Affordable Care Act survives Supreme Court challenge

Roberts gave Scalia what he wanted- the opportunity to write politically motivated drivel. This case was never in doubt. The bigger travesty would have been if they ruled in a favor of the plaintiffs. That would have opened a Pandora's box of never ending statutory reinterpretation.

Assumes the policy is actually making America healthier.
Assumes there are no alternatives that will result in even better health or lower costs.
Assumes that people would not pay for better health voluntarily if it was worth buying.
Pretends that redistributing from the healthy and young to the sick is as American as apple pie.

What a complete bunch of horseshit. The indisputable truth is that the Dems underestimated the resistance when they were writing language clearly intended to pressure states to create exchanges. This has already been admitted by insiders starting with Jonathan Gruber. You've won, so there's really no need to lie about it anymore. Or go ahead and prove how you're actually stupid enough to believe that crap. But please don't waste your time trying to sell that shit to people who haven't had the lobotomy yet.

Lanzman is a drooling idiot sometimes. In 1795 when Congress required all sailors to buy life insurance was that some how unconstitutional or outside of the founding father's original intent? I would say, no, you mook.

They are not limited to a single term. Retired justices can be reappointed.

No. Assumes that access to something is better than no access. Most adults can figure that out.

There are. Your people shouted them down.

Because everyone in the U.S. is middle class or higher.

No. Understands the Pareto principle. Which, apparently, you don't. Next?

Access to insurance is not access to care. It's access to prohibitive deductibles and it's access to Medicaid which can arguably be shown to be no better than nothing at all.

Actually per Gruber the operating principle is that they won't.

Again, disagreed that those particular alternatives were better or cheaper. Emphatically, in fact.

Actually, because instead of giving everyone money to buy the things we think they should have, it's also quite possible to pass laws that remove the unnecessary costs that drive up costs of things people would naturally buy on their own. Affordable care is illegal to deliver in this country. Or at least it was -- I fully expect to see more inferior care legalized now that the government is underwriting so much more of it. Hence the media bombardment of stories about how colonoscopies and mammograms are suddenly less beneficial than previously thought. Timed perfectly to match the formulary changes that will make those tests more scarce.

Pareto requires that no party be made worse off. People are worse off everywhere under Obamacare.

This thread is golden...

Um, you might want to google Pareto, as it has no such requirement. It's descriptive, not prescriptive.

Noteworthy in this thread, is the extent to which people who don't like PPACA also don't bother to understand what it actually is. Hence, we have pretzel twisting logic that requires eliminating all taxes in order to be consistent. John Castle would love this thread.

The pretzel twisting logic came when finding the thing constitutional.

Is there actual proof that preventative care saves money in the long run? To me is sounds like chimney corner scripture. Something people think sounds right without actual evidence to support it.

You got it backwards, so you are playing to type.

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Thank God we Liberals aren't opposed to aborting that rough beast.

So true.

I'd be real careful throwing the "drooling idiot" thing around given your track record, sparky. And anyway, there is a very clear difference between what the fedgov can require of military members while in federal service and what can be required of private citizens. Or is that concept also beyond your grasp?

It required private sailors who do not work for the government to purchase life insurance. This directly contradicts your claims, this has been repeatedly brought up in the past, so you continuing to ignore this fact does say something about where you are at on this issue.

You worked yourself into an irrational tizzy claiming it was unprecedented and probably illegal that the goverent t can require someone to buy something like insurance. Except, we have been doing that since the very founding of this country so you are just plain wrong.

No gul, you got it backwards and something isn't constitutional just because you say so. I'm getting real sick of your smug liberal, I'm the smartest man in the room shtick. Just because the Supreme Court makes a decision, doesn't mean they made the right one. They are not gods, they are capable of making mistakes too. It's their job to interpret law, not legislate from the bench like they did yesterday. You can say you are right all you want, doesn't mean shit and I can and will criticize it all I want. You are not the superior intellect you think you are and your understanding of what you think the Constitution means is laughable.

It was a requirement for the civilian merchant marine, ie private citizens.

What's funny about your little rant, is you don't have the foggiest clue why they decided as they did. I explained it up thread, but here it is again. The reason the PPACA is legal is because it is nothing more than a tax loophole. Tax loopholes are very much legal, as Congress has the constitutional authority to levy fees and taxes and structure collection of receipts. Your whole understanding of the issue is predicated on ignorance. So just stop embarrassing yourself, and accept that you are wrong about this. Then, and only then, will you have the credibility to start arguing for policy based changes.

Then the requirement was improper at that time as well.

It wasn't a requirement on the civilian sailors, it was a requirement on ship owners hauling cargoes between US ports.

You had to reach all the way back to the 1790s to find anything remotely relevant, how pathetic. I bet next you'll use the Alien and Sedition Acts to justify the Patriot Act.

But that's not the issue at all. Very few of the patients seen in an Emergency Room are actually in need of critical care. The vast and overwhelming majority of patients seen either simply don't have a PCP or treat the ER like any other Doctor's Office or Outpatient Clinic. There's also a growing trend to market Emergency Rooms as "just another Doctor's Office" to bolster sagging hospital revenues.

Every time your fingers tickle the keyboard, the stupid gets broader.

1. That was Dinner's example.
2. We have thousands of tax loopholes in the current code, this is just one more.

Maybe you can explain how tax loopholes became unconstitutional, after 200 plus years of them being a part of Federal tax law.

If hospitals are able to remarket themselves, that's a good thing, as is the rise in minute clinics, doctors on call...and the fact that people now have coverage for these things, so that when your three-year-old is screaming in pain from an earache at 2 a.m. on a Sunday morning, you have more options for treatment.

Bah. That's why we invented bourbon.

Garamet, I don't know if you have any children, but I'll give you a clue.

If you have a three year old screaming in pain at 2 a.m on a Sunday morning, you have NO OTHER OPTIONS for treatment aside from the emergency room even if your insurance is gold plated.

Do you really think doctors make appointments at 2 in the morning on a weekend?

What "other options" are you suggesting?

I guess if you're a multimillionaire and have a doctor on 24 hours a day call, but I doubt you were suggesting that.