purchase auto insurance, because even though owning a car may be a practical necessity, it's still considered a choice.

mwoody said @ 12:39am GMT on 27th Mar [Score:2 Insightful]
And even more to the point, you're not at all required to have car insurance in the same way you're now required to have health insurance. You're usually only required to have liability insurance, so you can pay for the damage to health or property you might inflict on others.

Croatia said @ 12:40am GMT on 27th Mar
But is the necessity of living and being healthy a choice? Suicide is still "illegal" and assisted suicide is too. So what kind of message is it to turn people away from hospitals for lack of coverage, but still keep the puritanical viewpoint towards hauling off and fucking killing yourself?

sanepride said @ 12:43am GMT on 27th Mar
Sure, the ultimate ideal here is that no one would be turned away, because everyone would by law be covered.

Croatia said @ 1:25am GMT on 27th Mar
I didnt mean the good ideal. I meant the alternative, i.e. whatever Paul Ryan and his people would suggest is the best way to manage the bloated corpse of the healthcare industry.

sanepride said @ 2:18am GMT on 27th Mar
This article I posted above describes their strategy rather starkly.

ENZ said @ 12:37pm GMT on 27th Mar
What's the bloody difference between state and federal mandates? Government is government, why do so many people get in such a tizzy over meaningless distinctions?

ComposerNate said @ 12:58pm GMT on 27th Mar
Because Republicans garner southern votes by demonizing federal secular government, which took away their slaves and subsequent prosperity their state fought for them to biblically keep.

sanepride said @ 3:53pm GMT on 27th Mar
From a purely technical standpoint you are correct, but here is the ideological argument, at least as I see it:
The US is a big and diverse country. The idea is that a federal mandate forces everyone to conform to a universal standard. Some perceive a state mandate as being more 'democratic', since it is more likely to conform to the values held by a majority of citizens within that particular state. Abortion is a good example. God-fearin' folks in Kansas or Alabama might argue - why should we be forced to conform to the baby-killing immorality of soulless liberals from New York or California?
The other issue is that, the more local you get, the more people feel in touch and trusting of government. The federal gov't is seen, sometimes rightly, as a vast, unapproachable behemoth. State government at least approaches a level where folks may feel more involved.

epease said @ 2:06pm GMT on 28th Mar
Nah, you are required to have auto insurance if drive within any of the states. Insurance is also required if you run a business. Own a home. etc.
The Fed requires similar insurance for airlines, railways and any interstate carriers of goods and/or services.

sanepride said @ 5:26pm GMT on 28th Mar
Right, but you see technically speaking all of those things are still choices. And homeowners' insurance is mandated by lenders, not government.

sanepride said @ 8:13pm GMT on 27th Mar
UH-OH.
Toobin on CNN: "This law will be struck down"

sanepride said @ 6:56pm GMT on 28th Mar
Day 3 looks just as bad, if not worse.
Toobin: "A train wreck and a plane wreck" (warning- autoplay news video)