So, thanks to Chief Justice Roberts I will get to keep buying health insurance, and won’t be tossed off because of my pre-existing condition. And the Civil Rights decisions are no longer in jeprody because the use of the Commerce Clause was upheld and vindicated by this decision.
And may I say — Senator Rand Paul is an idiot. He’s a U.S. Senator. Does he not understand the American Constitution. He released a statement that “just because a couple of people said it was constitutional doesn’t make it constitutional.”
Yes it does. It’s the Supreme court, you moron. I hate the Citizen’s United decision. I think it’s an unwise law, but the Supremes ruled it constitutional — so it’s constitutional.
Ten years from not another court can look at it as they did with separate but equal, and maybe Congress can draft a law that will withstand court scrutiny regarding campaign financing, but it’s how separation of powers works.
The Commerce Clause? Roberts explicitly rejected the Commerce Clause and the Necessary and Proper Clause as grounds for the mandate, and based it entirely on the interpretation of the mandate as an exercise of the taxing power. It was quite a surprise, as both Congress and the president denied that the penalty for being uninsured was a tax.
My apologies. At the time I wrote this I hadn’t read far enough. Roberts does take a step to limit the power of the commerce clause, but it’s not as toxic as it could have been for future use of the clause.
Also, it’s a muddled decision that will be refined — if it’s cited — in later decisions. Roberts looked at it the way the gasoline tax is imposed. Virtually everyone uses the roads, they have to be repaired so we put on a gas tax. Well, everyone, sooner or later will use health care, and it’s the most massive chunk of our budget so it has to be addressed. There is an amazing graph that shows what Australia, Germany, England, Canada, etc. pay per capita for health care — it’s slightly over $3000. Our spending per capita is over $7000. And we have worse outcomes. Those countries have longer life spans than the U.S.
You write as if the only alternatives were to keep the current dysfunctional system, or to adopt a centralized, state-controlled system.
Not shocked at the ruling, save I am pretty happy they torpedoed the Commerce Clause malarkey
The beneficiary of the polciy should be a testamentary trust in favor of the person who you want to benefit. The death benefit will go into the trust, which will be administered for the benefit of the beneficiary according to the terms of the trust.A lawyer can help you to do this. It is quite common. This is not a do it yourself project, or one for those non-lawyer trust mills. You will need to name a trustee this can be someone you trust whom you expect to outlive you, or the trust department of a bank. A successor trustee should also be named, just in case something unexpected happens to the original trustee. The trustee’s job is to make sure your instructions are followed to the letter.
It’s actually fairly straight forward. Much of the language is to deal with insurance companies. How much they spend on advertising and admin versus oh, health care. It limits it severely. Medicare spends only 2% or 3% on admin, and nothing on advertising because it’s one of those hated government programs. What it does is keeps insurance companies from slapping lifetime limits on you, and they can’t deny people like me with preexisting conditions any more, and it tells insurance companies they have to pay for routine checkups like mamograms, pap smears, prostate exams, that will keep a small problem from becoming a really expensive problem down the line. It stops insurance companies from charging women up to 30% more in some states for their health insurance. It provides financial aid to people who can’t afford health insurance. It increases the amount of money for medicaid so the very poor don’t end up in the emergency rooms which costs a fortune to all of us tax payers, and overloads the system. And it makes the young and healthy carry insurance which helps spread the costs around to everyone (a single payer system funded by taxes would have done the same, and not rewarded insurance companies who are bastards, but that’s another discussion) In a sense we’re spreading the risk now, but in a very expensive way by forcing people to rely on emergency rooms for care, and by the time they get there they are usually desperately ill. I had a friend who had no money, hand’t gotten check ups, nearly died, and spent 21 days in intensive care. Who do you think paid for that? He had no money, the hospital saved him, but it was tax dollars. it would have been so much better for the system if he had gone to a doctor years before.
And let’s talk about the Commerce Clause. Using it in a brilliant and creative way was what allows African-Americans to eat in any restaurant they wish, and stay at any hotel. When I was in law school, and we studied Heart of Alabama Hotel Inc. vs. United States and Katzenbach vs. McClung I was so impressed with the genius of those decisions as a means to extend civil rights to all people in this country.