“When the Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act in a 5-4 ruling Thursday, the American Medical Association was quick to release a statement in support of the ‘historic’ decision that will give more people access to health coverage.
But (and there’s always a ‘but’) medical professionals across the country are wondering: When an additional 32 million Americans get medical insurance, who exactly is going to treat them?”
“The Roberts court declared this threat unconstitutional, finding that Washington could use the carrot (dangling new money) but not the stick (withdrawing old money). The states, when they initially signed up for Medicaid, could not have anticipated that Congress would one day enact a law that caused Medicaid to be ‘no longer a program to care for the neediest among us, but rather an element of a comprehensive national plan to provide universal health insurance coverage,’ the Court reasoned.”
“For states, this is a clear winner – covering more individuals and saving budget dollars at the same time. For the taxpayer this is a nightmare. The taxpayer would save some money on the Medicaid expansions that would not take place (where the feds pay 90 percent of the cost) but they will pick up the full cost of the additional and generous insurance, bearing an additional $500 billion over ten years.”
“The Affordable Care Act will expand the reach of government into our personal health-care choices, while exacerbating the problems with our current health-care system. Market forces, if allowed to work properly, are the best means for reducing the growth in health costs, encouraging continued innovation, and ensuring that consumers have access to quality health care.”
“Though the ultimate disposition of the case was disappointing, today could become a turning point of constitutional law, so long as the public maintains its current level of interest in the constitutional limits on congressional power that have been affirmed by the court. To see why, we need to step back.”
“The Supreme Court’s ObamaCare decision is both a triumph and a tragedy for our constitutional system. On the plus side, as we have long argued in these pages and in the courts, the justices held that Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce cannot support federal requirements imposed on Americans simply because they exist. The court also ruled that there are limits to Congress’s ability to use federal spending to force the states to adopt its preferred policies.”
“What the Court has done is not so much to declare the mandate constitutional as to declare that it is not a mandate at all, any more than the mortgage-interest deduction in the tax code is a mandate to buy a house. Congress would almost surely have been within its constitutional powers to tax the uninsured more than the insured.”
“Republican governors are planning to ignore the Supreme Court’s decision Thursday to uphold Obamacare hoping that the issue will drive voters to dump President Obama in favor of Mitt Romney who has vowed to kill the Affordable Care Act.
After the decision, the Republican Governors Association said that nothing should be done by the states until after the election, a clear signal that they believe a GOP president, House and Senate will kill the health care reform pushed through by Democrats and opposed by Republicans.”
“Today’s Supreme Court decision is complex and will likely take weeks to fully digest in terms of what it means for the future of ObamaCare. But a few things are becoming clear. For starters, the Court found that at least one part of ObamaCare is indeed unconstitutional. Specifically, the provisions of the statute by which the federal government would try to coerce the states into a massive Medicaid expansion were ruled invalid by the Court.”
“It’s unfortunate that Chief Justice Roberts joined the liberal justices to uphold the individual mandate as a tax. Yet as I understand the ruling, the opinion does very little to enlarge the federal government’s power and, in key respects, reinforced federalism limitations on federal power. According to SCOTUSBlog, while Chief Justice Roberts concluded the mandate is a tax, he also rejected the Commerce Clause arguments in favor of the mandate.”