December 20, 2017

The nightmare of Obamacare, about to be finished off

The best part of this week's vast tax cut reform package, set to be approved this morning, is the end of the hellish Obamacare mandate.

What a massive relief to millions of Americans, stuck between the rock of having to buy overpriced, under-delivering Obamacare health insurance policies and the hard place of paying large, gratuitous fines, which the Supreme Court ruled a tax, if they don't.

It's the most questionably legal and outrageously bad law since Prohibition because it's literally a life tax. Obamacare law up until now requires that everyone stuck in the individual market either buy these costly policies or be taxed for being alive without one. It's not like states requiring the purchase of car insurance, as some have claimed. In that instance, one always has the choice to not drive a car. One doesn't have the choice to be alive. To Obamacare boosters, being alive is being obliged to buy Obamacare.

It's also a poverty tax. It's an actual punishment tax for being poor. Typically, these one-size-fits-all policies are so overpriced based on the kind of costly coverage they require, such as pregnancy care and drug addiction rehab, that they aren't affordable without subsidies. What's more, if a buyer is never going to need this kind of coverage, either because he cannot get pregnant or refuses to ingest illegal drugs, he must pay for the insurance plan cost anyway. Net result: Overpriced Obamacare policies on the individual market have made purchase of health care insurance impossible for millions of Americans, and those are the ones who pay the fines.

A recent survey of Obamacare fines shows that most fines are coming in from the poorer range of Americans, meaning this poverty tax has slammed the working and lower middle classes hardest of all. Jeb Graham at IBD shows how this has happened:

The 2017 tax data offer new evidence that there's much to be gained by moving away from the individual mandate and much to lose by sticking with it. Tax returns that had been processed as of April 27 included 4 million that paid ObamaCare fines (officially known as individual shared responsibility payments), with an average payment of $708.

What is striking about the data is that the average payment is barely higher than the minimum payment of $695. Since people were required to pay the greater of $695 or 2.5% of taxable income above the filing threshold ($10,350 in 2017), one takeaway is that most of the $2.8 billion in fines paid through April appear to have come from people with modest to moderate incomes.

Betsy McCaughey write that the phenomenon is so bad that it's made the middle class "the new uninsured."

And that brings us to the third point: it's unaffordable and anti-health, mocking the very Affordable Care Act name it claims to embody. How does paying for health care policies the size of a mortgage help the middle class? How is that not punitive taxation? And how does paying fines affect the ordinary Americans who cannot afford the mortgage-sized Obamacare policies? Well, consider that paying fines pretty well keeps millions of Americans from paying for plans they can afford – smaller plans not in the Obamacare cavalcade of offerings, plans that are not larded up with pregnancy, pediatric dental, and drug treatment coverage, or policies that that include the kind of health care that some buyers need, such as dental care, which is not included in Obamacare policies. If one is spending all of one's health care dollars on fines, you can bet he isn't going to have a lot left for checkups, mammograms, replacing a tooth, or getting a crown. Some health care.

What a massive relief it is for millions of Americans to be released from the Obamacare mandate. Now the Obamacare advocates and insurers are going to have to work for their consumer dollar, offering policies that actually serve consumers' needs and can be delivered at a genuinely affordable price. The consumer will finally have to be consulted, not the bureaucrat. Otherwise, no one will buy.

There is still a long way to go for that market to build itself up and for insurers to get a better idea of what consumers want. But freed of the Obamacare mandate fetters, at least there is a fighting chance.

Congress should be praised for this great tax relief package at Christmas, which ends this most hideous tax of all.

www.americanthinker.com/blog/2...be_finished_off.html

quote:

Originally posted by chellim1:
Now the Obamacare advocates and insurers are going to have to work for their consumer dollar, offering policies that actually serve consumers' needs and can be delivered at a genuinely affordable price. The consumer will finally have to be consulted, not the bureaucrat. Otherwise, no one will buy.

Insurance carriers are not going to do that. They few healthy young people who bought insurance because they feared the penalty will walk away from insurance, leaving the carriers with only unhealthy and/or older policy holders, which is not a profitable scenario. Eliminating the individual mandate penalty will effectively result in fewer healthcare options as more carriers drop out, raise premiums for those who still want insurance, and eventually speed the collapse of Obamacare.

Healthy young people generally don't buy insurance anyhow, and don't pay much for it when they do. The only way the logic works is if you think intergenerationally - there are enough Millenials to theoretically cover the costs of Gen X'ers who need a lot of help. There aren't enough Gen X'ers to cover the costs of the Baby Boomers who need a lot of help, and it's the concerns over Baby Boomer costs that are essentially driving the sense that there's a 'crisis' that needs to be addressed.

IOW, this just doesn't change much of anything significant when it comes to insurers being able to cover claims. That's why Gen X'ers need OCare to die - so they don't spend their working lives pouring insane amounts of money into covering costs for other people rather than dealing with their own health and retirement needs as well as those of their children.

quote:

They few healthy young people who bought insurance because they feared the penalty will walk away from insurance, leaving the carriers with only unhealthy and/or older policy holders, which is not a profitable scenario. Eliminating the individual mandate penalty will effectively result in fewer healthcare options as more carriers drop out, raise premiums for those who still want insurance, and eventually speed the collapse of Obamacare.

True enough... Eliminating the individual mandate will speed the collapse of Obamacare.

But that's a good thing. Furthermore, eliminating the mandate means that young people will be free to buy what they want. When that happens, insurance companies will attempt to get them as customers by offering cheaper, stripped down coverage.

quote:

True enough... Eliminating the individual mandate will speed the collapse of Obamacare.

But that's a good thing. Furthermore, eliminating the mandate means that young people will be free to buy what they want. When that happens, insurance companies will attempt to get them as customers by offering cheaper, stripped down coverage.

**AND** stop the subsidies that .gov has been paying to the insurers to "force" them to cover people who could not afford the premiums on a worthless policy.

RMD

Yep. BOTH incentives and "force" need to go before we can truly say we're done with that mess.

Revealed: How The CBO Saved ObamaCare With Bogus

2/22/2019

Health Reform: How do you enact a massive new program, and then keep it from being repealed after it fails? It's simple. Just pull the numbers out of thin air. That's basically what happened with ObamaCare.

When centrist Democrats were deciding whether to support ObamaCare in 2010, the "nonpartisan" Congressional Budget Office told them not to worry. The law, it said, would cut the deficit. It would bring 24 million people into the new ObamaCare exchanges. Subsidy costs would be modest. And the number of uninsured would fall by more than half. Those Dems signed on.
ObamaCare Repeal Thwarted

Seven years later, as centrist Republicans contemplated an ObamaCare repeal-and-replace plan, the CBO warned that doing so would boost the number of uninsured by 22 million. That scared enough Republicans away to kill the bill.

Turns out, all those forecasts were way off.

ObamaCare boosted the deficit in its first 10 years. Only 8 million, not 24 million, people enrolled in the ObamaCare exchanges. The average cost of ObamaCare subsidies is 11% higher, and the number uninsured 36% higher, than the CBO projected.

Had the CBO been better at predicting the future of health care under ObamaCare, it's likely that Democrats would have scaled back their plans, while perhaps seeking Republican input.

Now we learn that the CBO wildly exaggerated the impact of the Republicans' repeal effort when it said that 22 million would lose coverage as a result. Almost all that loss was from repealing the individual mandate.

Wildly Inflated Numbers

CBO said 7 million people would drop out of the individual insurance market. Another 4 million would lose employer coverage. And 4 million would cancel their Medicaid — even though it's free. All in the first year.

At the time, we argued that the CBO had hugely inflated those numbers because it vastly overestimated the effectiveness of the individual mandate.

Ironically, Republicans ended up repealing the individual mandate tax penalty, but keeping the rest of ObamaCare. So what happened?

This week, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services released its latest annual report on national health spending. The intrepid Philip Klein at the Washington Examiner noticed that, buried in a footnote, was a stunning rebuke of those CBO forecasts.

The report says that the mandate repeal will result in only 1.5 million dropping out of the individual insurance market, and 1 million from employer plans. CMS says Medicaid enrollment will "be unaffected."

In other words, the CBO was off by a factor of six.

These forecasting errors don't even rise to the "good enough for government work" level. But they were good enough to get ObamaCare on the books, and then keep it there.

https://www.investors.com/poli...amacare-cbo-numbers/


Hayward: CBO’s Obamacare Failure Is a Devastating Blow to Socialism

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) released a little-noticed report last week that confirms what Obamacare critics said from Day One: the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates for the cost and impact of the Affordable Care Act were off by enormous margins.

American voters should carefully consider this object lesson when evaluating all socialist promises. If socialists couldn’t predict the effect of Obamacare accurately, how can anyone trust their predictions for vastly larger and more complex government takeovers like “Medicare for All” or the “Green New Deal?”

https://www.breitbart.com/heal...ting-blow-socialism/

Democrats Credit Health Care For House Win And Are Divided On What To Do

* Democrats are divided on what their next legislative step is when it comes to health care after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared “health care won” in the midterms.
* Many Democrats with more moderate bases would be in trouble should Pelosi put Medicare for all up to a vote.
* Medicare for all hearings could begin in April.

Months after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared “health care won” in the midterm elections, Democrats are divided on what their next legislative step is when it comes to health care.

Democratic Reps. Pramila Jayapal of Washington and Debbie Dingell of Michigan unveiled their Medicare for all bill on Feb. 27. It would place virtually all health care payments in the government’s hands.

But Medicare for all and its climate counterpart the Green New Deal have stalled in the House after being rolled out as “ambitious proposals,” reported The Washington Examiner Sunday.

The Medicare for all bill had 106 co-sponsors when Jayapal and Dingell introduced it. Nearly three weeks later, no new Democrats had signed on, according to The Examiner.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal questions witnesses during a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee’s Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law Subcommittee in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill March 12, 2019 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Many Democrats with more moderate bases would be in trouble should Pelosi put Medicare for all up to a vote.

“Most people receive health care from their employer,” Democratic California Rep. Scott Peters said according to The New York Times. “They do not want to replace it with an untested government system.”

Pelosi herself has not expressed enthusiasm for Medicare for all. The Times reported:

Ms. Pelosi has publicly stayed out of the fight, but with hearings on Medicare for all and other proposals scheduled in the coming weeks, that stance may not be sustainable. People close to her say she has serious reservations about the single-payer bill and believes the nation can achieve the goal of universal coverage at a more manageable cost by building on the framework of the Affordable Care Act, which she worked tirelessly to secure in 2010.

Jayapal has said Medicare for all hearings could begin in April.



US Senator Elizabeth Warren (C), Democrat from Massachusetts, speaks with US Senator Bernie Sanders (2nd R), Independent from Vermont, as they discusses Medicare for All legislation on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, on September 13, 2017. (JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images)

Many Democrats centered their platforms on ensuring protections for patients with pre-existing conditions, but the “full” House has not yet voted on any legislation on that topic, according to The Times.

Tensions between the Medicare for all faction and centrist faction is likely to continue as House Democrats try to craft their agenda-setting budget, the first of the session.

Republican lawmakers painted Medicare-for-all as a socialist nightmare after Jayapal introduced it.

“If I have a beef with the Medicare-for-all, they’re being totally dishonest with the American people,” Republican Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy told reporters at a meeting in February. “They’re not telling people how they’re going to pay for it.”

Republican Texas Rep. Michael Burgess, who is a physician like Cassidy, described the latest Medicare for all plan as a “one-size-fits-all, Soviet-style policy.”

Like the Democratic House, the 2020 Democratic presidential field is divided on the question of Medicare for all, although many are leaning towards the concept. The House’s Medicare-for-all proposal is broader than the one Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders introduced in 2017. Other 2020 Democratic presidential hopefuls including New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, California Sen. Kamala Harris and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren support his plan.

https://www.dailycaller.com/20...ts-health-care-plan/

DOJ Concludes Obamacare Unconstitutional And Should Be Struck Down

In a dramatic escalation of the Trump administration's legal battle against President Obama's health care law, Justice Department lawyers now say the entire Affordable Care Act should be struck down.

Having previously argued, under AG Jeff Sessions, that only the law's pre-existing condition protections should be struck down, DoJ lawyers told a federal appeals court Monday it thinks the whole of ObamaCare is unconstitutional, siding with a Texas district court ruling that found Obamacare unconstitutional.

In a letter Monday night, the administration said "it is not urging that any portion of the district court's judgment be reversed."

"The Department of Justice has determined that the district court's comprehensive opinion came to the correct conclusion and will support it on appeal," said Kerri Kupec, spokesperson for the Justice Department.

The Hill points out that the case centers on the argument that since Congress repealed the tax penalty in the law's mandate for everyone to have insurance in 2017, the mandate can no longer be ruled constitutional under Congress's power to tax.

The challengers then argue that all of ObamaCare should be invalidated because the mandate is unconstitutional.

Most legal experts say legal precedent shows that even if the mandate is ruled unconstitutional, the rest of ObamaCare should remain unharmed, as that is what Congress voted to do in the 2017 tax law that repealed the mandate's penalty.

Of course, at a moment when Trump's political capital is soaring after the Mueller/Avenatti debacles have crushed the #resistance, as The Hill reports, the move is certain to prompt new denunciations from Democrats, who had already seized on the Trump administration's earlier call for the pre-existing condition protections to be struck down.

"This lawsuit is as dangerous as it is reckless. It threatens the healthcare of tens of millions of Americans across the country -- from California to Kentucky and all the way to Maine," said California Attorney General Xavier Becerra in a statement.

"The Affordable Care Act is an integral part of our healthcare system... Because no American should fear losing healthcare, we will defend the ACA every step of the way."

Specifically, as The Washington Times concludes, the administration’s decision to fully back the lawsuit will loom large on Tuesday when Democrats plan to propose measures that would make Obamacare more generous and combat Mr. Trump’s changes to the program, which they’ve dubbed “sabotage.”

https://www.zerohedge.com/news...hould-be-struck-down

Trump's DOJ Looks To Smash Obamacare, Approves Of Appeals Court Decision Invalidating It

On Monday the Justice Department informed a federal appeals court that it approved of an appeals court decision that stated the entire Obamacare statute is unconstitutional.

In December, U.S. District Court Judge Reed O’Connor had ruled that Obamacare’s individual mandate was unconstitutional and thus the entire Obamacare structure was invalid. Writing to Lyle W. Cayce, Clerk of the Court of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, Joseph H. Hunt, Assistant Attorney General, and Brett A. Shumate, Deputy Assistant Attorney General, wrote, “The Department of Justice has determined that the district court’s judgment should be affirmed. Because the United States is not urging that any portion of the district court’s judgment be reversed, the government intends to file a brief on the appellees’ schedule."

O’Connor’s decision came in the case Texas v. Azar, in which the constitutionality of the individual mandate was challenged. O’Connor stated that because Congress terminated the fines placed upon people if they did not obey the individual mandate, the reasoning that Justice John Roberts used in supporting Obamacare by calling it a tax was no longer applicable. Thus the invalidity of the individual mandate, which was an essential part of Obamacare, invalidated the entire package.

O’Connor wrote in his decision, “Here, the Plaintiffs allege that, following passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA), the Individual Mandate in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) is unconstitutional. They say it is no longer fairly readable as an exercise of Congress’s Tax Power and continues to be unsustainable under the Interstate Commerce Clause. They further urge that, if they are correct, the balance of the ACA is untenable as inseverable from the Invalid Mandate.”

O’Connor continued:


Resolution of these claims rests at the intersection of the ACA, the Supreme Court’s decision in NFIB (National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius), and the TCJA (Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017). In NFIB, the Supreme Court held the Individual Mandate was unconstitutional under the Interstate Commerce Clause but could fairly be read as an exercise of Congress’s Tax Power because it triggered a tax. The TCJA eliminated that tax. The Supreme Court’s reasoning in NFIB—buttressed by other binding precedent and plain text—thus compels the conclusion that the Individual Mandate may no longer be upheld under the Tax Power. nd because the Individual Mandate continues to mandate the purchase of health insurance, it remains unsustainable under the Interstate Commerce Clause—as the Supreme Court already held.

O’Connor delineated how the defendants’ position was inconsistent:



At the threshold, the Intervenor Defendants hope to have their cake and eat it too by arguing the Individual Mandate does absolutely nothing but regulates interstate commerce. That is, they first say the Individual Mandate “does not compel anyone to purchase insurance.” Hr’g Tr. at 37:12. Yet they ask the Court to find the provision “regulate[s] Commerce . . . among the several States.” U.S. CONST. art. 1, § 8, cl. 3. The Intervenor Defendants’ theory, then, is that Congress regulates interstate commerce when it regulates nothing at all. But to “regulate” is “to govern or direct according to rule” and to “bring under the control of law or constituted authority.”

O’Connor noted, “The Court today finds the Individual Mandate is no longer fairly readable as an exercise of Congress’s Tax Power and continues to be unsustainable under Congress’s Interstate Commerce Power … All told, Congress stated three separate times that the Individual Mandate is essential to the ACA. That is once, twice, three times and plainly … On the unambiguous enacted text alone, the Court finds the Individual Mandate is inseverable from the Act to which it is essential … The ACA’s text and the Supreme Court’s decisions in NFIB and King thus make clear the Individual Mandate is inseverable from the ACA.”

He concluded, “For the reasons stated above, the Court grants Plaintiffs partial summary judgment and declares the Individual Mandate, 26 U.S.C. § 5000A(a), UNCONSTITUTIONAL. Further, the Court declares the remaining provisions of the ACA, Pub. L. 111-148, are INSEVERABLE and therefore INVALID.”

On Monday night, reacting to the news from Trump's DOJ, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi huffed, “Tonight in federal court, the Trump administration decided not only to try to destroy protections for Americans living with pre-existing conditions but to declare all-out war on the health care of the American people.”

https://www.dailywire.com/news...appeals-hank-berrien

quote:

For the reasons stated above, the Court grants Plaintiffs partial summary judgment and declares the Individual Mandate, 26 U.S.C. § 5000A(a), UNCONSTITUTIONAL. Further, the Court declares the remaining provisions of the ACA, Pub. L. 111-148, are INSEVERABLE and therefore INVALID.”

huzzah

quote:

Originally posted by thunderson:

quote:

For the reasons stated above, the Court grants Plaintiffs partial summary judgment and declares the Individual Mandate, 26 U.S.C. § 5000A(a), UNCONSTITUTIONAL. Further, the Court declares the remaining provisions of the ACA, Pub. L. 111-148, are INSEVERABLE and therefore INVALID.”

huzzah

In the insufferable words of creepy Joe, "This is a big effin deal"...

I wouldn't get too excited. Usually a court will only strike the invalid part and let the rest stand.

My guess is the individual mandate will stay struck down at the higher level, but they'll reverse on invalidating the whole thing.

quote:

Originally posted by esdunbar:
I wouldn't get too excited. Usually a court will only strike the invalid part and let the rest stand.

My guess is the individual mandate will stay struck down at the higher level, but they'll reverse on invalidating the whole thing.

Even if the rest is ruled inseverable?

quote:

My guess is the individual mandate will stay struck down at the higher level, but they'll reverse on invalidating the whole thing.

Trying to take the wind out of our sails?
I disagree. I agree with darthfuster: "This is a big effin deal"...

quote:

All told, Congress stated three separate times that the Individual Mandate is essential to the ACA. That is once, twice, three times and plainly … On the unambiguous enacted text alone, the Court finds the Individual Mandate is inseverable from the Act to which it is essential … The ACA’s text and the Supreme Court’s decisions in NFIB and King thus make clear the Individual Mandate is inseverable from the ACA.”

If this went back to the Supremes I don't think even Justice Roberts could put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

quote:

Originally posted by chellim1:
If this went back to the Supremes I don't think even Justice Roberts could put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

Yeah, but I'll bet Roberts' will give it a try none the less. As he noted the first time around, he doesn't want the court to legislate this issue, he wants Congress to act on it instead. However, since Congress did repeal the individual mandate, one might argue Congress did act, so the court must now act (invalidating the rest of the law).

The disgusting part of all this is that every single one of us knows the individual mandate was unconstitutional. Yet years later, this law is like herpes in that we can't get rid of it.

quote:

he doesn't want the court to legislate this issue, he wants Congress to act on it instead.

This is how courts are supposed to do it. That's why I said I wouldn't get too excited just yet.

Another article on the subject:

DOJ Backs Court Ruling Killing Obamacare

The Trump administration green-lights judicial repeal of the hated law.

March 27, 2019
Matthew Vadum

Three months after a federal court struck down the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that created Obamacare, the Department of Justice announced that it will back the court’s landmark decision, escalating the Trump administration’s attacks on the un-American 2010 legislation that nationalized a huge chunk of the nation’s economy.

Predictably, Democrats, Republican squishes, and insurance companies unjustly enriched by Obamacare denounced the Trump administration’s move. Democrats, in particular, are eager to keep the issue of health care alive so they can run on it in 2020 and in every election until the end of time.

It was Dec. 14, 2018, that U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor of the Northern District of Texas held that in 2017 when Congress effectively repealed the mandate that forced Americans to buy health insurance that body “sawed off the last leg it [i.e. Obamacare] stood on.”

“The court finds the individual mandate ‘is essential to’ and inseverable from ‘the other provisions of’” the Obamacare statute and is therefore unconstitutional, O’Connor wrote.

Robert Henneke, general counsel and director of the Center for the American Future at the Austin-based Texas Public Policy Foundation, who was part of the legal team that vanquished Obamacare in the lawsuit, told The Epoch Times in December that the ruling was “the third chapter in the trilogy” of significant challenges to Obamacare.

“The entire Affordable Care Act when it was originally crafted by Congress was built around the individual mandate penalty, the premise that the way to fund and to make viable this entire regulatory scheme was by compelling individuals to purchase health insurance. Hard-written into the statute in many ways is how it’s an essential component and how the regulatory scheme doesn’t function without the individual mandate penalty.”

In NFIB v. Sebelius in 2012, the Supreme Court deemed the mandate a valid exercise of congressional taxing power because it generated revenue, rejecting the government’s argument that the mandate could be justified under the Constitution’s Commerce Clause.

Because the mandate penalty was reduced to zero by Congress, it no longer would generate revenue and could not be seen as an exercise of congressional taxing authority, Henneke said.

At the time President Trump celebrated O’Connor’s decision with a Twitter post.

“As I predicted all along, Obamacare has been struck down as an UNCONSTITUTIONAL disaster! Now Congress must pass a STRONG law that provides GREAT healthcare and protects pre-existing conditions.”

After calling the ruling “Great news for America!” Trump urged Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and then-incoming Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to “get it done!”

The Hill newspaper reported March 25 that the Justice Department sent a letter to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals advising the court that its new position was that the Dec. 14 decision should remain intact while it goes through the appellate process. Previously it was the department’s position that only the preexisting condition coverage protections of the law should be struck down.

“The Department of Justice has determined that the district court’s judgment should be affirmed,” the agency said in the letter.

The political legitimacy of the huge government takeover of the American healthcare sector has long been in doubt because it had no GOP support in Congress. Although some Republican lawmakers voted for Democrat Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Democrat Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, not a single Republican lawmaker voted for Barack Obama’s signature legislative accomplishment, the disastrous so-called healthcare reform law. Because of Obamacare, insurance premiums throughout America have skyrocketed and bureaucratic red tape has strangled patient choice.

Before O’Connor’s ruling, Obamacare had withstood major legal challenges.

In NFIB v. Sebelius Chief Justice John Roberts went rogue, infamously siding with left-wing justices on the Supreme Court in a tortured, nonsensical judicial opinion that was widely ridiculed. On a 5-to-4 vote the all-encompassing 2,000-page statute was upheld as constitutional on the theory that the individual mandate, which required consumers to buy health insurance even if they didn’t want it, was somehow a valid exercise of the congressional power to tax. The same court also upheld the individual mandate in 2015 in King v. Burwell in a 6-to-3 vote. In 2017, Congress effectively nullified the mandate by reducing the tax penalty for not purchasing insurance to zero effective next year.

Texas, 18 other states, and consumers then launched a lawsuit arguing the law as amended in 2017 was unconstitutional because the individual mandate was so key to the Obamacare program that it could not operate in its absence. Sixteen states took the opposite tack and insisted the revised law be upheld.

On cue, Democrats attacked the Trump administration for supporting O’Connor’s ruling.

“In 2020, we need to elect a president who will make health care a right,” leftist Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), a presidential candidate, wrote on Twitter.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said the administration’s position would tie an “anchor around the neck of every Republican for the next two years.”

“At a time when all this Russia news came out and it’s not what voters are interested in, leave it to the Trump administration to turn it back to health care, which is why we’re in the majority,” said Rep. Scott Peters (D-Calif.).

Lawmakers said Trump visited Capitol Hill on Tuesday for a luncheon. Without going into specifics, he called on lawmakers to coming up with something better than Obamacare.

Whatever that may be it should protect people with preexisting conditions, the president said, according to Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.).

“He just mentioned it in passing that there was litigation moving through the courts, but litigation takes a while and he wanted to see us revisit the subject,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) said, according to The Hill.

RINO Sen. Susan Collins (R-Me.) blasted Trump for backing O’Connor’s ruling, calling the move “very disappointing.”

The Department of Justice is required to defend “duly enacted laws, which the Affordable Care Act certainly was,” said Collins, presumably with a straight face.

Status quo-defending Beltway insiders aren’t worried about O’Connor’s ruling.

They dismiss all conservative, Constitution-respecting judges like O’Connor as cranks and fully expect the courts to undo his decision.

Their expectation, unfortunately, is well-founded.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/f...macare-matthew-vadum

That's right. Erase every speck of the Stampy Feet administration. Let there only be a comically ostentatious presidential library at an insulting cost to the libs in Illinois such that it turns the stomach to visit and see the propaganda.

quote:

In a dramatic escalation of the Trump administration's legal battle against President Obama's health care law, Justice Department lawyers now say the entire Affordable Care Act should be struck down.

Turn about is fair play. How many federal policies did the Obama DOJ suddenly decide to either not defend or actually attack?

As for severability, there's a reason why the only way OCare could be kept alive was for the courts to decide that the mandate was a tax. Without that, the whole thing fell apart as unConstitutional. IOW, there's good reason to consider this the death-knell of the ACA and there's no good reason to fear that the SCOTUS is going to be desperate to keep it alive somehow.

Yeah, yeah, yeah - everybody wants to hate on Roberts for following the law rather than playing the activist judge, including a couple of people here who have the legal education to know better. Paranoid fantasies will make you old before your time.