On Friday, a federal Court of Appeals held unconstitutional a central feature of the new healthcare law-its requirement that almost all Americans obtain healthcare insurance through private insurance markets. This ruling came only days after the debt-ceiling debacle — a “tempest in a tea party” — during which our country’s credibility for honoring its debts was held hostage to the conviction that tax revenues should regularly ratchet down, but never up. Both the subtext of the majority’s opinion in the healthcare case and the anti-tax fervor evident in the debt-ceiling debate share a common underlying philosophy: the belief that government activity is largely hostile to prosperity and the pursuit of happiness, and therefore the less of it, the better. But this view of government is incorrect.
Government, to paraphrase Congressman Barney Frank, is just the name we give for the things we the people decide to do together. And taxes in turn are just the amounts we chip into the collective pot to buy whatever package of goods and services that we have agreed to purchase collectively.
In ordinary commercial settings, the private sector is more efficient at allocating scarce resources than is the government, which is why the United States relies so heavily on private markets. So why should we bother to do things together through the mechanism of government? One answer is that only government can address an “incomplete” market, which occurs when the private sector cannot or does not provide a market solution to an economic problem. Healthcare insurance is a classic case of an incomplete market that results in real economic burdens.
You cannot today buy the sort of private healthcare insurance that one would expect to find if private markets always provided a complete suite of rational solutions. That product would be “permanent” healthcare insurance, analogous to permanent life insurance, in which an individual could contract today for a non-cancellable policy that would provide specified medical care benefits for the individual’s life, in return for annual insurance premiums.
Such a market does not exist because of adverse selection (the phenomenon that those individuals who knock on an insurance company’s door are more likely to be sick than those who never give healthcare insurance a moment’s thought), because the annual premium for permanent healthcare insurance would be very high for a young person, relative to the cost of a one-year policy, because healthcare technology and costs rise at unpredictable rates (while life insurance pays off a fixed amount), and because everyone knows that in the end government (that is to say, all of us, together) will provide at least some minimum level of care for the uninsured. As the majority admitted in Friday’s Court of Appeals decision, this last point explains why voluntary federal flood insurance has been a failure — homeowners have no reason to buy insurance when they know they will always be bailed out through government “disaster relief.”
It is precisely because private healthcare insurance markets are unavoidably incomplete that every developed country other than the United States has some form of mandatory health insurance plan. The reasoning is simple: if you can get everyone into the insurance pool — the young and healthy as well as the old and sick – then healthcare costs can be broadly shared, and thereby made affordable. The young and healthy “overpay” today, in return for receiving guaranteed coverage for their future selves, when they in turn will be old and sick.
By requiring universal participation in healthcare insurance, government thus can create the very product that the private sector cannot (because of adverse selection, etc.) — permanent health insurance, in which your premium reflects not just the cost of covering you today, but for your entire lifetime. Why should it be unconstitutional for all of us to solve this problem in this way? The appellate court majority’s answer hinges less on constitutional bedrock doctrines than it does on alleged terminological foot-faults by Congress.
One of Congress’s principal errors, according to the majority opinion, was to impose a “mandate” that each of us purchase private insurance, or face a “penalty” for failing to do so. Had Congress imposed a “tax” rather than a “penalty,” the result apparently would have within its power — even though under the design of the legislation the “penalty” in question in fact will be collected through the personal income tax system, just like the rest of an individual’s income tax obligations.
In other words, the majority would agree that government (that is, all of us acting together) can collect taxes from all Americans in amounts equal to the required insurance premiums to fund affordable healthcare, and then use those tax revenues to subsidize medical care provided by private healthcare professionals. In fact, we do just that for a subgroup of Americans today — we call it Medicare!
And if in turn Congress were to grant to an individual who provided proof that she had obtained qualifying private insurance a tax credit in an amount equal to her tentative healthcare tax liability (so that net she would owe no tax), surely that liberty-enhancing grant of additional personal flexibility to buy any private insurance policy that she preferred would raise no constitutional issue at all. Yet this hypothetical tax-and-credit system is the economic equivalent of the “mandate” that the court struck down as unconstitutional, because under either formulation individuals can either procure qualifying private health insurance or incur a tax liability.
In contrast to the Medicare model, the new law eliminates the mandatory channeling of money into government in the form of taxes (except for those who do not choose a private plan on their own) and the disbursement of those taxes back out to the people in the form of healthcare subsidies. Yet in the view of the majority opinion, this reduction in government’s involvement, when compared to Medicare, somehow made the legislation into a “wholly novel and potentially unbounded assertion of congressional authority: the ability to compel Americans to purchase an expensive health insurance product they have elected not to buy, and to make them re-purchase that insurance product every month for their entire lives.”
In the end there are two great ironies at work here. First, if Congress had followed the tax-and-subsidy Medicare model for financing universal healthcare, the new healthcare legislation plainly would be constitutional. The majority opinion in Friday’s Court of Appeals case effectively argues that Congress, by trying to reduce the role of government when compared with that model (and, it must be admitted, being too cute in using the word “penalty” to describe what plainly operates in fact as a tax on individuals who do not buy their own insurance), somehow converted a constitutional law into an unconstitutional assertion of a novel authority. We now must hope that the Supreme Court will see past the formalism of this analysis and conclude that the legislation in substance is completely constitutional.
The other irony at work is that the principal driver of our worsening federal deficit is healthcare. According to the OECD, the United States in 2009 spent 55 percent more per capita on healthcare than did the next most profligate developed country (Switzerland). Of that total, government programs provided larger subsidies per capita than did those in any other developed country except Norway. Yet our system does not thereby obtain any better health outcomes: U.S. life expectancies at birth are far below those of Australia, or France, or the U.K., or even poor beleaguered Greece.
The healthcare legislation was our first serious effort to grapple with the problem that our current healthcare system (including the healthcare insurance market) will bankrupt us if left to continue on the same path, while delivering poor value along the way. The legislation might not be perfect, but the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office concluded that it would reduce the deficit over the next ten years and have an increasingly positive impact in years thereafter.
By striking what they naively think to be a blow for personal liberty and small government, those who seek to undo the legislation in reality are proposing to dig the government’s deficit hole that much deeper. If the Supreme Court does not reverse this most recent decision, the end result will be that one day in the near future we all be required to pay higher taxes to climb out of this latest deficit hole of our own making.
Edward D. Kleinbard is a Professor of Law at University of Southern California Gould School of Law, and former Chief of Staff of the U.S. Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation.
This post first appeared at The Huffington Post.
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Peter you read your own link?
Such tax filers probably have big portfolios and big investment losses from the 2008 financial crisis. They are also more likely to be retired or self-employed, and may be charitably inclined.
Williams offered a hypothetical example: A retired person with $10 million invested in municipal bonds paying 5% interest, or $500,000 a year.
To look at one year of tax returns is very simplistic and unscientific. You need to look at people over multiple years and then the details on why they didn’t pay income tax. Wealth is very fluid, most people are only in the top tax bracket for 1 or a couple years.
This is why liberals always screw everything up, you don’t know how to look at the complete picture. For example I could open a business and invest 10 million over 10 years. After a decade of losing money I give up and sell off. Simple minded liberals will see my 8 million dollar cash out as a windfall salary and want to tax it at 37% or what ever number your at these days. Your ignorant of the fact that 8 million still represents a 2 million dollar loss. After your taxes I would net only 5+ million. And you wonder why people aren’t starting businesses and investing with Liberals in power……
Not nearly as simple as you though, now your turn, justify why 63 million people aren’t contributing
” I don’t think that today’s Tea Party stands for a balanced view of central government, as much as it stands for getting Obama out of office at whatever cost, including imploding the entire country.”
Then why would they run primary challenges to Republicans and why would they put fringe candiates like Angle and O’Donnel up when RINOs could have won without doubt. This is a clear example of your opinion supporting your bias. Any RINO could have wont the 2010 elections but they were willing to lose the seat rather then sit another RINO. Tea Party has clearly acted more independently then your know or admit. They are just as willing to go after Republicans as they are Obama.
FYI our country is already imploding, 100 trillion in unfunded promises, how much more implosion does it need?
” today’s left is arguing for social programs and raising revenues to fund them, while the right is fighting hard to keep the money from flowing to those programs.”
What you leave out is very telling. The Left has and is pushing this agenda at the federal level instead of the state level where it belongs. This goes along with Tim’s point that the left is miss using the federal government to confiscate the goods and labor of those they disagree with. This is exactly what the founding fathers tried to protect us from. If MA wants to implement Universal healthcare then go ahead that is their right. Don’t try twisting the constitution to force the entire nation to do so.
How can you compare murder of a baby to taxes to implement national healthcare? We are all CREATED, not born, with certain rights, one of those is life itself, one is not healthcare, welfare, education, or any of the other liberal goals.
“The only “liberties” that seems to apply equally to all, are keeping one’s money and guns out of government reach..”
You mean those liberities that the constitution actually grants versus those later “found”. The Federal goverment, versus the state democracies, was designed to be very limited and to guarantee very few but very specific and important rights and liberities. The left has ran all over the founding fathers idea for a stable federation.
Thank you for the welcome, Tim, but I don’t think that today’s Tea Party stands for a balanced view of central government, as much as it stands for getting Obama out of office at whatever cost, including imploding the entire country.
Leaving that aside, I also don’t think liberals have a visceral hatred for the Constitution. I most certainly do not. I also find it interesting that the folks that argued for increased Federal power in the 18th century were not what you would call “liberal” today. It was the “left” of those days that insisted on limited government.
But times have changed, and today’s left is arguing for social programs and raising revenues to fund them, while the right is fighting hard to keep the money from flowing to those programs.
Simultaneously, those fighting hard to keep the government out of their wallets are fighting equally hard to insert the government into people’s beliefs, bedrooms and even into people’s physical bodies.
The only “liberties” that seems to apply equally to all, are keeping one’s money and guns out of government reach..
I believe the modern conservative right is of the opinion that conservative policies, no matter how intrusive, are Constitutional because they fit in with the social and moral beliefs of 200 years ago, while anything that redirects money to vulnerable populations, or could be construed as indiscriminate social benefits is not Constitutional, because Madison never considered such thing.
I don’t think you can have it both ways.
I haven’t seen this get any mention in the press. This entire debate is all becuase they didn’t want to call it a tax. They tried playing politics and having it both ways and got burned. Now we have a constitutional crisis becuase of game playing.
No, I am not suggesting that it would be unconstitutional. I don’t even know if the penalty as it stands will be found unconstitutional.
I am suggesting that if the government wants to raise revenues, it should call it tax and if it wants to influence behavior by means of sticks and carrots, it should call it what it is, and let the dice roll. Which is what they did in this case, so going back now and tinkering with terminology to find ways around it seems a bit dishonest to me.
The alternative of course is to tax and provide service in return. I still think that the public option would have been, and it may still turn out to be, the cleanest way to go.
“I believe that government is (or should be) just another name for all of us doing things together. But there needs to be a limitation to what all of us together can dictate to any one of us individually.”
Margalit, welcome to the oldest party, the Tea Party. But you swallowed a big assumption there. If you describe a thing by leaving out the one feature of the thing that makes it different from all other things, you are either a simpleton or a con man. Mr. Frank may be both.
“…just a name for all of doing things together…”. Right, and a musket is just a stick with fire on one end. Honestly, what could be a more superficial, obtuse reading of political history than that? The people who put such sweat and blood into writing the Federalist papers and the Constitution knew one thing for sure, and that is that government is NOT “just a name for all of us doing things together” — that is an ice cream social or a bowling league. The one thing it is not, is a government.
Obviously, the only thing that makes government different from any other institution is that it holds the power of coercion. If it did not, we would not be talking about it. So, to be stated accurately, government is “just a name for all of us doing the things that we’re going to force, on pain of loss of life and property, the dissidents to go along with”. If this distinction between coercion and voluntarism seems trivial or pedantic to you, all that means is that you are genetically dictatorial, and I don’t want you for my neighbor.
The entire debate in the late 18th century was on how to limit the central government — how to make it different from a divine-right monarchy. It was THE subject. Indeed, if there is no limit to what the government can do, then there is no need for a written Constitution. This is why the left hates, with a visceral hatred, the very idea of control by a 200 year old document. They long, with a sublimated religious longing, for complete control, and the one thing standing between them and their religious vision is the need to constantly argue about what some white guys wrote with a quill pen. In their minds, there is no moral reason not to just dispense with it all, and say whatever the majority wants is what everyone will do — or go to jail. And that is what Madison worked very hard to make impossible, and what this debate is about, not the difference between a tax, a penalty, an incentive, or a dormouse.
Most people agree we have to tax each either, true. And the Constitution obviously gives the people the power to tax each other. But to argue that this makes any imagined tax “constitutional”, and then it’s only a minor transformation to make all control “constitutional”, is to use the trees to kill the forest — the entire purpose of the document was to constrain the power of the government. Any interpretation that gives Congress the power to control any part of your life can safely be labeled “sophistry”, and then analyzed. You don’t have to know exactly where the edge of the cliff was to know you are now in mid-air.
By the way, it was no comfort to the founders to think that the formerly monarchical power was to be vested in the majority. They considered that, and said no, and separated the powers precisely to produce the gridlock that would make it hard for the majority to coerce the minority. (“A republic, if you can keep it.”)
The people now crying about broken politics are the same people who say “we won” when they win, and who called Bush ‘Hitler” for poking into their library lists. Apparently, it’s “general welfare” when the left seizes your property, but its “fascism” when the right reads your mail.
Hypocrites. Monarchists.
Now, here we are, on the verge of hard-wiring into our body of law the logic that the government has no moral limit on its power. Both sides in this argument know that if Congress can make you buy health insurance then Congress can make you eat your peas.
(Donning tri-pointed hat:)
NO!
Margalit, are you saying that a tax break is unconstitutional whenever it is paid for via taxes at the same time that the tax break is enacted? Yet the same tax break is constitutional if it is paid for via deficit and then revenue is raised at some other time?
I don’t think any court will ever follow that doctrine, but even if it did, it would be a rather meaningless constitutional restriction. It’s pretty easy to get around it.
“what part of one nation under God aren’t you getting?”
That’s the “Pledge of Allegiance” Nate, not the Constitution. That phrase was added in 1954, you can look at the history of why. Challenges to political meetings that start with a Christian prayer (said by a political office holder), or any other religion, are being challenged under the Constitution, so we’ll see how it works out.
Paolo,
First, my apologies for mistakenly addressing Peter in my previous response to your comment.
It all boils down to whether this is a penalty or an incentive. It is a bit like the chicken and the egg, but it is important to define which came first.
I do agree that if the bill granted a deduction, from current tax levels. to those who purchase insurance on the individual market (as you suggested above), the constitutionality issue would probably not have been raised, and it would have been comparable to deductions for mortgage, charity, education or energy efficient purchases. I would classify these as incentives, since they were not immediately preceded by a tax increase to compensate the government for losses incurred due to inactivity.
But if you raise taxes across the board (fictitiously) and then deduct the increase for all folks that buy or otherwise obtain insurance (with a double delight for employer provided insurance), no matter how much they paid for that insurance (different than all other deductions), then this still counts as a penalty in my book.
If, for example, the government decided that folks should buy houses in order to revive the market right now, and used the same tactics as they are proposing to use for health insurance – either penalizing non-buyers, or raising and waving taxes for home owners (again, double prize for mortgage holders) – would that be an acceptable situation?
[BTW, you escape the penalty for not buying a house by having too little income as well]
I made an assumption above, which is obviously incorrect, that if we look at this as a tax, then, by definition, it is intended to raise revenue. Accounting for the automatic deduction and accounting for the dollar amount of the mandate and accounting for the impossibility to actually collect on a large enough scale, the revenue is negligible. So how can we in all honesty refer to this exercise as taxation?
“As long as I keep my wallet zipped in my pocket, there is nothing the government can do.”
Not true. Every year you pay income taxes, and if you don’t purchase a mortgage, or an HSA, or a solar panel you’ll have more money taken from your wallet than if you did buy any of those products. Exactly the same thing that will happen after 2014 if you choose not to purchase health insurance.
Furthermore, the insurance mandate is weaker than existing income-tax based incentives. There are quite a few ways to be exempt from the mandate, including not making enough income. There is no way to circumvent the penalty for not having purchased a mortgage.
Nate, you have your nightmares… and I have mine….
send you off to the Pealogs for some re-education
Right. I bow in humble deference to your comprehensive knowledge of EVERYTHING, which enables you to personally diss and dismiss everyone else who posts articles or commentary here.
Carry on/
” this concept to require we buy vegetables to improve our health”
___
If my BMI, as recorded in the Vitals data in my doc’s certified EHR, exceeds 26, Michelle Obama and her Celery Stick Police will be a’knoockin’ forthwith.
Hey, a typo!
🙂
SCOTUS has already ruled on school drug testing (see Vernonia v Acton). Scalia, who angrily railed against suspicionless drug testing in Skinner v Railway on “provacy” grounds, blew of the school thing on the grounds that “hey, they’re just KIDS, they don’t have full constitutional rights.
Y’see, you have full constitutional rights from the “moment of conception” until birth, then they become lesser until you’re 18.*
How do I feel about it? I’m against it. It’s mostly a symbolic “solution” in search of a problem, it’s “corporate welfare” (easy high volume money for the clinical labs).
Voluminous detail in my thesis on all the issues: prevalence, methodological, Constitutional, and ethical.
___
*Scalia — to his credit — says that the Constitution is silent on fetal “personhood” and abortion. For details, see my blog post here:
http://bgladd.blogspot.com/2008/04/diploid-dave-et-al.html
um no one said all DOE contractors not employees, would be, see the reference to hundreds of thousands not millions. And who said anything about cost plus?
Sounds like you need to get out more and read some more as well.
How do you feel about schools testing all kids and disaplining those who fail even if use was off campus and had nothing to do with school. I think BG or one of the GV schools was doing it.
odd you pick the republican Bush to follow up with another Obama constitutional violation. Wouldn’t the more likly scenerio be Obama or the next Democrat builds on this concept to require we buy vegetables to improve our health which will help lower the cost of ObamaCare which blows way out of budget. Or the next time a Democrat takes over a car company wouldn’t it be helpeful to require we buy electric cars from said tooken over company?
When government is the sole insurer of everyone do we really trust them to not tell us what to eat, how much exercise to get, and manage our lives to the smallest detail?
“The only good mechanism we have to ensure that this power does not get abused is to vote for politicians who use this power wisely.”
Wouldn’t a smarter solution be to have a limited government that didn’t dictate any of these life soltutions to us? Further any personal fredoom we do cede be done to the state and not the federal government? The more authority and opportunity to provide to government the more tempting people will misuse that power to their personal advantage or belief.
FYI ethanol in gas is great for our GDP and trade deficit more then it is for Iowa farmers. Do the math and see what happens if we replaced Ethanol with normal gas. 30 million Iraq’s and 5? million Afganastanies did pretty good with the whole war thing as well.
Seems like we need some sort of equal protection protection in our old constitution. Something like government can’t treat or tax one citizen different then another, if only our forefathers had thought of that.
We are a christian nation Peter, what part of one nation under God aren’t you getting? Of course they are going to pray to Jesus. We aren’t a muslim nation, where do you see one nation under Mohammad in any of our founding documents? The fact that we allow people to pratice other religions doesn’t change we are a christion nation.
Peter, regarding use of tax revenues, yes, I agree, the only way for citizens to regulate that is by voting, and I wish people would get of their a**es and go vote because if they would have done that in 2010, we would have been able to avoid much of the damage done by a loud minority stuck at a developmental stage of the “terrible twos”.
As to private purchases, the government today can force me to buy certain things and not others, if and only if, I decide of my free will to buy. As long as I keep my wallet zipped in my pocket, there is nothing the government can do. There is no law that I have to purchase a certain amount of ethanol every day. It may seem a minor thing to you, but I think the philosophical difference is huge, as are the practical implications.
I find the argument that since the government has never done anything like this before, we should trust that it will never do this again (other than just this once) incredibly naive, particularly when coming from great legal minds. If this little experiment goes well, what’s to stop the next President Bush from just mandating that you go out and spend at least $100 on non-perishable goods, instead of just advising us to go to the mall in the face of foreign attack on our soil?
We have a line in the sand now, and I prefer to not move it back. If there are infinite ways for the government to go around it, then why is it imperative to go right through it? And if the government has many ways to do the wrong thing, why should we supply yet one more way?
The constitution is just a vehicle that closes the argument by giving the final (in relative terms) ruling to a body that may or may not have enough wisdom and backbone to do the right thing. You could replace the constitution with the Bible and have as much interpretation for doing good or evil. I revert back to my example of Dred Scott which was based on the Constitution of the time. Amendments try to get it right depending on the political climate that created the amendment. The 18th Amendment established prohibition, the 21st repealed it.
If the Supreme Court was not a political body defining a legal set of interpretable rules then why so much political jockeying by the left and right on Justice appointments. Why is it I always know how Justice Thomas is going to rule?
“There can be no exceptions. If we start making exceptions, we become that which we fear most, and we trigger a see-saw of chipping away from the left and from the right until there’s nothing left.”
___
Agreed. But, what constitutes an “exception” is itself frequently the subject of loud and protracted wrangle.
Have you heard of the accrued “administrative exceptions” case law departures from the 4th Amendment’s Probable Cause and Warrants requirements?
Take the example of mass non-cause workplace (and school) drug testing. From my 1998 grad thesis:
“…It is simply beyond dispute that our government is deeply involved in the marketing of drug testing in all workplace domains, public and private-sector. Anyone in need of more evidence need only examine the activities of The National Alliance for Model State Drug Laws (click here), a federally-funded non-profit tax-exempt § 501(c)(3) “charitable organization” whose mission is to help state legislatures enact comprehensive anti-drug laws that include indiscriminate drug testing of private sector employees.The supposedly public/private distinction delineating the boundary of the reach of the Fourth Amendment has beeen hammered into oblivion.
[2] Whether the state or its designee has a compelling interest sufficient to trump individuals’ privacy rights. This question turns on empirical assertions of exigency: are the nature, extent, and cost of drug abuse in fact sufficiently adverse to warrant extreme measures? As we have seen elsewhere in this work, the pertinent characteristics and aggregate severity of the drug problem—and the likelihood that indiscriminate drug testing can serve as a significant deterrent—are hotly disputed by a host of competent researchers. Moreover, laws exist to deal with the “problem.” Twentieth century American law enforcement agencies bear no resemblance whatever to their feeble 16th century constabulary antecedents. Enforce the law within the law; extrajudicial measures are beyond the pale of Constitutional legitimacy.
[3] Whether the privacy intrusions are minimal relative to legitimate state interests. Constitutional validity should not be regarded as a function of the proximal “severity” of the intrusion. Yes; collection of a urine sample is less invasive than that of an IV blood sample, and far less invasive than, say, forced stomach pumping or body cavity examinations in search of contraband. But “loss of privacy” need not even entail physical contact and/or bioassay. If an unmarked police van outfitted with the latest surveillance technology monitors your house without cause, its operatives capable of listening to your most intimate conversations and monitoring your movements via ultrasonic, infrared, or other imaging equipment, your privacy has been violated as surely as had your blood been drawn or stomach forcibly evacuated—and arguably all the more reprehensibly for the stealth employed.
[4] The purpose of the testing. Prosecutorial or “administrative?” Following a trend developed in the lower courts over the last generation, the Supreme Court has allowed “administrative” or “special needs” exceptions to the “probable cause” and “warrant” requirements of the Fourth Amendment. In short, since positive drug test results are supposedly “confidential” and not referred for prosecution—despite the fact that they constitute “scientific evidence” of recent criminal conduct—the Court majority finds them acceptable as mere non-discretionary and “evenhanded” administrative functions for which the probable-cause evaluating function of the magistrate is rendered unnecessary. In Skinner v. Railway, Justice Kennedy sings the praises of this curious nuance of evenhandedness, arguing that “arbitrary” would be his (hallucinatory) spectre of magistrates abusing their power by opting to “arbitrarily” issue warrants without cause against targeted individuals. Better to trade in this type of speculative (and preposterous) arbitrariness for the operational evenhandedness of indiscriminate investigation…”
___
http://www.bgladd.com/drugwar/chapter4.htm
Today, we see all these loud, angry, ignorant people with their placards and funny hats and colonial outfits, for whom it never suffices that any policy with which they disagree is unwise, ineffective, or otherwise wasteful. It’s always gotta be glandularly “Unconstitutional.”
Margalit – I don’t quite understand what constitutional freedom you are trying to defend.
Government today already can force you to buy ethanol in your gasoline, which favors private corn farmers in Iowa. It forces you to finance wars that favor private corporations like Haliburton. It can use eminent domain to force people out of their property and give it to other private owners. It can take your Medicare taxes and give them to private Medicare Advantage providers. It can simply give money to any private sector it wants to favor/protect via defense, research, or infrastructure spending.
And if you look at spending through the tax code, government is already penalizing anyone who doesn’t have a mortgage, or anyone who doesn’t buy employer-based health insurance, or anyone who doesn’t install solar energy panels on their rooftops.
Government has plenty of constitutional powers to force you into economic activity that favors other private individuals and corporations. This is nothing new. The only good mechanism we have to ensure that this power does not get abused is to vote for politicians who use this power wisely. A constitutional restriction on government not being able to “mandate” a purchase of a private product is a useless protection since there an infinite ways for a future government to get around it.
Peter, there have always been those who chose to defend some liberties and oppose others based on their personal views and values. In my opinion these people are not committed to the spirit of the Constitution. They are only committed to their own beliefs and are using the Constitution to promote and enforce those beliefs on others. Democracy in general is very vulnerable to such efforts and the Constitution is its best weapon in this country. We are ill advised when we try to minimize its importance because Democracy is, and will increasingly be, facing great dangers from global corporations.
I know I have some strange bedfellows right now, but if you are committed to protecting the freedoms embedded in that 200 years old document, you have to stand up whether you are protecting something aligned with your personal beliefs or not. There can be no exceptions. If we start making exceptions, we become that which we fear most, and we trigger a see-saw of chipping away from the left and from the right until there’s nothing left.
I find that prospect more frightening than the health care “crisis” and the budget “crisis” put together.
Getting WAY off-topic now.
Nice. All of it irrelevant to my point.
Were my wife to lose her job, DOE would henceforth be on the hook for ZILCH regarding her. It’d be once again back off to 100% out-of-pocket premiums COBRA land.
Moreover, fyi, not all DOE (or any other agencies’) contracts are “cost-plus” by any means. Ever heard the phrase “fixed-price”?
“I seem to recall hundreds of thousands of private contractors also have health insurance for life paid by DOE.”
Funny that I’ve not run into any of these people. The “for life” part.
“An invocation is neither an establishment of religion or a prohibition of free exercise.”
Funny how the invocation is always Christian and very often espouses Jesus as Lord – ever think that maybe Jews attend local meetings. Guess who’d scream the loudest about separation if a Muslim invocation was used.
I guess you can’t comprehend.
no peter i said the exact opposit everyone is free to think what they want but this is a nation founded under god. israel allows muslims and christians to live and pratice ib their jewish state, its still a jewish state
Nate, are you saying everyone MUST believe in a God and that is what the founding fathers meant?
I can think (not what the Catholic Church wants) and read, can you read and comprehend?
http://www.slate.com/id/2067499/
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof
Name once this has ever been done peter. An invocation is neither an establishment of religion or a prohibition of free exercise.
How do people get as misguided and negativly educated as you? Its a 200 year old document easily found on the internet. Is it really to much to ask maybe you read it before running at your mouth?
http://www.usconstitution.net/const.html#Am1
you also need to have someone teach you the difference between faith in god and religion, the constituion says a church like the church of england or the roman catholic church will not be favored on over the other, this has always been a nation under god.
Since you can’t grasp the difference between church and religion you will never grasp this
Peter always the simpelton. I don’t have a church Peter. In fact I take issue with the way most Church’s have distroted their faith for power and money. Religion and church are not one in the same.
Try not to be such a projectionist idiot. I have no problem saying what I think, I don’t need someone like you to make things up for me
No one is going to force your church Nate to marry same sex, like no one is forcing your church to recognize women as equals in the church. I also doubt the church will be forced to hire gays, if a gay even wanted to work there.
But I understand the reluctance of Catholics to agree with the emancipation of gays as they have always fought against alternate thought and freedom of the individual to think, act and believe differently than the Catholic Church. 600 years of brutal inquisition proved that as is the enabling of pedophiles in the church.
As for a state religion, you simply only need to attend one of hundreds of local government meetings to listen (forced) to invocations to God and Jesus. Tell me NASCAR doesn’t force feed the “state religion” of Christianity. Seems your great “Constitution” doesn’t mean much then does it.
“Take a typical for-profit insurer with a long run average net income of 5%. A 5% profit off $6,000 in premium is more than a 5% profit off $5,500 in premiums.”
This is why out of pocket spending has decreased from 50% to 13% today. Insurers ideally would like people to buy 100% no out of pocket plans and those plans covered everything the law would allow. The higher the premium the higher their retention.
Its why insurers love the preventive mandates but people schooled in insurance shake their head at the stupidty of the Obama Admin. For effective cost insurance it needs to be insurance not a wealth redistribution financing mechanism.
“public health benefits are well beyond the reach of a health care system characterized by the complexities of medicine and conflicts of multiple parties working at economic cross-purposes.”
Could you please ask Kleinke how the worker comp market functions then. Medical economist, thats someone that has never worked in the field but spent a number of years in academia though so they feel qualified to write on the subject?
This is the type of error someone that has never worked in the business makes.
“Actually, it can and will go on like this forever, absent any major intervention by the nation’s largest health care purchaser—the U.S. government…”
Its government intervention that has lead up to the collapse and any collapse will be the result of government action not private insurance. Private Insurance is sustainable becuase it doesn’t carry debt past 12 months in most cases. Any cost increase and budget issues are dealt with now. That leads to some wild bumps in cost or drops in benefits but it can continue forever.
Government on the other hand collects premiums/taxes now and spends all of that or more on benefits on other programs while promising future benefits. Some of these promises are explicit and others are not. Its this unfunded liability that can and will cause a collpase, when government can’t provide the medicare benefits it promised to those that paid medicare taxes for 50 years there will be hell to pay. Depending how many people have been forced into this ponzi scheme when it finally implodes will determine the seriousness of the collapse. If we have a healthy private market of 200 million people it could pick up most of the pieces of the government failure. If we have 70 million covered by Medicare, another 100 million on Medicaid and only 130 million with private insurance the market wont be sufficient to pick up the government failure.
That Bobby is the difference between someone that works in a system and someone that sits on the sideline studying it
do you hear that Bobby?
Its comming for you….another big ole correction about to drop on yo a$$
http://www.allbusiness.com/government/government-bodies-offices/11508979-1.html
DOE is ultimately responsible for reimbursing its contractors for allowable pension and postretirement benefit plan costs, and records a liability or asset in its financial statements for the funded status–plan obligations less plan assets–of these benefit plans. When these contracts are recompeted or expire, it is DOE’s policy to ensure the continuation of these benefits–and the reimbursement of related costs–for incumbent contractor employees and eligible retirees by, for example, transferring benefit plan sponsorship responsibilities to a successor contractor or related company.
DOE reimburses these contractors for allowable costs, including the costs of providing pension and other postretirement benefits, such as retiree health care plans. Since the economic downturn, DOE has had to devote significantly more funding toward reimbursing these benefit costs, in part because of a decline in interest rates and asset values that has increased contractor pension contributions. In a challenging budgetary environment, further growth in these costs could put pressure on DOE’s mission work. GAO was asked to report on