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Holy Shit Mandate – ACA Almost Entirely Upheld
OK, I was wrong. Chief Justice Roberts swung to the left and Kennedy did not. Amazing. I’ll have to scrutinize Roberts’s voting record more closely before passing him off as ideologically pure. Here’s the full ruling if you have a lot of free time. He actually upheld the mandate under the federal government’s Tax Power and not the Commerce Clause, while Ginsberg would have upheld it under both. Interesting, certainly a blow to conservatives.
Being uninsured myself, I have mixed opinions about the 2014 individual mandate, but what is known from models like Mass. is that it will reduce overall health care spending and create more competitive private insurance plans.
For a while this morning, Cable News was reporting that the mandate was struck down before they got “conflicting information.”
This is what happens when they don’t let in cameras.
What the Medicaid part of the ruling means according to SCOTUSblog:
The Court’s decision on the constitutionality of the Medicaid expansion is divided and complicated. The bottom line is that: (1) Congress acted constitutionally in offering states funds to expand coverage to millions of new individuals; (2) So states can agree to expand coverage in exchange for those new funds; (3) If the state accepts the expansion funds, it must obey by the new rules and expand coverage; (4) but a state can refuse to participate in the expansion without losing all of its Medicaid funds; instead the state will have the option of continue the its current, unexpanded plan as is.
Senator Harry Reid Now that this matter is settled, I hope we can work together to create jobs and secure this country’s economic future
SCOTUS Predictions for the Health Care Bill
[6/28 Edit: Those 19 constitutional scholars were wrong about the Court. Reax on my blog “Holy Shit Mandate” here.]
Sarah Kliff of Ezra Klein’s Wonkblog does some of the tightest health care news blogging I’ve ever seen.
Kliff on the SCOTUS individual mandate decision:
Bloomberg surveyed 21 top constitutional scholars and found that, while 19 think the individual mandate of the Affordable Care Act ought to be upheld on the basis of legal precedent, just eight think the Supreme Court will actually do so.
Sigh. Yup, pretty much. Kennedy is supposed to be the swing Judge, the new Sandra Day O’Connor, but he really does bend conservative. It’ll probably turn out to be a 5-4 ruling against the mandate. There’s hope though, according to Kliff.
The other thing they are ruling on, but people are talking about less, is the proposed Medicaid expansions. States are arguing that it puts excessive burden on them and suing. Suck it, Red states. Eat your own Christian values, and help your poor people have basic human dignity.
I think, hopefully, a lot of the bill should remain intact. Otherwise everyone with a college kid under 26 is going to be pissed.
Fact Checking “ObamaCare Yay Or Nay? The Truth About Canada!”
This is response to the following youtube video with over a half million hits:
The video was hosted by the annoying, stand-up comedian and FoxNews commentator, Steven Crowder, for Tea Party movement pimp PJTV.
In addition to being not funny and having obnoxious amounts of dude-man-bro-awesome Dane Cook frat boy, there’s a lot of the “truth” in the video about health care in Canada that’s just anecdotal stylization about waiting.
00:06 “Socialized Health Care! Isn’t it about time we get on board?” First words of the video, followed by clips of people talking about universal health care. I’m going to make probably the most relevant point of the entire America-Canada health care system debate: Canada does not have a socialized health care system. They have a public INSURANCE system, and private insurance and health care providers also exist.
“Socialized Medicine” has sketchy semantic connotations, but generally refers to a health care program run by the government. In the United Kingdom’s publicly- funded National Health Service, most general practitioners are independent contractors, which means that they are self-employed but also have a contract with the government to provide specific services on certain terms. Even the more left-wing proposed legislation (not ObamaCare) in the US, which seeks to establish universal government-backed insurance, does not reach the government involvement of UK’s NHS levels.
Conservatives have recently been attempting to label any publicly-funded (tax payer-funded) system, including insurance, as “socialized medicine.” But with that definition, the United States already has socialized medicine; it’s called Medicare. Medicare is available to the disabled or retired, and it has higher satisfaction and performance rates as opposed to private insurance.
2:15 Steven and his homeboys go to the Clinique Médicale Urgence St-Hubert on a weekend but it’s closed. From all the French, we can establish they are in Quebec, Canada. Funding for the health insurance is provided by the province, not directly from the federal government, so viewers should note Canadian quality may vary by province.
2:57 “Take a number. The nurse will call with the number.” “Triage… which means we wait and get judged by a nurse.” (3:15) They told the staff at the the hospital that they were not urgent. In my experience, in private hospitals in the US, prioritizing by urgency works the same way.
4:24 Steve is denied a plastic glove to play with. Tragic. No rooster blow up doll for you.
5:05 They get tired of waiting at the hospital and leave. With no accompanying footage, Steve tells anecdotal stories about other people in the waiting room.
7:25 They go back to the clinic the next day and the clinician tells them that they don’t offer cholesterol blood tests. That doesn’t seem unreasonable to me. There’s no point in getting your cholesterol checked by a walk-in clinic, because you should go to primary doctor for a chronic condition.
8:01 The clinician says that it’s $900 for a private clinic check up. What?! That’s about $937 US dollars. That figure doesn’t make sense. The woman’s English was clearly not fluent. There are private clinics that offer MRIs for only $695.
15:22 “The average wait time to see a specialist in Canada is 17.3 weeks.” He didn’t cite a source for that figure, or how it was calculated, if it included outliers. Here’s a study that says 51% of Quebec patients waiting to see a specialist do so within a month.
16:05 “It’s proven to be terribly inefficient.” Using what standard? Certainly not cost. The per capita health care spending of Canada is nearly half that of the United States.
17:05 “Socialism creates a safety net…” Followed up by footage from a Subway. Canadian sandwich shops are Socialist because they cost more? I think I missed the sandwich-standard definition of Socialism in school.
19:58 “Do you still think Obama is moving us in the right direction here?” Thanks, Steve, for actually talking about ObamaCare anywhere in the video.
Most parts of the video I didn’t address were just a series of medical horror stories from random interviewed Canadians. You can find stories like that anywhere about any health care system.
Recap: Canada is not Socialist. Health care in Canada sucks, but health care in America still sucks more. Everyone wants free, efficient doctors. No one still knows anything about ObamaCare. And Steven Crowder is about as funny as Dane Cook and Michelle Bachman’s lovechild.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
