ACA Ruled Unconstitutional

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  • OakRiver

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    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/14/health/obamacare-unconstitutional-texas-judge.html

    "U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor in Fort Worth agreed with a coalition of states led by Texas that the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional now that Congress eliminated the individual mandate tax penalty for not buying insurance. . .
    “The remainder of the ACA is non-severable from the individual mandate, meaning that the Act must be invalidated in whole,” O’Connor wrote.


    The decision is almost certain to be appealed all the way to the Supreme Court."
     

    PaulF

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    Ruled unconstitutional...because Trump removed the individual mandate's teeth. I don't think it's safe to assume that a court will scrap the whole law when they could restore constitutionality by just scrapping Trump's changes.
     

    hoosierdoc

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    Ruled unconstitutional...because Trump removed the individual mandate's teeth. I don't think it's safe to assume that a court will scrap the whole law when they could restore constitutionality by just scrapping Trump's changes.

    Separation of powers. CONGRESS scrapped the tax, trump signed it

    would love to hear the argument that it’s unconstitutional to remove a tax
     

    PaulF

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    Separation of powers. CONGRESS scrapped the tax, trump signed it

    would love to hear the argument that it’s unconstitutional to remove a tax

    It will be interesting to see how the new justices change the balance of the Supreme Court. You could be right, this one could actually be judged based on the merits of the case...

    ...but I don't think that is consistent with the direction the court has been trending the last twenty years or so. The court already decided once that the ACA is constitutional as a tax, so it isn't unreasonable (to my non-lawyer mind) to argue that it is only the changes to the law that are unconstitutional, and reset the previous status quo.

    The judiciary overrules the will of the legislature and executive all the time. I'm not saying you are wrong...not at all...just that celebration is probably premature at this point. The outcome isn't really a forgone conclusion.
     

    Fallschirmjaeger

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    The Establishment (in which many members of the judiciary figure prominently) will find a way to keep it around. Even Justice Kavanaugh, as a judge on the court of appeals, wrote extensively about what sorts of things would make Obamacare a valid exercise of Congressional power. I wouldn't be surprised to see him be the vote to save it. Unfortunately.
     

    spec4

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    I know people who have been screwed by Obamacare. I don't know anyone who has spoken positively about it.
     

    Libertarian01

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    I know people who have been screwed by Obamacare. I don't know anyone who has spoken positively about it.


    :wavey:

    Me. Right here.

    Before the ACA I had a $5k deductible plus 20% to $5k, so to keep my premiums down I was on the hook for $6k total per year. I paid for my own private insurance. I work at a nonprofit and don't make a lot of money. So when ACA came in it was about (IIRC) a $3,750 deductible with a max out of pocket of $6,500. So I was on the hook for a whopping $500 more per year. HOWEVER, with the subsidy it saved me about $200 per month, so well worth it - for me.

    The ACA helped (kindof) millions of people who are/were lower income. It broke even with some in the middle, and it screwed everyone else.

    The problem has never been on the insurance side, at least not significantly. The problem is on the health industry side. The insurance pays the bills, but it doesn't create the massive waste and titanic bills. The best you could argue against insurance is that it adds a level of bureaucracy, but I don't believe that would account for more than maybe(?) 5% of the bill. So the a $24,000 for my broken hand in car accident the insurance added in maybe $1,000 - $1,500. All the rest came from massive waste generated by the health industry. Should fixing a broken hand bone cost money? Sure it should. But if we could sick a good CPA on the entire cost of my surgery and care I'll be it didn't come out to more than $10,000 for the surgeon, nurses, equipment etc etc etc.

    I still blame the republicans for doing nothing before Obama came in. There were massive problems with growing healthcare costs. It was a problem. It still is. But before hand they could have taken conservative, free market corrections that could have changed direction and they did nothing. When Obama came in it was too late.

    I still won't speak positively about the ACA. It is a horrible thing and now it is worse for America as all of the mechanisms to pay for it have been removed. The republicans in congress were again idiots for not letting the sour side of it reach the masses!!! Had people been forced to endure all the bad crap that was with it they would have had a fit and demanded change. The democrats didn't want it to bite them in the behind and the republicans were too stupid and short sighted to force them to keep the sour tasting side of it. So now all we have is a handout without pain. Idiots...

    Regards,

    Doug

    EDIT - I didn't answer right. It DID help me, but I won't speak positively about it. You are correct. However, I have heard people that do.
     

    bwframe

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    With McCain in the ground and two other "look at me, look at me," turncoat RINO's gone from the Senate, maybe we can get something done about this? Good for Indiana for finally stepping up to get rid of Donnelly.



    I hear there are a lot of good folks doing their damnedest to stay healthy without health insurance while waiting for the government to be OUT of the health insurance biz.
     

    K_W

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    I pay 350 to 525 a month ($175 per check) for group coverage for my wife and I through my work... We have a $1000 deductible each, $0 preventitve, $200 +20% hospital coverage, and decent prescription coverage.

    Yesterday I checked Obama's affordable care exchange... $680 to $950 a month, for pretty much disaster only insurance... $7500 to $3500 deductible respectively, $200 ER only copay, 40% inpatient copay, $25 preventible, generic meds only. Not affordable, or worth it.
     

    Leadeye

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    I look at all the expensive legal wrangling over the ACA and wonder if it's going to make my premiums go back to what they were before ACA.

    Then I laugh, sadly.
     

    Libertarian01

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    My big question for our local lawyers is, "Does this judges decision sit on extremely firm legal thinking, or is it stretching the law too far?"

    I know what I want it to be but I also know that legally it may not be so.

    Regards,

    Doug
     

    Twangbanger

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    "A" for effort, but not sure the constitutionality argument makes sense here. The SC ruled it was A) a tax, and B) constitutional as such. It's not clear to me that setting the value of that tax to zero invalidates or in any way undermines that finding. In the previous go-round at the SC, the Court was asked to determine whether the levying of a particular tax was constitutional, and they ruled it was (thanks to a dick move by Justice Roberts). They did not find, at least to my knowledge, that any tax must in fact be levied. That's a question of fiscal responsibility, not constitutionality. Money is fungible. The writers of the ACA provided other sources of revenue for it (eg, subsidies). Setting one of those revenue streams equal to zero undermines the fiscal responsibility of the law, but it's not clear to me that it affects its constitutionality in any way.

    Tax rates change all the time. Hell, in the case of Refundable Tax Credits, there are situations where the effective tax rate is actually a negative number. I don't see anyone ruling the Welfare State unconstitutional, on grounds that some of the taxes supporting it were set to negative values. It just changes the direction of flow of the money involved, not the fundamental "right" of the government to act as a payer of such benefits.

    (I mean, really; if we could actually invalidate the constitutionality of entire government programs simply by retroactively setting their revenue sources equal to zero...what fun we could have! But in the absence of a Balanced Budget Amendment, I don't see how this can even remotely be argued to be rational).

    Sorry to be the Denny here, but this is so obvious, I could almost write their opinion for them. Texas sometimes acts as sort of a "San Francisco 9th circuit" for kooky conservative opinions. I'm afraid this is just another one of them. It's just another deplorable example of the US Judiciary acting as a player in the "binary war of kooks," instead of making solid, rational arguments.
     
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    KG1

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    The individual mandate penalty was declared by SCOTUS to be a tax. That tax was the basis for the Constitutional ruling. Congress did away with the mandate. Without the mandate the tax doesn’t exist.

    Too simple? What am I missing?
     
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