Supreme Court Will Look at Health Care Reform Challenge: Decision by June?
Fasten your political seat belts. The Supreme Court will hear a challenge to President Barack Obama’s health care reform law — and commentators on cable and other news organizations this morning have predicted the final decision could come down by June 2012, right before the Nov. 12 elections:
The U.S. Supreme Court will hear a challenge to President Obama’s signature law on health care, it said Monday in an announcement that has nearly as much impact on partisan politics as the final decision has on the law itself.
The challenge in the case, brought by 26 states out of Florida, is based on the constitutionality of the individual mandate in the Patient Accountability and Affordable Care Act, which requires that all Americans purchase health insurance.
The nine-member court will also look at severability, meaning if the mandate falls, could the rest of the law survive since it is primarily built on the revenues collected by forcing people to buy health care.
The court is also folding in an additional case on the tax implications of the law.
The case is one that all sides want heard. But hearing the case this session — arguments could come in March — means that a ruling will come in June — in the heat of the 2012 election cycle.
Some argue that a defeat for Obama would be as beneficial as a victory since it would take away an economic and philosophical argument that Republicans have used to bash the law that will impact roughly 18 percent of the nation’s annual gross domestic product.
If the mandate is wiped off the map but the law itself isn’t, the president would also be able to promote aspects that most Americans say they accept, including leaving 26 year olds on their parents insurance and not allowing insurers to reject clients with pre-existing conditions.
If a decision comes down before the election — no matter what it is — it will have an impact on the election debate and could be a “hot button” issue for those on the losing side.
24 Responses to “Supreme Court Will Look at Health Care Reform Challenge: Decision by June?”
Arguably the best thing for Obama would be to have the mandate stricken.
He could then run against the ‘mean conservative judges’ who ‘stole your insurance’ and so on.
Conversely the GOP nominee would no longer be able to run against the ‘evil mandate’ that would ‘force you to buy insurance’.
I’m not sure at this point which way the court will go (though I lean to the law being upheld) but I am pretty sure that some of the justices will surprise us with their ruling.
When the rubber hits the road, two realities will continue to be of issue:
1) for many families, health insurance will remain prohibitively high, in the $800-1200/month range, for those with individual policies. I doubt we’ll see rates decline without a single payer system that just says “tough, this is what we reimburse for a specific medical code. That’s it. Get over it.”
2) If it fails in court, it will be a tough sell to explain to the American public that yes, pre-existing still matters, so get over it. Yes, getting ill will remain the number one reason for personal bankruptcy in the nation, and no, there is nothing whatsoever in place to rein in costs, or assure that your premiums are actually going to medical care.
I work in medical data, many hospitals.
The system is designed to do one thing well:
generate bills.
Not PAY the bills, just generate them.
Doctors, nurses, administrators, ask anyone–everyone sees the for-profit bill collecting medical care as embarrassing.
It is too bad Obama gave so much ground to privatization, because it can backfire. That said, the system is so broken that a fundamental change may be an improvement.
Look at it this way.
You go into a restaurant.
You ask for a lasagne, for free.
The host says “no”.
Sadly, you walk away. NO big deal.
You get in your car, traveling at 40MPH. You get in an accident and wake up in the ER. The hospital cannot refuse you in an emergency. You dont have insurance, so the cost SKYROCKETS. You can’t pay the $45k bill. The hospital doesn’t want to pick up the $45k loss either. Someone eventually has to pay. Its probably the taxpayer, now ** paying double, triple, or more** than what the actual cost is. It would have been better to pay the insured cost. This is OBVIOUS.
What is happening here is that health care DOES NOT follow traditional supply-demand economics. Patients have a right to be treated in an emergency, you can’t deny them. The price of the services already provided is then bartered AFTER. By barter I mean that someone eventually has to pay, and the bartering is to figure out who can pay what.
US healthcare billing practices are a complete disaster and all of us who work in this field know it. The rest of the world is now waking up to this reality as well.
SINGLE PAYER SYSTEM WILL BE BETTER.
Will be a long bumpy road.
The interim private-business obsessed phase will be a Colosseum of public disaster theater.
Real progress will recognize that since health cannot be denied it makes no sense to keep as a traditional private entity.
hyperflow: Yup, Yup and Yup.
The extent to which we piss away resources on healthcare is astonishing. Breathtaking.
The reality is that almost NO INDIVIDUAL can pay the bills they will incur from an even minor illness. Thereby necessitating costly insurance for those who can afford it, and charity care for those who cannot.
The insured and the government, then end up paying exorbitant medical costs because there are absolutely no controls on prices. Patients typically don’t CARE how much a procedure costs because no one is paying the bill directly. If you’re poor, you’re getting it for free, and if you’re insured, it’s the insurance company’s problem.
And if you’re neither…well, you can’t get blood from a turnip. If you’re making $40,000 a year, those medical bills of $100,000 or $1 million simply aren’t going to to get paid. It’s a joke. You simply can’t do anything except make very small payments over the course of decades. I’ve been told that as long as you continue to make payments every week, even if it’s only $5.00, that the hospital can’t do anything to you. Because you’re making a good faith effort to repay. Does anyone know if this is true?
My god, as a nurse in a major medical center, I could tell you stories that would make you spitting mad. We might as well take piles of money out on the front lawn and burn it, for all the good we do some people in the hospital.
And we all know the system is broken. But what is the individual supposed to do? The machine is so big, so convoluted and entrenched, that it will take a huge, huge push to make any changes. I could write about this all day, but for now, I’ll leave it at this.
Single payer is the correct model. We should have had it in this country decades ago. As for the coming USSC ruling, I’d say all bets are off given the partisan nature of the court.
hyper and vera, your comments ought be articles instead of buried in comments. If you want to make them into articles, send to me and we’ll see about running it. Serious.
Obamama Care is similar to the Swiss system, with one big difference. The Swiss use private insurance but those insures are told what they can charge. Without price control no system will work.
Yes, single payer will stop our rising costs. Every other country with a single payer system still has rising costs, but no matter. This time it will be different.
Mr.”J” has been trying to sell this line of BS for two, maybe three years.
Yes, health care costs are rising worldwide however, and here’s the part “J” always tries to ignore is the rise is RADICALLY higher in the U.S.
For more of what paid lobbyists for the U.S. Health Care industry don’t want you to see go to:
The Kaiser Family Foundation Report: Health Care Spending in the United States and Selected OECD Countries – April 2011
@Tyrone – Would you please reduce the size of the graphs I posted to 80%?
Short version:
Yes, Steve, I’ve been saying it for two or three years. And you (and others) have been failing a substantive reply for just as long.
I’m going to keep saying it, because it’s true and extremely relevant. There are no examples of a single payer system lowering costs. None, not one, nowhere.
Our costs are already dramatically higher than any other country. (Read that again, please, because you keep imagining it’s some new point I’m ignoring.) Even if their lower growth rates were due to their different payment mechanisms (which in a lot of cases aren’t that different from ours), adopting their growth rates is not good enough. We need to *lower* costs, not just reduce their growth rate a little.
SO WHAT???
The “single payer’s” are paying between 150% and 250% less than we are AND their costs are raising at a slower rate than ours are.
You’re just blowing smoke to intentionally distract people from seeing this. Shame on you.
EDIT TO ADD: And they live longer, see their doctor more often, and are healthier than we are!
Steve, I keep agreeing with you that our base is higher and our growth rate is higher. Where’s the smoke?
And what exactly are you claiming? That we’ll adopt single payer, and over the next few years our costs will drop from $7500 to $4500 per capita? Please point to the country that saw a 40% drop in costs when they adopted their single payer system. Or 20%. Or 10%. Or any drop at all.
Or if you can’t find one, how about a country that saw a lower growth rate in health care costs after adopting single payer than it had before?
“Single Payer” by it’s very nature lowers medical costs drastically.
Negotiated drug prices… Everyone paying in… Elimination of profit absconded with by ‘middle men’, HMO’s, and brokers… etc… etc.
“J” knows the facts and that’s why I call his posts “blowing smoke” because with all the advantages in a ‘single payer’ system it makes no sense (other than for profit) to be so misleading about it.
Here’s some “Single Payer FAQ’s” from Physicians for a National Health Program
It’s very simple, Steve. Single payer is an undeniable improvement in access. But for it to help us with costs, it must either lower our base or lower our growth rate. Are you claiming it will do one, or the other, or both?
Yes… AGAIN, “Single Payer” has proven to lower costs BUT I’m not at all surprised that you’ve ignored everything I’ve said and every link I’ve posted that show you that that’s what happens.
That’s how you operate… That’s your M.O. My M.O. is to go to bed oh so thankful that I live in my world and not yours… Good night and good luck.
Where? If scores of countries have adopted it, their costs should have been lower afterwards than they were before, shouldn’t they? I haven’t ignored your links at all; you haven’t posted a single one showing a country where this happened. Where are the success stories?
You might as well be claiming that bikinis are miraculous weight loss garments that make women thin. You can post dozens of links and graphs to statistics from the beaches of the world, showing that nearly all women wearing bikinis are thin. And your statistics would be quite sound.
But until you can cite some success stories–overweight women who got thin by squeezing into a bikini–you haven’t proven anything. People will rightly distrust your miracle weight loss garment, just as people should distrust your “proven” savings from single payer.
Is it too much to ask for someplace it has actually worked as advertised?
@ Steve K
Ran into similar problem, I think % doesn’t quite work. Need to do actual size in pizels. If T doesn’t help will try to dig something up this afternoon.
The amazing part of the comments disagreement between Steve and Dr. J. is that neither of them has pointed out that in the ‘single payer system’ all of the people in those countries are covered for basic health care. That means that mothers and fathers can bring their kids into the doctor’s office instead of the emergency room.
I get that the conservatives and the politicians want to have trickle-up economics. I get that the wealthy are immensely upset at the lower 95% wanting to have livable wages and decent jobs with safe working conditions. I even get that they want us all to think that they are doing us favors by paying their taxes. What I do NOT understand is why they think that letting the poorer people get sick and injured without adequate means of recuperation is a good idea? How are they supposed to oppress us if we can’t survive?
RC, I did actually mention that a single payer system would improve access in my 12:54 comment. But this has primarily been a discussion of costs.
And costs are the more important problem in the long term. The reason we have a problem with access today is that the costs have spiraled out of control and out of reach for most people. And we will not be able to improve access for long if we don’t tame the cost beast. It will come back to bite us in the form of rationing. Medicaid (or whatever we call it) will theoretically cover treatment for your affliction, but the nearest doctor who will accept what the program is willing to pay is four hours away, two years out of medical school, and has a six month wait.
The math is very simple: in order for the system to be sustainable, the average person needs to be able to afford the average lifetime’s medical bills. If they can’t, no amount of cost pooling through either private or public insurers will make the system work.
Forget it Dr. J, you might as well post in Latin. You’re forgetting that the government has unlimited money, and will never have trouble paying a single medical bill ever, so of course it will be able to pay for everyone’s medical bills, with no rationing, using our current facilities and expectations. That’s why Medicare projections never phase them, because we’re foolishly thinking that there’s limits out there that can’t simply be fixed with higher taxes on the
employedrich.Latin? Well, I did use the phrase “per capita.” It didn’t help.
But to be fair to Steve, he does seem concerned with costs and sincerely convinced that single payer will lower them, through the mechanisms he cited:
- Negotiated drug prices (which we already have)
- Everyone paying in (which increases revenue but doesn’t lower costs)
- Elimination of profit from middle men (which is valid but under 10%)
Hyperflow and Vera make more sense, recognizing that the waste doesn’t start with the middle men and brokers, but in the trenches. How a single payer would put an end to that remains a mystery. Medicare is already a bigger single payer than most other countries have, and it sure hasn’t been able to squeeze out the waste.
Don’t use %, use actual pixel count:
height=”20″ width=”40″
height=”40″ width=”80″
height=”75″ width=”150″
height=”200″ width=”400″
No height or width parameters