Tag Archives: individual mandate
Individual Mandate Unravels
The latest Friday document dump featured another ObamaCare proclamation. If your insurance was canceled because it was a substandard bad apple you can buy another substandard bad apple plan. Or you can take a one year break from the individual mandate and go without.
The WSJ headlined, “Obama Repeals ObamaCare”
Dick Morris claims ObamaCare is dead because the unraveling will accelerate next year when group plans are canceled.
Individual Insurance Mandate
A Washington Examiner poll shows that 70% of Americans want to delay the individual mandate to buy Obama approved health care. The other 30% are insurance companies. Just kidding.
But Bloomberg does report that insurance companies are absolutely positively opposed to any delay in the mandate.
Update: Here’s an IBD piece explaining how insurance companies jumped in bed with ObamaCare to produce 30 million new customers. And then got blamed as “bad apples” for canceling policies Obama doesn’t like.
Bipartisanship
In the Obamacare ruling shakeout over the Obama Healthcare Mandate, it appears that Roberts changed his mind after writing the, then, majority opinion overturning the individual mandate based on the commerce clause. He later wrote the new majority opinion upholding the mandate under Congress’ taxing power.
The chief justice isn’t the only one having it both ways. Obama has loudly insisted an estimated one zillion times on national TV that the mandate is not a tax (and he still does, now that he’s won).
After Justice Kennedy’s famous question, “can we create commerce in order to regulate it?”, it looked like the court wasn’t going to uphold the mandate as regulated commerce. So, the administration lawyers argued, hell yes, it’s a tax!
Healthcare Ruling
Chief Justice Roberts bestowed the burden of victory on the president by calling the individual mandate a tax.
The dissenting minority accuse Roberts of rewriting the legislation. Well, can’t say we weren’t warned of conservative judicial activism.
The Hammer thinks Roberts heroically twisted and turned through narrow legal fissures to restore the integrity of the court, in the eyes of his enemies on left. Those enemies think the court soiled itself by putting George W. Bush in office in 2001 and that it has been illigit ever since.
But even as he saved Obamacare, Roberts found the use of the commerce clause to justify the mandate to be unconstitutional. So he rewrote the bill to save the bill, calling the mandate a tax. I guess we can all agree that anyone can be bludgeoned to do anything with a tax. Mission accomplished:
The Wall Street Journal is not so easily impressed. Its editorial today notes references to Justice Ginsberg’s “dissent”. Why would she dissent if she was in the majority, unless she wasn’t until Roberts switched sides?
Mandate
The judicial branch gave the executive branch a 3 page writing assignment. The senate section of the legislative branch hasn’t turned in a budget in over 1070 days.
