Posted on 07/11/2019 5:42:55 AM PDT by DoodleDawg
The threat to do away with Obamacare is once again on the rise nearly 10 years after it was passed, as a major challenge to the health care law got a sympathetic-sounding hearing in a federal appeals court this week.
If the case does ultimately reach the Supreme Court, and five justices agree to strike down the Affordable Care Act, experts say it would upend the U.S. health care system and strip health insurance from an estimated 20 million people. Many millions more would lose crucial protections they might need in case of catastrophic medical issues ― including coverage for those with preexisting conditions.
Republicans in the U.S. Senate don’t appear to be sweating the likelihood of such a scenario, however. Some are pinning their hopes on the courts to reject the challenge, which is backed by the Trump administration, on the grounds that it isn’t serious and is legally moot.
(Excerpt) Read more at huffpost.com ...
Here’s a plan... If you want something that someone else has to provide, pay for it. If you can’t afford it, there are many options, such as not having it, borrowing for it, saving for it, asking someone else to pay for it, negotiate with the provider... Works for EVERYTHING ELSE in life, including essentials such as food and water.
Based on some freepers’ bad attitudes? I don’t think so.
Secondly, Roberts was right on target in one of his public comments after the ruling: It’s not the job of the U.S. Supreme Court to fix a stupid law. That’s the job of Congress.
If what you’re saying is true, then it’s likely that the reduction of the penalty to $0 wasn’t scheduled to take effect until the 2019 tax year.
Even if it isn’t, they cannot collect anyways...............
It was unconstitutional because it mandated we buy insurance. Period.
That was the argument of all the other conservative judges, and that of Roberts until the last minute. His change of mind was far from brilliant, it was a tortured legal opinion, one of the most awful in memory.
If Obamacare is struck down, wouldn't that simply mean that we revert back to when the law didn't exist? Wouldn't that mean that private insurers are again free to offer group policies based on risk pools?
-PJ
...no one wants to pay for their Obamacare because no one in their right mind wants to pay $2000-4000 dollars a month with huge deductibles.
Based on past jobs and my experience with COBRA I don’t think employer-provided insurance is any less expensive than in the individual market (for similar coverage).
It’s just that the employee doesn’t see the whole cost and the employer gets tax advantages that individuals don’t.
Whatever happened to the concepts of competition in the insurance market by allowing companies to sell across state lines and tailor plans to individual needs?
It's the other way around. It's basically a tax that you can avoid paying by buying insurance coverage.
It's a stupid law, but there's no question that it's a tax.
Something to keep in mind here is that Roberts' ruling didn't uphold ObamaCare. It only upheld the individual mandate. There are plenty other more effective legal avenues to overturn ObamaCare. Some of them have actually been successful in the Federal courts, without much media coverage at all.
As far as I know there hasn’t been a single challenge to the ACA brought by an insurance company or a state insurance commission against the three ACA provisions that are the most blatantly unconstitutional: the requirement for pre-existing conditions coverage, the elimination of caps on coverage, and the establishment of a "uniform coverage standards."
The plaintiff in such a case would have to be an insurance company that wants to sell plans that don’t meet ACA requirements and/or a state that wants to allow such plans to be sold.
I have yet to see any reports of such a challenge, which leads me to believe that the insurance industry and its state regulators are perfectly fine with ObamaCare.
To some extent, but to a large degree these costs ultimately get dumped on the providers when patients can’t pay which results in higher charges for everyone and higher insurance rates.
The rest of the cost gets dumped on government and our taxes go up.
It isn’t like the costs of pre-existing conditions go away if they aren’t covered by insurance, and we don’t stop providing care for people when they hit their lifetime coverage limit. The costs just get shifted to somewhere less visible.
To me the strongest argument for single payer is it will make the total costs we pay as a society more visible and therefore more manageable.
As it is today the system is so opaque and there is much shifted cost that no one can get a handle on it.
Yes it was a stupid law. One that Roberts should have stopped, but didn’t. His tortured analysis left it in place.
The other four conservative judges said it was unconstitutional as I described. Roberts made an ass of himself when he did that. There was no excuse for him in doing so.
And yes, the insurance companies left, love the mandate.
And yes, the insurance companies left, love the mandate.
Five states currently allow that and to date not a single policy has been sold across state lines. The insurance companies are not interested. No way to make any money off those policies and dozens of ways for them to lose their shirts off them.
It does revert to pre-Obamacare, without requirements to cover pre-existing conditions, a return to caps on payouts, and all the rest. Insurance companies would be free to do business as they did before.
Insurance policies are legal contracts for financial services and are regulated at the state level.
The way it was for 200 years beforehand, by keeping it out of government’s hands.
It isn’t like the costs of pre-existing conditions go away if they aren’t covered by insurance, and we don’t stop providing care for people when they hit their lifetime coverage limit. The costs just get shifted to somewhere less visible.
Is there anything less visible than the transactions that are paid from an insurer to a doctor or medical facility?
To me the strongest argument for single payer is it will make the total costs we pay as a society more visible and therefore more manageable.
More "visible?" Maybe in aggregate. But at some point the number just becomes multiples of a bazillion and nobody cares anymore.
If you really want visibility, just have people pay out of their own pockets for most of their medical care. You can be damn sure the costs will go down if that were the case.
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