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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: 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.