
Supreme Court upholds health-care law, individual mandate - joeyespo
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/supreme-court-to-rule-thursday-on-health-care-law/2012/06/28/gJQAarRm8V_story.html
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mindcrime
I can't even discuss this, because there really isn't anything to be said. The
Supreme Court is a joke, as far as I'm concerned. Nothing gives any
"government" any authority to tell me what I _must_ buy, regardless of what
they, Congress, you, pg, my 7th grade Science teacher, or the sterno-bum at
the corner of 9th and Main thinks.

I'm so far beyond angry right now that I'm not even capable of rational
thought. "Seeing red" falls way short of describing my state right now.

I can't talk about this anymore. Have fun discussing this, folks. I need to
get work done today and it's best for me to try as hard as I can to ignore
this topic for a while.

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einhverfr
The decision is actually quite interesting and it didn't come down the way a
lot of folks thought it would.

1) The individual mandate is beyond Congress's commerce clause authority (5-4)
and is only upheld as an income tax like social security (5-4, but only one
vote in common with the commerce clause side). I don;t know if this makes the
floor unconstitutional, and indeed I would suspect it might. This weakens the
law in ways that a lot of people might not expect, and it also deeply
constrains Congress's power to do things like this in the future.

2) The states won regarding Medicaid. They got, quite frankly, more than they
asked for, even though the court did not invalidate the provision. The court
(7-2) said that Congress could require use participation in new programs. This
means that states can opt out of the new Medicaid expansion and, arguably
other past Medicaid expansions, like SCHIP, and the Federal Government doesn't
have a lot they can do about it.

I don't like the mandate. I think it's a bad idea, deeply misguided, etc. I
don't see anything coming out of Congress that wouldn't make a broken system
even worse, regardless of party. But if a decision was going to uphold it,
this isn't such a bad one.

