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Reuters reports that the US Supreme Court has ruled 6 - 3 in favor of the nationwide availability of tax subsidies that are crucial to the implementation of President Barack Obama's signature healthcare law, handing a major victory to the President. It marked the second time in three years that the high court ruled against a major challenge to the law brought by conservatives seeking to gut it. "Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not to destroy them," wrote Chief Justice Roberts, who added that nationwide availability of the credits is required to "avoid the type of calamitous result that Congress plainly meant to avoid." The ruling will come as a major relief to Obama as he seeks to ensure that his legacy legislative achievement is implemented effectively and survives political and legal attacks before he leaves office in January 2017.
Justice Antonin Scalia took the relatively rare step of reading a summary of his dissenting opinion from the bench. "We really should start calling the law SCOTUScare," said Scalia, referencing the court's earlier decision upholding the constitutionality of the law (SCOTUS is the acronym for the Supreme Court of the United States).
Original Submission
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Thursday June 25 2015, @05:18PM
Uh-huh. Makes sense, doesn't it? Except, I'm paying more today than I paid two years ago. My employer and my insurance company both blame Obamacare for the increases. Hmmm . . .
Oh yes, I know there are success stories because of Obamacare. Some social worker in Ohio demonstrated that he got health care for hundreds of clients who were un-insurable before Obamacare. So, what does that mean? Subsidies. You, me, and every taxpayer in the nation is paying for those un-insurable people's insurance.
I could maybe go along with that, up to a point. Obama COULD HAVE simply passed a law that no one could be turned down for insurance. No one. If someone applies for insurance, the insurance company has to insure them, at a reasonable rate. First thing that would have happened is, the insurance companies would have jacked up the rates - and I'd be in just about the same place I am now, with a couple rate hikes. Wouldn't that have been much simpler? And, the IRS wouldn't be looking over my shoulder to make sure that I'm insured.
BTW, when I said gubbermint doesn't get ANYTHING right, I was referring to our own government.
The military industrial complex is so very damned expensive for the very same reasons we can expect health care to continue increasing in cost every year from now on. When gubbermint meddles in anything at all, the costs grow exponentially.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Thursday June 25 2015, @05:37PM
My employer and my insurance company both blame Obamacare for the increases. Hmmm . . .
And you believe them? Hmmm, we need to get the mental health provisions into Obamacare, Stat!
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday June 25 2015, @05:58PM
Do I believe them? Yes and no. No, I don't believe that they can justify the increased rates. But, I most certainly believe that they can rationalize the increased rates by blaming Obamacare. And, it's working - the rates have been jacked up, and I have little choice but to pay them! Five years ago, I had an option to just drop the damned insurance, today, the law says I don't have that option. Obviously, the rates can be increased by 10, 30, even 100% at the insurance company's whim, each and every year. If I were getting the subsidy, the near-term pain would be masked, but what about five, or ten years from now, when gubbermint turns the subsidies off?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2015, @05:59PM
Mine has not gone up since Obamacare, for the first time ever.
So there's the opposite anecdote for you.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2015, @06:20PM
> Mine has not gone up since Obamacare, for the first time ever.
I went from paying $550/month with a $5K deductible and a 30% co-pay to $300/month with a $2K deductible and $10 office-visits and $10 diagnostics.
Former plan was through my employer, later plan was a "gold" plan bought through my state's exchange website.
(Score: 1) by Squidious on Friday June 26 2015, @01:17PM
We are paying the same price as two years ago for much better coverage. No subsidies and complaints here, either.
The terrorists have won, game, set, match. They've scared the people into electing authoritarian regimes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2015, @05:39PM
But the obscene rise in health care costs started back between the Clinton and Bush era and has been spiralling upward ever since. Obamacare is certainly a waste and will eventually be proven a historical failure, but it was just a legislative symptom of a much bigger disease running its course through this country. And partisanship is at least one vector it uses to to infect the system.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Thursday June 25 2015, @05:46PM
Uh-huh. Makes sense, doesn't it? Except, I'm paying more today than I paid two years ago.
And this is totally the ONLY time healthcare costs have ever risen, right?
My employer and my insurance company both blame Obamacare for the increases. Hmmm . . .
Certainly no conflict of interest there...
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday June 25 2015, @07:26PM
We were promised that health care costs would DECLINE, you idiot.
http://www.breitbart.com/blog/2013/10/28/video-19-times-obama-promised-to-lower-annual-insurance-premiums-by-2500/ [breitbart.com]
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by gishzida on Thursday June 25 2015, @06:14PM
What we got in the ACA was what was "Allowed" by large corporate interests. This is your hard earned "Libertarian Ideals (tm)" in action!
It would have been much better if what had been enacted was true socialized medicine where the "profit motive" had been removed. The "Death Panels" advertized by Republicans, Tea Baggers, and Libertarians are now run by insurance companies instead of ethicists looking for reasonable quality of care and quality of life.
As for subsidies not working or being a failure the answer for me at least is that they work as described. When we enrolled we'd had a really bad year with total income being around $12K... so we got a "deal" of about $76 / mo. for my wife and I... but during the year I got old enough (59 1/2) to cash in some of my 401K savings... When tax time came around I had to "pay back" $1400 to the government since my income was too high for the subsidy received and we had to re-enroll in a "more expensive" plan (about $120 / mo.) .
You complain about what you have to pay for insurance when the truth is your corporate masters are the ones that are screwing you. They make their profit off of your hard work and blame someone else for why they can't pay you a decent wage and proper benefits. To make matters worse they refused to make medical care a public "utility". Why did they do that? So they can make a profit from people's medical issues, disease, and suffering. Don't believe the issue is about "choice". It is about profits. That is the only thing corporations care about.
Much as I dislike the ACA it is better than nothing.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday June 26 2015, @04:54AM
This is your hard earned "Libertarian Ideals (tm)" in action!
This is quite true. I doubt there is a leftist idea out there, no matter how stupid, ill-conceived, or self-serving, that we can't cause to fail instantly merely by pointing out that it won't work. Our mental failwaves are simply too strong for you to resist.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2015, @07:37PM
I believe there are people in the GOP that would love to interview you and go all Fox Newsy about it.
Because they've been looking for a case like that for a long while and couldn't find a single one that stood up to even a little bit of scrutiny.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Friday June 26 2015, @01:29PM
Yup, we are. Just like we were before - we used to do so by hospitals overcharging for care to make up for the people that couldn't pay their bills, now we're helping to pay for their insurance. And the least insurable people in the country are also already covered by taxpayers, with Medicare and Medicaid.
What if the someone in question can't afford to pay the "reasonable rate"? Then what do you do?
If your policy goal is to make sure that everybody has insurance, then you need some way of either forcing or incentivizing everybody to have insurance to make sure that those who are not sick can pay for the costs of those who get sick.
The ACA, which is definitely not perfect but much less bad than the way things were before, basically has 3 pieces:
A. Insurers must insure everybody. None of this "first prove you aren't sick, and then we'll let you buy insurance, and if you get sick then we'll cut you off" business that was going on in 2005.
B. Everybody must have insurance. Otherwise, you'll have people only buy insurance when they're sick, which means that the cost of insurance will rise to be more than the cost of health care, which defeats the purpose of having insurance, which means that nobody is better off than before.
C. Subsidies are given out for people who can't afford insurance without help. Otherwise, you're going to have lots of people who both have to have insurance (point B) and can't get it.
That, of course, explains the skyrocketing costs of postage stamps [usnews.com]. By which I mean not-at-all skyrocketing, because the inflation-adjusted price is lower now than it was in the 1970's.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.