I can't wait to see someone try and explain to the American people that those are bad things for the country in a debate.
This absolutely should be the case. An insurance company can't stay in business if people can just sign on whenever they get sick. Everyone would - and should - just drop their coverage and pay for basic health care out of pocket. If they get cancer or in a car wreck, sign up for insurance.
They don't have to. They just say it's socialist and then people will vote against their own self interest. It's worked like magic for how many decades now?
Sure they can. It's how the system works now and worked before the PPACA. If you get sick just get a job with health insurance which cannot deny you for a preexisting condition. Of course they only stay in business by raising premiums 20-30% annually. This is why the insurance companies support a mandate. You are right that like traditional insurance we should only utilize health insurance for catastrophic type injuries not just checkups and vaccines. Your car insurance won't cover oil changes and brake pads.
But in that scenario, everyone at the company has health insurance - it effectively works like a mandate where you have healthy and unhealthy people sharing the load. Limited enrollment options prevent you from just signing up when you get sick, so it provides incentive to maintain your insurance. And the sickest of people can't work, so you eliminate them from the pool. In an environment with no mandate and no pre-existing conditions, insurance is a failed concept - the individual insurance market simply cannot work because there is no incentive to get insurance when healthy.
The whole purpose of insurance is as a hedge against a relatively unlikely but costly event that has not occurred yet. Not sure who you hang out with, but no one I know waits to get sick before finding insurance.
So you have a freakin' mandate, Major, and if you don't, then pass one before repealing the provision being complained about.
Politico: 4 hard truths of health care reform. 1) Some people won’t get to keep the coverage they like. 2) Costs aren’t going to go down. 3) It’s just a guess that the law can pay for itself. 4) “The more they know, the more they'll like it” isn’t happening.
Nobody is suggesting keeping Obamacare without the mandate. The Republicans want the whole piece of legislation repealed, not just the mandate. Who are you arguing with?
I was responding to the article that I quoted. To make it easy for you, in general, if I quote something, that's what I'm responding to. The Republicans may want to repeal the whole thing, but the Supreme Court has the option of repealing just the mandate because there was no severability clause in the legislation, from my understanding.
We have a mandate. The issue is what happens if Congress is broken and can't pass any legislation one way or another, and the Supreme Court rejects the mandate without rejecting everything else.
Bush v. Gore pretty much killed the idea that you can look to the Constitution, precedent, and previous rulings to figure out how Scalia will "decide' a political case. I don't see any way he doesn't vote against while coming up with some crappy legal theory that downplays the precedents. Question is whether Roberts (probably) and Kennedy (who knows?) go along with it. Too many legal scholars are looking at this court and these justices as if they operate the way an ideal Supreme Court is supposed to operate instead of a Court with a bunch of flaks and hacks. And that b**** Sandra Day O'Connor could have done the right thing, but wanted to retire and have a Republican President name her successor, so she went along with the crowd. Now that they've gotten away with it once, twice (Citizens), no need to think they won't try very hard again. I'm convinced it all comes down to one man, Anthony Kennedy.
It's simple, but true. Insurance requires participation of the healthy to work - that's the distribution of risk. If you take out the incentive to participate when healthy, then the model breaks down.
Agreed, but the system does not work as is, especially when insurance companies use the "pre-existing condition" clause and some clever wording to get out of performing the service that they have been paid to perform. It wouldn't be fair for them as a company to have to take on any and everyone who gets sick then signs up, and I believe the writers of the law took that into account, I don't know the thing back and forth but I can't imagine they would not have addressed something like that.
That's the problem here - the writers screwed up when designing the severability clauses. As it stands, the Supreme Court could void the individual mandate and not void the rest of it. Whether they would or not, who really knows - but the article I was originally responding to was about that very topic.
