In a remarkable act of either stupidity or brinksmanship, the Obama Administration challenged the US Supreme Court to either keep the federal individual mandate to buy health insurance or throw out with it some of the most important consumer protections in the federal health care overhaul.
The Justice Department argues in a brief to SCOTUS that if the mandate is unconstitutional, then insurance companies cannot be forced to sell health insurance to people regardless of their preexisting conditions or to price their policies based on factors other than a patient's medical condition. In other words, give us mandatory health insurance or take from sick patients the right to have access to insurance at an affordable price.
WTF? Has the White House lost its mind?
New York has a system with NO mandatory health insurance, but the very take-all-comers provision and community rating pricing, which excludes price gouging based on illness, that the Justice Department says cannot work without the mandate. Obama advocated for such a system while running for president and distinguishing himself from Hillary Clinton. Now, according to his Justice Department, it's just not possible?
New York may have high premiums, but so does Massachusetts, which has mandatory health insurance. Both states have recently adopted premium regulation to deal with reining in premiums. Consumer Watchdog's study earlier this year found premium regulation to be the essential component for health reform to work, not mandatory insurance.
Obama's attempt to force the hands of a Supreme Court that couldn't even be shamed out of throwing the 2000 election to George W. Bush seems to be more than legal sophistry. The President seems to have said to himself so many times that mandatory health insurance is necessary for any pro-consumer reform that his Justice Department believed it.
Lower courts have ruled the mandatory purchase provision -- which is wildly unpopular with public, unfair without premium regulation and possibly unconstitutional -- could be struck from the federal law without losing the pro-consumer provisions. Now the Justice Department just gave the Supreme Court the blade it needed to gut the prohibitions against insurance companies refusing to sell insurance to people who need it most.
Obama just handed the health insurance companies a huge pot of gold. He may just not know how to play poker, but the President just destroyed his own hand. If the Supreme Court knocks down the best of his Patient Protection Act, it's his own fault. And once again Americans will be the casualties. It doesn't get much worse than this in the annals of presidents who negotiate against themselves.
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Jamie Court is president of Consumer Watchdog and author of The Progressive's Guide To Raising Hell: How To Win Grassroots Campaigns, Pass Ballot Box Laws And Get The Change We Voted For.
Follow Jamie Court on Twitter: www.twitter.com/RaisingHellNow
One way or another, the sooner the SCOTUS issues a ruling, the faster we can get on with it. Till then, get over it.
However, the 2012 election is going to be the biggest surprise of a generation. The help to inform the general public by the OWS movement and by serious blogging and general known conversation and knowledge about what's really making our country dysfunctional and broken will result in the biggest loss by the Republican party nationwide in decades. In spite of billions of dollars the Right will spend, it will be mostly all for naught, as it deserves to be, since in the end Americans will show their collective disgust for those hypocrites who think they can continue to buy our government.
After this mandate is shown to clearly be the will of the majority of the American people, it will be time to consider once again with renewed vigor the best way to save the cost of healthcare and implement it, whether it will be a public option or going to full-on Single payer, which will save the most, but will bring the largest howls from the undertaker -like profiteers of sick people, the private insurance corporations... Ha ha -too bad.
Of course, things may not work out that way, but indications sure do show they could. For most I know, it can't happen soon enough.
Insurance is not arsenic. We know that insurance saves lives. Or conversely, that 45,000 American lives are lost annually because people don't have insurance. THEREFORE what we need are regulations on the behavior of insurance companies. AND THAT IS WHAT THE ACA IS ABOUT ! ! !
As Jamie stated, this the same majority that had no problem ignoring decades of precedent and their own oft-stated bias towards "states rights" to intercede in, and over turn a state court about, a matter of state election law. They didn't need the Gore campaign to suggest that their decision need not be relied upon for precedential value--they came up with that gem on their own.
So, let's not go overboard and pretend that the administration just handed the conservative majority a line of reasoning that it wouldn't have otherwise come up with. The current majority isn't just evil, they're smart, and they will gut the HCRA to suit their political bias using any (or no) reasoning.
And the Supreme court should rule against "mandatory payment for medical insurance" . . . it IS unconstituional We have laws that require all vehicle owners to have car insurance before driving on the highways, right? And purportedly something like 40% to 50% of the car owners in Miami-Dade Country are driving without insurance . . .how is medical insurance going to be any different?
The regulation of premiums is, indeed key. Health insurance companies, were they the instruments of universal health care coverage for every American family, would be operating as de facto utilties... much the same as our electric companies do in America.
Southern California Edison is a private, stockholder-owned company, that provides electricity to the entire LA basin, essentially a captive audience. The California PUC strictly controls its profits, granting tax-free concessions and investor benefits to keep the rates absolutely as low as possible, while keeping the doors open to continue to do business.
Health insurers need be treated exactly the same way... as utilities. Each state's Insurance Commissioner must strictly limit their profits, to keep premiums absolutely as low as possible.
For more on this... http://americanprogressive.org/2011/08/28/a-social-capitalist-approach-to-health-care-delivery/
You overly idealistic utopians just do not have much "common sense" do you? The proposed insurance plans are unaffordable for too many people and will DEGRADE overall medical services and treatments. How is that REALLY a benefit and improvement to society?