SCOTUScare ... and it's still NOT Affordable
The 7 Best Lines from Justice Scalia’s Blistering Obamacare Dissent
Excerpt:
"The Act that Congress passed makes tax credits available only on an “Exchange established by the State.” This Court, however, concludes that this limitation would prevent the rest of the Act from working as well as hoped. So it rewrites the law to make tax credits available everywhere. We should start calling this law SCOTUScare.”Obamacare still faces these big challenges
Excerpt:
As many enrollees are discovering, the “Affordable” Care Act is somewhat misnamed. Healthcare costs continue to rise faster than wages or overall inflation, putting a financial burden even on people who have healthcare. A recent study by the Commonwealth Fund found that 23% of Americans who have healthcare coverage are “underinsured,” meaning their out-of-pocket spending on healthcare is more than 10% of their income in a given year. Deductibles and other out-of-pocket costs have been rising because consumers and businesses have been opting for plans with lower premiums—which usually require the patient to bear more of the cost before 100% coverage kicks in. The irony is that insurance has gotten more affordable, but actual healthcare hasn’t.Comment: Image source ... modified with. In our post-modern world words no longer convey absolutes Updated:
Unanswered Health Law Question: So Why Was It Written that Way? - Words ‘established by the State’ formed the basis of the unsuccessful Supreme Court challenge:
ReplyDelete“I went up to the Hill to get the answer to my question: Why would you make this distinction with a state exchange?” said Lanny Davis, a former counsel in the Bill Clinton White House who is a lobbyist for Mountain View, Calif., broker eHealth Inc. “The answer was mind boggling to me: ‘We don’t trust the private sector.’ ”
Welcome to John Roberts’ America, Where Words Mean Nothing:
ReplyDeleteWelcome to postmodern America. For decades now, we have been living in a culture where the meaning of words is stretched almost beyond recognition. “Metanarratives” ring truer than actual facts. Self-prescribed identities trump everything, including nature. A white woman can blithely claim she is black, but when challenged, the only thing she can muster in her defense is irritable confusion and a declaration of how she “identifies.” A man announces he’s a woman and is celebrated as a hero.
Chief Justice Roberts may have had legal and political reasons for ignoring the common usage of words, but it is hard to escape the conclusion that, like so many others in our culture, he felt that being a stickler for a word’s actual meaning was just pedantic, a trivial matter when compared to the importance of some larger cause—in his case, delivering what he thought Congress really intended.