health ruling thursday

[Danzig]

so, does it stand or does it go???

[bigrun]

Originally Posted by Danzig

so, does it stand or does it go???

Saw a great cartoon yesterday and can't find it now...pic of SCOTUS with 5 having elephant heads and 4 with donkey heads...precurser of the vote..

Few others..In the 2nd pic, check the dog gasping for breath..

[Riot]

I'll stick with my original guess, based upon what the lawyers, scholars and even conservative lower court judges said about it's unquestioned constitutionality when the case first went to the Supremes: 5 to 4 upheld as Constitutional.

At worse, best guesses seem to be only the mandate overturned - which wouldn't be a bad thing, because then we can press immediately for Medicare/single payer for every American.

If they overthrew the whole thing, millions of Americans will suddenly be uninsured, in the middle of their cancer treatments, etc.

None of the legal eagles seem to think they will just throw it out as not yet suitable for review, as the mandate hasn't yet kicked in.

Although Scalia wrote a really, really weird dissenting opinion about one of their other rulings today, stepping clearly into politics.

Socialized health care. Hitler enticed the Austrians with it. Just gradually taking away our rights...like Hitler.

Just read stories of Austrians during WWII and how awful health care coverage was under Hitler. How medical research at Austrian universities came to a grinding halt.

FEMA camps are real. History repeats itself. We are going down a similar path.

[Riot]

The interesting trick is that the individual mandate is a 100% Republican-created idea for self-responsibility and self-pay. "Everyone buys his own insurance, and stops freeloading off the rest of us"

The insurance companies loved it, as it gives them millions of new customers.

Republicans have spent 25 years activing pushing for the individual mandate in health care, supported by the insurance companies. Yes: Republicans have spent the last 25 years pushing to force every American that can afford it to buy health insurance: "Just like auto insurance", the GOP used to argue. "We don't want to pay for their visits to the ER when they don't have insurance", the GOP said.

The only reason Obama dropped single-payer so readily (much to the consternation of the left), and went with the individual mandate, was because he thought he'd then get Republican support for their 100% Republican health-care plan. Wrong. The GOP were out to screw him, so they abandoned their own health care mandate plan they'd supported and pushed for decades.

But it will be interesting to see what the conservative Supremes say about the Heritage Foundations 100% Republican "individual mandate".

[ArlJim78]

What a load of nonsense. Some Republicans (a small minority) have been for the IM. That doesn't make it a "100% Republican idea", and the idea that this is something that Republicans have been pushing for 25 years is preposterous. Yes some did advocate for it but they were shot down by the majority who wanted no part of it.

[Danzig]

and once upon a time, obama was against the individual mandate. he took ol' hillary to task back when they were both vying for the democratic nomination for daring to suggest such a thing. boy, he changed his tune.
but then he also changed his tune on many other things.
gitmo
bushes tax cuts
having a transparent administration
not kowtowing to big business (look at the deals cut with pharma on the ppuca)

then there was his 'the economy is the #1 priority' line of bs. yeah, then he turned around and made health care the big priority. all that work, and the thing is most likely going right down the drain on thursday.
it's not that he's a liar, it's that he's a politician. no hope of change, pols are pols first, last and always. the shame is that some suckers believed him.

[Riot]

Originally Posted by ArlJim78

What a load of nonsense. Some Republicans (a small minority) have been for the IM. That doesn't make it a "100% Republican idea", and the idea that this is something that Republicans have been pushing for 25 years is preposterous. Yes some did advocate for it but they were shot down by the majority who wanted no part of it.

The individual mandate was created by the Republican Heritage Foundation, and yes, the Republicans - including the majority leaders, such as Newt - have embraced the individual mandate since they were against the Clinton health care reforms. The insurance industry lobbyists have always supported it (they even have during Obama) The GOP has indeed pushed the mandate very hard during the 1990's and 2000's. It's all about "buy your own insurance, be responsible for yourself".

Yes, the GOP "is" the individual mandate. Democrats always hated it as they considered it a giveaway to the private insurance companies (and why progressives didn't like it when Obama embraced it to try and get something passed for the first time ever)

Every president of the past 60 years had said our health insurance model needed major reform. Finally we have a start.

[Riot]

As Ezra Klein says:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/busine...w2V_story.html

But permission structures aren’t just for elections. Over the past two years, the Republican Party has slowly been building a permission structure for the five Republicans on the Supreme Court to feel comfortable doing something nobody thought they could do: Violate the existing understanding of the commerce clause and, in perhaps the most significant moment of judicial activism since the New Deal, overturn either all or part of the Affordable Care Act.

The first step was perhaps the hardest: The Republican Party had to take an official and unanimous stand against the constitutionality of the individual mandate. Typically, it’s not that difficult for the opposition party to oppose the least popular element in the majority party’s signature initiative. But the individual mandate was a policy idea Republicans had thought of in the late 1980s and supported for two decades. They had to, in effect, persuade every Republican to say that the policy they had been supporting was an unconstitutional assault on liberty.

[Riot]

History of the individual mandate

The concept of the individual health insurance mandate is considered to have originated in 1989 at the conservative Heritage Foundation. In 1993, Republicans twice introduced health care bills that contained an individual health insurance mandate. Advocates for those bills included prominent Republicans who today oppose the mandate including Orrin Hatch (R-UT), Charles Grassley (R-IA), Robert Bennett (R-UT), and Christopher Bond (R-MO).

First introduction of the individual mandate:

November, 1993 Consumer Choice Healthy Security Act
Sponsored by Senator Don Nickles (R-OK) & 24 Republican cosponsors

November, 1993 Health Equity and Access Reform Today Act
Sponsored by Senator John H. Chafee (R-RI) & 20 cosponsors (18-R, 2D)

http://healthcarereform.procon.org/v...ourceID=004182