OTHER VOICES
“Tuesday’s two hours of Supreme Court oral arguments on Obamacare’s individual mandate were rough-going for the government and its assertions of unlimited federal power. Several justices are clearly taking seriously the Constitution’s structural checks and balances that are intended to protect individual liberty. … The court has always balanced federal and state power by distinguishing between pressure and coercion. Obamacare crosses that line. The conditions of new Medicaid conscript the states into involuntary servitude to the federal government’s policy goals, in this case national healthcare.”
—Wall Street Journal
“A family medical policy costs an estimated $1,000 more a year because of the price of treating the uninsured.”
“Supreme Court arguments over the ‘individual mandate’ contained in the 2010 healthcare law came down to one core question. If the government can require you to buy medical insurance, what else could it make you buy? Skeptics of the (individual) mandate suggested a range of possibilities. Cars? (Justice Antonin Scalia) Cellphones to dial 911? (Chief Justice John Roberts) Burial insurance? (Justice Samuel Alito) Broccoli? (Roberts and Scalia) ...., It fell to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to point out the rationale behind the individual mandate: ‘The people who don’t participate in (the health insurance) market are making it much more expensive for the people who do,’ she observed. … It’s hard to make that case about consumers, and nonconsumers, of any other product. A family medical policy costs an estimated $1,000 more a year because of the price of treating the uninsured. So it makes sense— as a matter of personal responsibility and social equity—to require most people to have coverage.”
—USA Today “If the Supreme Court strikes down the individual mandate in the new health law, private insurers will swarm Capitol Hill demanding that the law be amended to remove the requirement that they cover people with preexisting conditions. When this happens, Mr. Obama and the Democrats should say they’re willing to remove that requirement—but only if Medicare is available to all, financed by payroll taxes. Do this and the public will be behind them, as will the Supreme Court.” —Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich in the
Baltimore Sun