With Obamacare, the 100% Democrats who wrote this intrusive and hated law forgot to put severability within, and there has been much discussion, even within court cases, that if the mandate to purchase health insurance or pay a fine/tax goes down, so does the whole bill. The DOJ accidentally makes a mistake in arguing that there is no severability
(Politico) No broccoli? Then no dessert.
That’s the scenario the Obama administration is presenting to the Supreme Court on health reform’s individual mandate. If you want to get rid of the hated mandate, the administration is telling the justices, you also have to get rid of the most popular part: coverage for people with pre-existing conditions.
The Justice Department argues that without the mandate, there is no way to keep the law’s requirements that insurance companies accept all applicants regardless of their medical history and cannot charge more to sicker and older patients. That’s because without the mandate, there won’t be enough healthy people paying health insurance premiums to cover the costs of the sick people. And insurers could raise everyone’s premiums sky-high to pay for those costs.
It’s a legal high-wire act that could have substantial consequences for the White House in an election year: If they lose the mandate, they’ll most likely lose one of the law’s greatest selling points, too.
A couple points on that. First of all, those “greatest selling points” were put in there simply to reduce the stink from the overall bill. They allow supporters and those who voted for it to say “hey, see, there’s some stuff in there that you do like. Now eat your Kopi Luwak.” It’s like putting salad dressing on broccoli for those of us who hate it. Makes it slightly more palatable, but, still gross.
Second, the DOJ arguing that if you lose the mandate, you lose other parts, creates a situation that states that if the mandate goes down, so does the rest of the bill.
Third, it shows just how desperate the Obama DOJ is in making their argument. They’ve run through multiple versions of defense, and haven’t been able to find any that are actually popular. The question being, do they argue this in front of the Supreme Court, or is this simply partisan politics from the country’s top law enforcement agency?
Finally, there’s an easy way to add sick people into the pools without drastically increasing costs: make them nationwide. Then you have a much larger pool of healthy people to offset the sick people. The GOP has been arguing this from the beginning. Furthermore, mandating that insurance companies have to charge the same thing to sick people and/or people with a history of sickness is a problem the legislation created itself. There’s a reason they would typically have coverage cost a lot more or be denied. If you are a bad driver, you’re auto insurance goes up, and perhaps gets to the point where no one will cover you.
Had ObamaCare gone a different way, creating some sort of nationwide pool, the sick could have been covered easily, albeit at a higher rate. This law needs to be done away with, then we can craft common sense legislation that actually works.
Crossed at Right Wing News and Stop The ACLU.
