Posted on 01/13/2017 2:32:27 PM PST by Innovative
Congress took its first step toward rolling back President Obama’s health care reform law Friday, with the House voting along party lines to pass key preliminary legislation.
The measure, which was passed Thursday by the Senate, will allow Republicans to use special budget procedures to repeal major parts of the Affordable Care Act without cooperation from Democrats.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Medicare is also a government program.
If government gets out of healthcare then Medicare goes.
If government gets out of healthcare then there will be no program.
If the government gets entirely out of healthcare, (FDA and all) costs would be a small fraction of what they are now and Christian Charity could easily manage America’s needs.
Sure. But it's January 2017 and we have 55 million people on Medicare and at least as many still working who have paid in and are planning their lives based on it being there.
Let's stay in the real world.
In the real world a third of working age people have no job and much of that is due to Obamacare. Much of the remaining population must work multiple part time jobs for the same reason.
They outnumber and will over rule Medicare patients.
Hillary made the exact same calculations you assert are valid.
They were and are myopic.
Politicians constituents will love a phase out of Medicare...what's not to like, $1 trillion per year in long term savings (lower taxes on constituents) after the Ponzi scheme is wound down. Less national debt. Balanced budgets. More freedom of choice in healthcare. Part of the $1 trillion in savings could go to increased Social Security payments to help future seniors (about 45 years in the future) pay for private health insurance.
Roberts was in a tactical bind. Justice Kennedy is two faced, voting with the conservative side on petty issues, but always with the liberals on the big issues. As such, he is the “swing vote”. Oddly enough, unless he can be the swing vote, he won’t join with the liberals, which suggests that he craves to get his name in legal textbooks.
So, had Roberts voted *against* Obamacare, Kennedy would have voted for it, the liberals would have won, but their decision would have been written by them, and it would likely mean that Obamacare would be as impossible to repeal without 60 or even 67 votes in the senate, which the Democrats could likely prevent forever.
When Roberts voted *for* Obamacare, this changed everything.
First of all, Kennedy was reportedly *livid* at Roberts for denying him, Kennedy, the swing vote in one of the biggest decisions in his career. Because his vote wouldn’t matter, Kennedy then just stayed with the conservatives.
But there was yet another important twist. One of the few powers the Chief Justice has that the other Justices do not is that, if he is on the side of the majority in a case, he is the one who assigns who writes the primary decision. While other justices on the majority can write an independent concurrent decision, it does not carry as much weight in the law.
So, having this power, Roberts decided that he, not one of the liberals, would write the decision. Only when he announced this, did the liberal justices realize they had been skunked.
But that is where the real legal artistry came into play.
He couldn’t do a judicial branch poison pill, because there are so many liberal federal judges. So it had to be the legislative branch that used the poison pill to kill Obamacare.
While typically a law requires 60 or even 67 votes in the senate, the constitution is very clear that all laws about taxes can *only* require a simple majority to pass. And this was the key to destroying Obamacare. Inserted in Roberts decision was that the individual mandate is a tax.
If it is a tax, then all of Obamacare is also a tax.
To be fair, the many people here who disparaged Chief Justice Roberts for voting “to uphold” Obamacare should not feel puzzled by it all; because it was so unexpected, and such a brilliant maneuver, even the conservative Justices on the court were taken by surprised and horrified by what they thought was Roberts “jumping ship”.
It really is one for the law books.
Maybe having their 80 year old parents lose their health insurance?
Has anyone thought about how this will play out if nothing is ready to replace it? The old system is gone, and tearing down the new one won’t bring it back.
I hate obamacare, it has raised my premiums a lot, but throwing it out without some thought is setting the Dems up for a massive upset in two years.
A “phase out” as I mentioned earlier...new workers won’t have Medicare and won’t pay any Medicare taxes. The rest of the people continue as normal as the Ponzi scheme unwinds. The feds will have to eat some extra expense since as a Ponzi the youngest workers bore a large share of current Medicare payments.
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