

Health care law stands in U.S. - leothekim
http://elections.nytimes.com/2012/live-coverage/scotus-healthcare

======
tzs
Long term, we probably would have been better off if the individual mandate
had been struck down but the rest left intact. That would have had a decent
chance of forcing us toward a real national healthcare system.

Consider the lesson of Washington State:
[http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2017852301_i...](http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2017852301_insurancemandate28m.html)

In 1993, Washington passed a law that guaranteed access to health insurance,
and required all residents to purchase insurance. Two years later, the
Republicans gained control and set about repealing this.

However, much of the law was extremely popular, such as the parts guaranteeing
affordable access. The Republicans let those stand, but went ahead and
repealed the mandate.

Result: people dropped insurance until they got sick, then bought it, then
dropped it when they were better. Insurance companies started losing a lot of
money.

That led insurance companies to pull out of the market, and it became
virtually impossible as an individual to buy health insurance in Washington at
any price.

Around 2000, the law was changed again, allowing insurance companies to make
people with preexisting conditions wait nine months before coverage starts,
and allowing them to reject the sickest applicants. The state created a state
run high risk pool to cover those people.

Imagine if something like this happened nationally. The individual mandate
goes, but the rest remains.

I think a similar thing would happen nationally. Polls show that when people
are asked about the various major provisions of the Affordable Care Act (but
are not told that they are being asked about that Act, so that they aren't
prejudiced by the ridiculous claims the Tea Party spread about it, such as the
"death panel" fantasy) they are overwhelming in favor of everything except the
mandate.

No way would the Republicans be able to get repeal of those through without
committing political suicide with the voters. That would leave us with the
Washington situation--the insurance companies bearing increased costs, without
the mandate to ensure that enough healthy people are paying premiums to cover
this. We'd get a health care crisis similar to what happened in Washington.

Congress would HAVE to act, and I think the outcome would be some sort of true
national health care system, with a mix of private and government provided
services, open to everyone.

~~~
cantastoria
_I think a similar thing would happen nationally. Polls show that when people
are asked about the various major provisions of the Affordable Care Act (but
are not told that they are being asked about that Act, so that they aren't
prejudiced by the ridiculous claims the Tea Party spread about it, such as the
"death panel" fantasy) they are overwhelming in favor of everything except the
mandate._

But the mandate is what makes everything else possible. This is like saying
"we polled peopled about getting more services from the government and they
were in favor of it except for the parts about taxes going up". Which, as of
this morning, is essentially what's going on as the "mandate" is now going to
have to be implemented as a tax penalty. So that polling just shows how
clueless people are about how this whole scheme works.

 _No way would the Republicans be able to get repeal of those through without
committing political suicide with the voters._ I think the more likely
proposal would be to "put it all back the way it was before" instead of a full
government takeover. At that point the current situation would be ,rightly,
described as being caused by the government (i.e. ObamaCare). I'm not sure how
easy a sell a full government take over would be.

