Supreme Court to strike down individual mandate

jmc wrote: Student loans, president has been set. Taxes and Govt. bucks are set aside. Including taxes. Govt. is heavily involved in health care an easy leap.
Better than a mandate.

That might hold some water if the federal government issued loans, or guaranteed the loans, made to people to pay for their medical treatment, but what if someone didn't apply for the loan to pay the bill? The leap you are wanting to make is no more constitutional than the mandate to purchase products chosen by the government is. The reason that student loans are not included in a personal bankruptcy is that the loan has been guaranteed with tax dollars from the outset. The money, in case of default, is not owed to a private company, it is owed, as are taxes, to the federal government. If you wanted to allow providers to refuse to treat people unless and until they first applied for and received a federal loan to cover the costs of their care, you could certainly do that I suppose, but you would then have to abandon the current law which requires private entities to provide care regardless of ability to pay and I'm not so sure that the left is willing to go down that path either.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezr ... _blog.html

Decision is supposed to be out Monday.

"A new poll of 56 former Supreme Court clerks finds that 57 percent think the individual mandate will be overturned. That’s a 22-point jump from the last time the same group of clerks was surveyed, right before oral arguments. Most of the clerks found the Supreme Court’s questioning to be more skeptical than they had expected.

That seems to capture the mood of the rest of the country, too. Over on InTrade, the estimated likelihood of the Supreme Court overturning the mandate has marched upward ever since oral arguments, hitting 79.9 percent Wednesday morning."

Yeah, an intrade has Pres Obama by almost 11 points....

Not loosing by a landslide BTW.

Barack Obama to be re-elected President in 2012
53.9%
Event: 2012 Presidential Election Winner (Individual)

Mitt Romney to be elected President in 2012
42.2%
Event: 2012 Presidential Election Winner (Individual)


http://www.intrade.com/v4/markets/contr ... tId=743474

PrintSmith wrote:

jmc wrote: Student loans, president has been set. Taxes and Govt. bucks are set aside. Including taxes. Govt. is heavily involved in health care an easy leap.
Better than a mandate.

That might hold some water if the federal government issued loans, or guaranteed the loans, made to people to pay for their medical treatment, but what if someone didn't apply for the loan to pay the bill? The leap you are wanting to make is no more constitutional than the mandate to purchase products chosen by the government is. The reason that student loans are not included in a personal bankruptcy is that the loan has been guaranteed with tax dollars from the outset. The money, in case of default, is not owed to a private company, it is owed, as are taxes, to the federal government. If you wanted to allow providers to refuse to treat people unless and until they first applied for and received a federal loan to cover the costs of their care, you could certainly do that I suppose, but you would then have to abandon the current law which requires private entities to provide care regardless of ability to pay and I'm not so sure that the left is willing to go down that path either.

PS rules were made to be broken, This is arbitrary, kind of like forcing hospitals to treat everyone. Try thinking outside your box. It would be better than a mandate and make people responsible so the rest of us don't support the freeloaders. If people choose to forgo insurance ,fine, they pay up. People get to choose taking a student loan or cheating on taxes but when they get sick they just get help.
Maybe the Gov pays and then bills with no relief by BK.

So if the mandate is upheld (which I hope not for the sake of liberty aka negative rights), it appears there are still some very basic loopholes.

Insurance companies typically only sell policies and honor them if you sign an agreement or contract with them.

But you can only enter a contract of your own free will, you cannot be forced into an agreement or it is not valid.

So for folks that would otherwise not buy insurance, that are now forced to by law, they can legally refuse to sign the agreement on the grounds that the agreement would not be valid (or could get denied coverage because they touted that they signed under force of law), or sign it and declare the agreement invalid at any point.

How are these folks that are required under law to get insurance, but don't want to, going to get insured without signing legal contracts with the insurance companies?

You don't use this loophole on the silly auto insurance laws because if you use it, you can loose your right to drive your car on the road. But if you use it for health insurance, you cannot loose your right to exist or move around.

Again, on 285bound we debate 4th level stuff, ignoring basic liberties for the sake of ignoring the fundamentals. The system was set up that unless you are committing a crime, you are free to agree, participate or not. Let's keep it that way. Liberties over entitlements, they cost less by definition.

Ready, set, ignore and keep talking about the right way to spend other people's money.

No more than being forced to buy insurance if you have a car. Nobody forces you to drive a car... But there is no way you can go through your entire life and not need some form of healthcare at some point. Since you can't "opt-out" of needing health care at some point in your life, it's about time those who are freeloading off the system by using the emergency rooms start paying something into the system to offset their care. In the end, it makes it cheaper for everyone.

And I frankly don't give a flip about the phony "liberty" issue. In some states you're not "at liberty" to ride motorcycles without helmets; in some states you're not "at liberty" to use celllphones while driving a vehicle... Life is tough...

The difference, SFB, is that it is a sovereign State government which is telling you what you must do instead of a federal government which has limited and delegated authority. It is not the federal government telling you that you have to purchase insurance in order to register and drive an automobile, it is a sovereign State government which is responsible for doing that. It isn't the federal government that says you may not use a cellphone while operating a motor vehicle, it is a sovereign State government which says that you may not do that. There are, despite your beliefs to the contrary, limits on the powers delegated to the federal government by the States which belong to the union and compulsory participation in commerce of the federal government's choosing just happens to be one of those limitations. The federal government may not compel participation in commerce in order to seek justification for regulating it. It may not tell you that you must grow wheat in order to regulate how much wheat you are permitted to grow to feed your family and your livestock. Personally I don't think it even has the power to tell you that you may not grow food to feed your own family if you have made the decision to do so regardless of the judicial activism of 8 Supreme Court justices nominated by FDR and one turncoat who shriveled from his duty and decided to preserve, protect and defend his position instead of the Constitution, but that's a whole different thread.

If indeed the federal government possesses the power to compel participation in the insurance market, where does their ability to compel participation end? Can they compel you to purchase life insurance so that Social Security doesn't need to pick up the slack for your dependents if you happen to die? Can it compel your participation in the annuities market to ease the burden on Social Security by compelling you to amass some funds for when you retire? How about IRA's and 401K's - can they make you purchase these financial instruments in order to lessen the demand placed on Social Security? Can they compel you to open up a Health Savings Account and contribute a minimum amount of your earnings for your entire life so that you have some money set aside to pay for your health care needs when you get older to lessen the burden on MediCare?

The entire problem stems from an extraconstitutional action of the federal government to begin with. The federal government was no more empowered to compel a physician to treat someone incapable of compensating them for their services than they are to compel participation in commerce of their choosing in order to justify regulating it.

Democracy4Sale wrote: No more than being forced to buy insurance if you have a car. Nobody forces you to drive a car... But there is no way you can go through your entire life and not need some form of healthcare at some point. Since you can't "opt-out" of needing health care at some point in your life, it's about time those who are freeloading off the system by using the emergency rooms start paying something into the system to offset their care. In the end, it makes it cheaper for everyone.

I "opted out" of purchasing health care for an entire decade when I was a young lad without ever freeloading off the system. When I needed care, I paid for it out of pocket, including a trip to the emergency room to have what turned out to be a severely sprained ankle examined, imaged and treated.

Not everyone who decides not to purchase insurance freeloads off the system; and for that matter it is the government's heavy hand of regulation which is the primary enabler of the freeloaders to begin with due to its mandates that services must be rendered regardless of one's ability to pay for them.

Emergency rooms should be able to turn away people who are seeking to have someone look down their throat and tell them if they have a strep infection. If your child needs to have their appendix removed and you are unable to pay for it, you should be willing to show up at night and mop the floors and clean the toilets for a year in exchange for the service of the doctors to save your child's life. That seems like a pretty fair trade, don't you think? The reason we have so many freeloaders is that the government said that they could freeload. You don't fix the problem the government created with more involvement of the government - you fix it by ending the government involvement. That's just basic common sense, isn't it?

PrintSmith wrote:

Democracy4Sale wrote: No more than being forced to buy insurance if you have a car. Nobody forces you to drive a car... But there is no way you can go through your entire life and not need some form of healthcare at some point. Since you can't "opt-out" of needing health care at some point in your life, it's about time those who are freeloading off the system by using the emergency rooms start paying something into the system to offset their care. In the end, it makes it cheaper for everyone.

I "opted out" of purchasing health care for an entire decade when I was a young lad without ever freeloading off the system. When I needed care, I paid for it out of pocket, including a trip to the emergency room to have what turned out to be a severely sprained ankle examined, imaged and treated.

Not everyone who decides not to purchase insurance freeloads off the system; and for that matter it is the government's heavy hand of regulation which is the primary enabler of the freeloaders to begin with due to its mandates that services must be rendered regardless of one's ability to pay for them.

Emergency rooms should be able to turn away people who are seeking to have someone look down their throat and tell them if they have a strep infection. If your child needs to have their appendix removed and you are unable to pay for it, you should be willing to show up at night and mop the floors and clean the toilets for a year in exchange for the service of the doctors to save your child's life. That seems like a pretty fair trade, don't you think? The reason we have so many freeloaders is that the government said that they could freeload. You don't fix the problem the government created with more involvement of the government - you fix it by ending the government involvement. That's just basic common sense, isn't it?

Agree PS, if you pay you are not a freeloader,not everybody without insurance is a freeloader. my comment was meant for the ones who take services and then skip paying. I doubt any hospital wants untrained temps paying off a debt to "work it off" but an idea.
I always thought that forcing hospitals to provide free care, except in emergencies of course,could be handled differently.

I dunno jmc - it would seem to me that the relatives of the people being treated would have a much higher interest in making sure that it was done properly to ward of staph infections and other such things given that it is their relative who is at risk of complications if they don't do it right. But even if we don't want them doing that kind of work, there is a lot of maintenance of the grounds and the building that could be done by those who need help paying for the services they received. If we, the taxpayers "we", are footing the bill out of the kindness of our hearts, perhaps "we" could then have the beneficiaries of our charity perform other necessary tasks for our benefit in exchange for picking up the bill. There are, after all, a lot of potholes that need filling, parks that need attention, graffiti that needs removal, public buildings and offices which need cleaning and maintenance done on them, etc, which would lessen the necessity of paying additional taxes for these public works projects.

There are solutions which don't involve having the general government usurp yet more power to make the problem they originally created worse than it already is under the guise of "fixing" it. Individual welfare of every States' citizens wasn't something the federal government was created to address on a continual basis. I can completely understand how it might be necessary, from time to time, for the federal government to assist the States' governments on a temporary basis during times of crisis like the Great Depression or Hurricane Katrina, the key word being "temporary" assistance, not an usurpation of the power to govern using the crisis as an excuse to expand its powers and reach.