If Justice Breyer is an indicator of the majority on the Supreme Court, ObamaCare will survive, however, it he is an example of the minority, we can say adieu to the most anti-American, unconstitutional act that Congress has ever been passed since Prohitibiton. We hope the latter will be the result of the case.
To say that Congress can make Americans buy products (cell phones, tires, mufflers, air conditioners, cars) like the health care plan does would mean the end of American freedom as we know it. However, that is what the Justice believes.
It is our belief, (maybe hopeful anticipation), that ObamaCare will be declared unconstitutional probably with a small majority. It is obvious that Judge Sotomayor and Judge Kagan will vote for their boss, Obama. So much for Judicial independence! Judge Kennedy will be linchpin. We think he will vote against the Obama team.
Obviously, we have not inside information but we believe that things always seem to work out for the best and in this case the best for the country is that ObamaCare is thrown out!
So what do you think?
Conservative Tom
To say that Congress can make Americans buy products (cell phones, tires, mufflers, air conditioners, cars) like the health care plan does would mean the end of American freedom as we know it. However, that is what the Justice believes.
It is our belief, (maybe hopeful anticipation), that ObamaCare will be declared unconstitutional probably with a small majority. It is obvious that Judge Sotomayor and Judge Kagan will vote for their boss, Obama. So much for Judicial independence! Judge Kennedy will be linchpin. We think he will vote against the Obama team.
Obviously, we have not inside information but we believe that things always seem to work out for the best and in this case the best for the country is that ObamaCare is thrown out!
So what do you think?
Conservative Tom
Justice Breyer: Can Congress Make Americans Buy Computers, Cell Phones, Burials? ‘Yes, of Course’
Justice Stephen Breyer
(CNSNews.com) - During oral arguments in the Supreme Court this week, Justice Stephen Breyer posed and answered the core question at issue in the controversy over the constitutionality of Obamacare’s mandate that individual Americans must buy government-approved health insurance policies: Can Congress order individuals to buy a good or service?
“Yes, of course they could,” said Breyer.
In the history of the nation, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the federal government has never done this.
But Breyer, on Tuesday, stated his belief that the basic power of Congress to do such a thing was settled by the Supreme Court as early as 1819, in the case of McCulloch v. Maryland, in which the court decided Congress had the power to create a Bank of the United States.
Breyer explained his point of view after becoming impatient with the convoluted answers Solicitor General Donald Verrilli had offered up in response to questions from Justices Sam Alito and Anthony Kennedy and Chief Justice John Roberts.
Alito had asked Verrilli if Congress could force young people to buy burial insurance because everyone is going to die someday. Roberts asked Verrilli if Congress could force people to buy cell phones because it would facilitate contacting emergency services in the event of an accident. And Kennedy asked Verrilli: “Can you create commerce in order to regulate it.”
“I'm somewhat uncertain about your answers to, for example, Justice Kennedy,” said Breyer. He “asked, can you, under the Commerce Clause, Congress create commerce where previously none existed.
“Well, yes,” said Breyer, “I thought the answer to that was, since McCulloch versus Maryland, when the Court said Congress could create the Bank of the United States which did not previously exist, which job was to create commerce that did not previously exist, since that time the answer has been, yes.
“I would have thought that your answer [to] can the government, in fact, require you to buy cell phones or buy burials that, if we propose comparable situations, if we have, for example, a uniform United States system of paying for every burial such as Medicare Burial, Medicaid Burial, Ship Burial, ERISA Burial and Emergency Burial beside the side of the road, and Congress wanted to rationalize that system, wouldn't the answer be: Yes, of course, they could,” said Breyer.
“And the same with the computers, or the same with the cell phones, if you're driving by the side of the highway and there is a federal emergency service, just as you say you have to buy certain mufflers for your car that don't hurt the environment, you could,” said Breyer.
“I mean, see, doesn't it depend on the situation?” said Breyer.
“It does, Justice Breyer,” said Verrilli, “and if Congress were to enact laws like that, we –”
“Would be up here defending it,” said Breyer.
“It would be my responsibility to then defend them, and I would defend them on a rationale like that, but I do think that we are advancing a narrower rationale,” said Verrilli.
Breyer served as a counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee in the late 1970s, when Sen. Ted Kennedy (D.-Mass.) chaired that committee. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter appointed him to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. In 1994, President Clinton nominated him to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, who in 1973 had authored the Roe v. Wade decision that declared abortion a constitutional right.
When Breyer was confirmed to the Supreme Court, only 9 Republicans in the Senate voted against him.
Comparing ratios between countries standardizes for size of GDP. You also have to look at the trend over time. As countries increase their GDP, they slowly increase the percentage of GDP spent on health care. That is true for all countries, regardless what type of health care system they have. But because the rest of the world have gone to universal health care and the U.S. is the only rich country without it, other countries have not been increasing health care as percent of GDP nearly as much as the U.S. See this graph…
ReplyDeletehttp://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/08/us-health-spending-breaks-from-the-pack/
Taiwan has a very efficient health care delivery system with the lowest administrative costs in world (2%), so they can create very good population health statistics with only 6% of GDP. Because our system is controlled by for-profit health insurance companies and 50 million Americans have no coverage, our delivery system is inefficient and population health statistics are mediocre compared to the other rich countries of the world despite the fact that we are spending 17% of GDP on health care and nearly double these other countries on a per capita basis. We are not getting "bang for the buck." Our system is great for the health insurance companies, but not for the average American.
Today, there are millions of people who could afford to buy health insurance getting free health care via the emergency rooms and the rest of us are picking up the tab. They are free riders. The individual mandate won't solve the problem entirely, but it will substantially reduce it (by about 30 million). That is one of the reasons our per capita health care costs are so high. These people often wait until they are extremely ill before they appear at the hospital with problems that preventive maintenance could have detected and treated. Instead, they develop major chronic diseases. The 80-20 rule applies -- 20% of the people consume 80% of the healthcare. The ACA addresses that problem, too.
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My prediction is a 5-4 split along the same fault lines as Bush v. Gore, Citizens United, and the Seattle school case. This is the most politicized Supreme Court since at least the 1930s.
I am going to write a separate note about cell phones and brocolli. From an interstate commerce perspective, they are very different than health care. Regulating them would be unconstitutional, but not health care.
Please how you can parse the difference between two products namely cell phones and a health care card. Products are products.
ReplyDeleteScalia is correct that everybody needs food, but it doesn't have to be broccoli. You can get all the nutrition of broccoli from other food sources. So your choice to not buy broccoli does not have an economic impact on me or people in other states. On the other hand, the people who could afford to buy health insurance but choose to gamble on it and become free rider users via emergency rooms have huge interstate impact on the fees that major hospitals charge and premiums this insurance companies charge to recoup there losses. You seem to grasp this concept very clearly when it is about Catholic bishops and contraceptives. Doctors and hospitals raise their fees to recoup their losses, and insurance companies have to raise their premiums to pass along the losses they would otherwise take from these escalating hospital/doctor fees. This has a HUGE, HUGE impact on interstate commerce not only in the healthcare industry itself, but also for all the downstream providers as well as labor markets (since healthcare is one of the main benefits of employment in our system of delivery). Ergo, it is clearly within the power of Congress to regulate under the commerce clause.
ReplyDeleteNow, what about broccoli? To make Scalia's analogy work, we would need a situation where most people will buy enormous quantities of broccoli during the final years of their lives (around 90% of health care goes for the 10%. with chronic diseases requiring serial hospitalizations, surgeries, expensive drugs, etc.). Some people will have these costs partially defrayed because they -- during all their working years -- have always had a "broccoli insurance card" that they have been using to help pay for their broccoli. The broccoli free riders don't want to spend money on broccoli insurance cards because they rarely eat broccoli -- that is, until they get a condition that requires them to eat enormous quantities of broccoli or else die. So, they speed down to the local supermarket with a U-Haul truck to buy a ton of broccoli. The store asks, "Where is your broccoli insurance card, sir?" The free rider replies, "I don't have a broccoli insurance card and I don't have enough cash to buy the broccoli." At that point, the supermarket can throw him out of the store to die on the street, or give him the broccoli and raise the prices so that everybody else absorbs the costs. Now, the free market "let them die" solution would take the problem out of interstate commerce (as Ann Coulter said on TV this morning), but as a society we have decided that we will not let a man die in agony on the street if he does not have the cash to pay for an emergency appendectomy. Is that not the society we want? If so, what is the most economical and ethical way to pay for it? As I see it, that's the core issue.
Other countries have figured this out and gone with single-payer or individual mandate. That is why that graph I showed you looks as it does. Among rich countries, we have the least cost effective health care system in the world, and the numbers prove it.
--David