It seems like what the Supreme Court has decided with the 5-4 ruling to uphold ObamaCare as a tax, is saying that the USA is looking at a President who is no better than a school-yard bully.
That "Tax" is really a shakedown. And we Americans who don't want to pay into the debacle and opt out, will have to shell out 2.5% of our income for nothing in return.
http://www.aei.org/article/health/he...-on-obamacare/
The controversial, contradictory and complex ruling on Obamacare
Thomas P. Miller | The Blaze
One day later and the Supreme Court’s ruling on ObamaCare doesn’t look any better than it did on Thursday morning when the Court narrowly upheld a health law that Congress never passed. Chief Justice John Roberts performed the legal equivalent of Olympian gymnastics in finding the individual mandate constitutional. But his “majority” 5-4 opinion for the Court is really an unusual majority of “one” that smacks of results-based rewriting of the actual text of the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
At the start of his opinion that decided the case, the Chief Justice appeared to be against the mandate before he was for it – in terms of constitutional law. He found that the law’s individual mandate was unconstitutional under the power of Congress to regulate interstate commerce, but, surprise, it was a constitutional “tax” after all. Four additional liberal justices were willing to join that decision, while making clear in their concurring opinion that they really believe that Congress could even regulate “inactivity” and compel individuals to enter into commerce.
“Why should the Chief Justice strive so mightily to hem in Congress’ capacity to meet the new problems arising constantly in our ever-developing economy?” wrote Justice Ginsburg. But she and her three other colleagues agreed to sign on quietly to the “tax” argument for the mandate, in order to save it.
The other four dissenting justices provided vigorous arguments to the contrary. They insisted that the entire health law should fall, as fatally flawed due both to the unconstitutional mandate and its coercive Medicaid expansion imposed on states. Justices Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, and Alito stripped bare the pretense that the mandate was a tax rather than a (unconstitutional) penalty. For example, different groups of people are exempted from the mandate’s coverage command itself than those exempted from paying its penalty.
Chief Justice Roberts did try to close the open-ended commerce clause door to sweeping federal regulatory authority over just about anything. But then opened another door wider under the taxing powers of Congress. His judicial reasoning first carefully showed that the individual mandate was not a “tax” when it came to jurisdictional issues under the Anti-Injunction Act (thereby allowing the Court to decide the case). But, like the Decepticon robot villains in the “Transformers” series of movies, the mandate could be converted into a “tax” for constitutional authority purposes. Just pay no attention to the ACA’s statutory history and language, President Obama’s own words in pushing for the law, or even some earlier legal positions by his attorneys. In most of the lower federal courts that reviewed similar versions of this “tax or penalty” legal ploy, it failed to pass the “straight-face” test.
The bottom line is that the Chief Justice decided that the “tie” in constitutional law challenges goes to the federal government’s runners, and four other liberal justices were willing to do whatever was necessary to save ObamaCare. The law under the Constitution is, or becomes, whatever five or more justices say it is.
One might now think of the mandate penalty as an “exit fee” for Americans who wish to opt out of the coverage requirements of ObamaCare. Millions are likely to make that choice, given the sizable gap between the modest penalty amounts and their full costs of mandatory, government-approved coverage. Enforcement of the penalty/tax will be relatively weak, as well. Uninsured or otherwise non-compliant Americans who do not file federal income taxes, or those who do not expect to receive year-end tax refunds, will not spend any time in the IRS penalty box. On the other hand, the federal government may have gained a freer hand to regulate whatever it wants (broccoli, anyone?), as long as it just charges you more if you don’t comply! And Congress apparently won’t even have to admit that the penalty is a “tax” before it votes for it.
A secondary part of the majority decision (on a 7-2 vote) did limit the health law’s provisions regarding penalties for states that do not cooperate with its proposed expansion of Medicaid in 2014. To update an old Justice Potter Stewart saying about pornography, the Court finally knew it had a case of unconstitutional coercion by the federal government when it saw one (here). This provides some modest, incremental relief for debt-plagued state governments who will be able to just say no to Medicaid expansion, without risking loss of all federal matching funds for their old, pre-expansion Medicaid programs.
The overall decision to uphold most of the ACA joins a long parade of past disappointments at the Court for judicial conservatives. It may be a controversial, contradictory, and complex ruling, but this represents a major initial legal victory for the Obama administration and other ACA supporters. Opponents cannot afford many more such defeats that are “supposed” to make their political chances stronger this fall. The legal cement for an even larger bureaucratized federal welfare state is beginning to harden.
Thursday’s ruling also highlights the dangers for opponents who overinvested too narrowly in outsourcing a solution for their health policy problems to the Supreme Court. They have not yet built sufficient political support and attractive legislative proposals to both repeal and replace this unpopular law passed in March 2010. The months ahead between now and November elections await.
The initial burst of recriminations about the Court ruling, cries for Full Repeal in Congress, and Capitol Hill press releases blaming all current and future health care woes on the Obama administration will not be enough to change the facts on the ground. Most of the health care industry will resume shrugging its shoulders and falling back into line with the political deals it cut with the Obama administration several years ago. (It’s just “business in Washington,” after all).
The political case for substantial or total repeal will become much stronger where it matters – at the grass roots level beyond the Washington Beltway, and particularly among independent voters this fall — if it finally includes a credible, attractive agenda for “replace” that offers better solutions to chronic health policy problems and improves the lives of average Americans.
We can afford neither to try to fix a fatally flawed ACA nor just to go back to the pre-2010 status quo. The core issue is really one of power and accountability: Who will get to decide the key issues of how health care is purchased, provided, organized, and overseen?
Facilitating a more decentralized and market-based alternative to ObamaCare will require a combination of defined contribution financing of taxpayer subsidies (for Medicare, Medicaid, and private health insurance, respectively), and restructuring of the health care safety net (better financed high-risk pools, plus protection against insurance restrictions on pre-existing conditions — for those with continuous insurance coverage). A more competitive health care marketplace should encourage easier entry, more accountability to consumers, and less command and control regulation.
The courts and politicians may continue to disappoint us. Some critics of the Chief Justice’s surprise decision have gone too Shakespearian in describing this legal tragedy, by asking: “Et tu, John?” But another part of the Julius Caesar play offers better advice: “The fault lies not in our [judicial] stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.”
It’s up to everyone else to reclaim their own roles and responsibilities in fixing what Washington keeps breaking.
So, one can choose to pay Obama his "exit fee", (seems like a shakedown to me) or face the biggest tax increase in history.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/merrillm...u-s-history/2/
Is ObamaCare The Largest Tax Increase In U.S. History?
Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts decided to save President Obama’s signature legislation by ruling that the individual mandate requiring Americans to have health coverage or pay a fine is constitutional under the federal government’s taxing power.
That ruling took most people by surprise, since the Justice Department appears to have thought the “taxing power” argument was the weakest of its three weak justifications. Maybe Roberts has an affinity for weak arguments, because he certainly made a number of them himself in justifying the mandate as a tax.
When the chief justice and his liberal colleagues consider the mandate a tax, they seem to mean only the penalty a person must pay for not having health insurance. However, the mandate has two parts: the requirement to have coverage and the penalty — er, tax — for not getting it. Why aren’t both considered a tax?
ABC’s George Stephanopoulos did. When he directly challenged the president on the mandate-as-tax question, he said, “Under this mandate, the government is forcing people to spend money, fining you if you don’t. How is that not a tax?”
And if both the premium and the penalty are considered a tax, the mandate becomes the largest tax increase in U.S. history. And that doesn’t include all of the other taxes imposed by the legislation.
The median U.S. family income is about $50,000. Family health coverage can easily run $20,000 a year — and rising quickly. In that scenario, the coverage mandate is essentially a 40 percent tax on that family, which is now required by law to ensure that every family member has qualifying coverage.
And because the cost of the coverage will be similar even though incomes vary significantly, the lower the income the higher the effective tax rate — in essence, the most regressive tax in U.S. history, too.
Now, President Obama and his enablers may deny the health insurance premium is a tax. But the bill’s defenders — including Budget Director Peter Orszag, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, and the president himself, not to mention Democrats in Congress — also denied the mandate was a tax.
But when it became useful for the law’s supporters to consider the mandate a tax, they made the mental switcheroo easily. That’s because consistency and truth were not the goal; getting five Supreme Court votes was the only thing that mattered.
If Roberts had told the liberals on the Court that the price for him signing on to the mandate was to consider both the premiums and the penalty a tax, would any of them have objected? How about the Flip-Flopper in Chief?
Indeed, several defenders of the legislation pointed out that workers have long been required to pay a 2.9 percent tax on their income, known as the Medicare FICA tax. And, they concluded, if the government can require workers to pay the FICA tax, which functions as a type of health insurance premium, and force them to have Medicare coverage when they turn 65, then the government should be able to require everyone under 65 to have coverage.
Of course, the architects of Medicare were clear that FICA is a tax, while the architects of ObamaCare were clear that the mandate isn’t a tax. It was only after the constitutional challenges that the Justice Department had to go on a fishing expedition for justifications.
No Obama administration official or elected Democrat in Congress gave even the slightest consideration to the notion that the individual mandate was unconstitutional. Not one.
When CNSNews asked Democrats about the provision’s constitutionally, they either dismissed the question — as with Nancy Pelosi’s “Are you serious!?” response — or they mumbled something about people being required to have auto insurance (which is a state, not federal, requirement).
All of the justifications — the Commerce Clause, the Necessary and Proper Clause, and the tax-authority argument — came after the passage of the legislation. The Justice Department threw everything it could against the wall in the hope that something would stick. And one thing did, to Roberts.
The irony is that if Chief Justice Roberts had just taken the administration’s primary argument — that the mandate was allowed under the Commerce and/or Necessary and Proper Clauses — it would have been a 5-4 decision striking down the mandate.
But Roberts went out of his way to salvage something the administration couldn’t. In essence, Roberts reached down and pulled out a drowning man who had gone under for the third time.
In doing so he has set a terrible precedent. Any politician can now argue that new mandates on the public aren’t a tax, only to decide they are a tax after getting reelected.
Now the battle moves back to the political stage — though it never really left — as every Republican runs on repeal and replace. ObamaCare is one of the most unpopular pieces of legislation in modern history, with Rasmussen polls consistently showing somewhere between 52 and 58 percent of the public wanting the law repealed.
What Roberts didn’t have the clarity or gumption to do in the Supreme Court, the voters will have to do — in November.
A-1
.....
Re: ObamaCare: Pay me to protect you, or I break your legs. (Bobover3 Tribute)
Originally Posted by A-1
Re: ObamaCare: Pay me to protect you, or I break your legs. (Bobover3 Tribute)
