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Post by bixaorellana on Jun 28, 2012 14:25:29 GMT
According to this, scotusblog.wpengine.com/, the Affordable Care Act has been upheld by the Supreme Court. Even though the US public will continue to remain in thrall to insurance companies, it seems the country is one tiny step closer to guaranteeing their citizens the medical care that the civilized countries grant to theirs. Perhaps with time -- and with the giant collective POP of the populace & their representatives pulling their heads out of their butts -- the whole insurance mafia will be phased out. |
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Post by bixaorellana on Jun 28, 2012 14:34:56 GMT
(these are Eastern Daylight times)
From scotusblog:
10:32
Tom: The opinion is still not available electronically.
10:32
Amy Howe: In Plain English: The Affordable Care Act, including its individual mandate that virtually all Americans buy health insurance, is constitutional. There were not five votes to uphold it on the ground that Congress could use its power to regulate commerce between the states to require everyone to buy health insurance. However, five Justices agreed that the penalty that someone must pay if he refuses to buy insurance is a kind of tax that Congress can impose using its taxing power. That is all that matters. Because the mandate survives, the Court did not need to decide what other parts of the statute were constitutional, except for a provision that required states to comply with new eligibility requirements for Medicaid or risk losing their funding. On that question, the Court held that the provision is constitutional as long as states would only lose new funds if they didn't comply with the new requirements, rather than all of their funding.
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Post by fumobici on Jun 28, 2012 15:24:20 GMT
The entire American private health insurance industry is essentially a huge parasite on the economy, sucking up hundreds of billions per year and delivering nothing in return but mountains of paperwork and limiting access to care often in the most heartless and cynical ways imaginable. If there is a hell, surely the the executives of that "industry" (scam) are bound there.
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Post by bixaorellana on Jun 28, 2012 15:54:00 GMT
*kisses hem of Fumobici's garment*
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Post by Kimby on Jun 28, 2012 16:16:03 GMT
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Post by Kimby on Jun 28, 2012 16:23:14 GMT
The Supreme Court on Thursday upheld the individual insurance requirement at the heart of President Barack Obama's historic health care overhaul.
The decision means the huge overhaul, still only partly in effect, will proceed and pick up momentum over the next several years, affecting the way that countless Americans receive and pay for their personal medical care. The ruling also hands Obama a campaign-season victory in rejecting arguments that Congress went too far in requiring most Americans to have health insurance or pay a penalty.
It's only fair that if hospitals are expected to treat everyone without exception whether they have insurance (or can pay out of pocket) or not, requiring the costs to be passed on to those with insurance or money, that everyone should be expected to have insurance.
Personally, I'd like to see someone make the argument that the mandate to care for everyone is just as unconstitutional as the mandate to have insurance for one's own care. Let's see how far THAT argument would get!
If young, mostly healthy people opt out of insurance, expecting that any unanticipated medical emergencies will be paid for "by society", then the only people buying insurance will be the old and infirm, meaning that the insurers will have more expenses per capita to cover, AND the cost of medical care will keep going up and up.
Of course, we should just start over with a universal coverage plan. But this is the hand we've been dealt. Looking forward to seeing how it plays out.
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Post by Deleted on Jun 28, 2012 17:00:26 GMT
Now that I have lived more than two thirds of my life in a land of socialized medicine, it is beyond my comprehension how anybody can be against it.
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Post by Kimby on Jun 28, 2012 17:05:39 GMT
In the US if the Democrats are for anything, you can be certain the Republicans - and Tea Partiers - will be against it. That is not to say that the Democrats can agree on anything either.
Our main problem in almost every difficult issue in the US seems to track back to CORPORATIONS. (Can't do socialized medicine because the insurance companies won't like it, and they give a pile of money to campaigns for reelection. Ditto for environmental regulations.)
And now the Supreme Court has upheld "corporate personhood". This could be the end of the USA as we (used to) know it.
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Post by Kimby on Jun 28, 2012 17:06:43 GMT
And there is only one word in today's USA that is dirtier than "Socialism" and that is "Communism".
And many idiots think there is no difference.
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LouisXIV
member
Offline
L'estat c'est moi.
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Post by LouisXIV on Jun 28, 2012 22:31:03 GMT
The Affordable Care Act, now we will find out what affordable means.
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Post by fumobici on Jun 28, 2012 23:38:42 GMT
Without a public option or single payer system, most of the savings that would be otherwise achievable are not there. Big pharma and the insurance lobbies have paid off the politicians to see that such savings, as achieved in every other industrialized country, aren't realized given that any real savings would have come right out of their pockets. Both parties are well and truly bought off so, like so many other issues facing the US, voting Democrat or Republican to fix them is essentially futile.
Which isn't to say that the ACA won't be better than the pre-ACA status quo in terms of savings and coverage but the US will continue to have the least efficient health care system in the world by a long mile. Actually as long as medicine costs are multiples higher in the US because of corruption of the political process by big pharma and we retain fee for service, for-profit as our system we will continue to cede a enormous competitive advantage to our business competitors, balloon the deficit and waste billions in taxpayer money subsidizing the current system.
The ACA is a bandage on a metastatic cancer, better than nothing- but only just. Overturning it would certainly not have helped in any way.
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Post by Kimby on Jun 29, 2012 0:36:07 GMT
Interesting that both FOX and CNN, in their rush to be the first to announce the Supreme Court's decision, got it WRONG! Apparently the court said that it was not constitutional to FINE people/employers who don't have/provide insurance, but that it could be considered a TAX, which IS constitutional.
Gotta admit, John Roberts surprised me today.
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Post by bixaorellana on Jun 29, 2012 1:30:36 GMT
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Post by Kimby on Jun 29, 2012 14:30:59 GMT
www.nytimes.com/2012/06/29/opinion/the-real-winners.html?_r=2&hpIn...the law that the Supreme Court upheld is an act of human decency that is also fiscally responsible. It’s not perfect, by a long shot — it is, after all, originally a Republican plan, devised long ago as a way to forestall the obvious alternative of extending Medicare to cover everyone. As a result, it’s an awkward hybrid of public and private insurance that isn’t the way anyone would have designed a system from scratch. And there will be a long struggle to make it better, just as there was for Social Security. (Bring back the public option!) But it’s still a big step toward a better — and by that I mean morally better — society.
Which brings us to the nature of the people who tried to kill health reform — and who will, of course, continue their efforts despite this unexpected defeat.
At one level, the most striking thing about the campaign against reform was its dishonesty. Remember “death panels”? Remember how reform’s opponents would, in the same breath, accuse Mr. Obama of promoting big government and denounce him for cutting Medicare? Politics ain’t beanbag, but, even in these partisan times, the unscrupulous nature of the campaign against reform was exceptional. And, rest assured, all the old lies and probably a bunch of new ones will be rolled out again in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision. Let’s hope the Democrats are ready.
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Post by Kimby on Jun 29, 2012 16:11:24 GMT
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Post by lola on Jun 30, 2012 3:18:20 GMT
I can't open your link to Krugman's column today, kimby, but read in Times this morning, and it was excellent.
I'm so relieved.
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Post by Kimby on Jun 30, 2012 13:25:05 GMT
Here's the whole text for those who couldn't open the link. OP-ED COLUMNIST
The Real Winners
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: June 28, 2012 653 Comments
So the Supreme Court — defying many expectations — upheld the Affordable Care Act, a k a Obamacare. There will, no doubt, be many headlines declaring this a big victory for President Obama, which it is. But the real winners are ordinary Americans — people like you.
How many people are we talking about? You might say 30 million, the number of additional people the Congressional Budget Office says will have health insurance thanks to Obamacare. But that vastly understates the true number of winners because millions of other Americans — including many who oppose the act — would have been at risk of being one of those 30 million.
So add in every American who currently works for a company that offers good health insurance but is at risk of losing that job (and who isn’t in this world of outsourcing and private equity buyouts?); every American who would have found health insurance unaffordable but will now receive crucial financial help; every American with a pre-existing condition who would have been flatly denied coverage in many states.
In short, unless you belong to that tiny class of wealthy Americans who are insulated and isolated from the realities of most people’s lives, the winners from that Supreme Court decision are your friends, your relatives, the people you work with — and, very likely, you. For almost all of us stand to benefit from making America a kinder and more decent society.
But what about the cost? Put it this way: the budget office’s estimate of the cost over the next decade of Obamacare’s “coverage provisions” — basically, the subsidies needed to make insurance affordable for all — is about only a third of the cost of the tax cuts, overwhelmingly favoring the wealthy, that Mitt Romney is proposing over the same period. True, Mr. Romney says that he would offset that cost, but he has failed to provide any plausible explanation of how he’d do that. The Affordable Care Act, by contrast, is fully paid for, with an explicit combination of tax increases and spending cuts elsewhere.
So the law that the Supreme Court upheld is an act of human decency that is also fiscally responsible. It’s not perfect, by a long shot — it is, after all, originally a Republican plan, devised long ago as a way to forestall the obvious alternative of extending Medicare to cover everyone. As a result, it’s an awkward hybrid of public and private insurance that isn’t the way anyone would have designed a system from scratch. And there will be a long struggle to make it better, just as there was for Social Security. (Bring back the public option!) But it’s still a big step toward a better — and by that I mean morally better — society.
Which brings us to the nature of the people who tried to kill health reform — and who will, of course, continue their efforts despite this unexpected defeat.
At one level, the most striking thing about the campaign against reform was its dishonesty. Remember “death panels”? Remember how reform’s opponents would, in the same breath, accuse Mr. Obama of promoting big government and denounce him for cutting Medicare? Politics ain’t beanbag, but, even in these partisan times, the unscrupulous nature of the campaign against reform was exceptional. And, rest assured, all the old lies and probably a bunch of new ones will be rolled out again in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision. Let’s hope the Democrats are ready.
But what was and is really striking about the anti-reformers is their cruelty. It would be one thing if, at any point, they had offered any hint of an alternative proposal to help Americans with pre-existing conditions, Americans who simply can’t afford expensive individual insurance, Americans who lose coverage along with their jobs. But it has long been obvious that the opposition’s goal is simply to kill reform, never mind the human consequences. We should all be thankful that, for the moment at least, that effort has failed.
Let me add a final word on the Supreme Court.
Before the arguments began, the overwhelming consensus among legal experts who aren’t hard-core conservatives — and even among some who are — was that Obamacare was clearly constitutional. And, in the end, thanks to Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., the court upheld that view. But four justices dissented, and did so in extreme terms, proclaiming not just the much-disputed individual mandate but the whole act unconstitutional. Given prevailing legal opinion, it’s hard to see that position as anything but naked partisanship.
The point is that this isn’t over — not on health care, not on the broader shape of American society. The cruelty and ruthlessness that made this court decision such a nail-biter aren’t going away.
But, for now, let’s celebrate. This was a big day, a victory for due process, decency and the American people.
A version of this op-ed appeared in print on June 29, 2012, on page A25 of the New York edition with the headline: The Real Winners. |
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