Supreme Court upholds Obamacare 5-4; White House 'elated' (video)

Supreme Court upholds Obamacare 5-4; White House 'elated'
By Bill Mears and Tom Cohen, CNN
updated 12:29 PM EDT, Thu June 28, 2012

Alan Smithee wrote:I agree that it remains to be seen if it will do enough good. I'm still PO'd at the Prez and the Democrats in congress for almost immediately taking a single payer system off the table. This is a question for Suzi if she sees it. Would we in the U.S. be better off with what you have in Canada?

Suzi wrote:
I think you would. Is Canada's system perfect? Not by a long shot but it beats the US system by a mile, it also beats the Obama care by a mile. Unfortunately Our government is doing all it can (short of having the people lynch them)to destroy our system. I have recently learned that BC where I live probably has the worst system in Canada. No wonder we are the poorest province.However yes we do pay for insurance (if we want to)or the employers do . We pay $116.00 per month (BC's right wing government has raised it twice), it covers all our regular dr's visits and any hospitalization. One eye check up every 2 years is partially paid depending on the optometrist, or in some cases once a year. Dental care is not paid for at all. Our pharmacy bills are killers(since Mulroney allowed the pharmacies to charge what they like) then after we have paid a certain amount according to income Fair Pharmacare kicks in. They pay 80% until another certain amount is reached they they pay for it all. But we pay nearly $700.00 per month from the end of March until Pharmacare kicks in, as they did at the end of this month. That doesn't mean everything is paid for. I just found out that in Ontario seniors pay $4.11 per prescription. I figured it out and we would be paying $90.49 per month if we lived in Ontario! Then we don't want to live in Ontario.

My guess is that France has the best system hands down. An American there in a documentary said something I thought was profound, she said "In the US the people are afraid of the government, in France the government is afraid of the people". That is how it should be.

GrayWolf wrote:Romney's saying that if he gets elected repealing Obamacare is gonna be the first thing he does the day after being sworn in.

Chris wrote:

Yep. This just became Mitt's campaign platform. 'Elected me, and I'll repeal it.'

WASHINGTON -- One of the few individuals who worked on health care reform under both Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama said on Friday that the controversial individual mandate provision was virtually identical in the bills signed into law by each of them.

"They are very similar," said Jonathan Gruber, a professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in an interview with The Huffington Post. "They aren't the same exact mandate, but they have the same basic structure."

Gruber was a key architect of the sweeping health insurance reform legislation that Romney passed as governor of Massachusetts. In addition, he advised Democrats and the Obama administration on how to build the Affordable Care Act. As that 18-month process unfolded, Gruber famously unloaded on Romney for his attacks on Obamacare, arguing that the two were the "same fucking bill."

Those similarities, he said on Friday, extend to the individual mandate.

"Basically the way it would function is you have a form 1099-HC, which is like a health care form you get from your insurer every year, and you would attach it to your taxes," he said, describing how the mandate would work nationally. "That form would show you have health insurance and you're fine. If you don't have health insurance, you fill out a form on your taxes ... which computes whether you're exempt from the penalty, [which would be the case] if your income is too low or insurance costs too much. Finally, if you don't have the form and you're not exempt, there will be a penalty on your taxes."

In Massachusetts, the Department of Revenue is in charge of enforcing the penalty. For the Affordable Care Act, the responsibility would rest with the IRS.

"The size of the penalty in Massachusetts is an amount that depends on your income," Gruber said. According to the Associated Press, in 2012, "those making more than three times the poverty level –- $32,676 for an individual –- pay the highest penalty of $105 per month, or $1,260 per year."

Nationally, added Gruber, "they do a similar thing. It would be whatever is bigger: $695 or 2.5 percent of your income."

As governor, Romney initially opposed including an individual mandate as part of health care reform. Under pressure from legislators, he ended up signing one into law. Since then, Gruber relayed, the policy has worked well. In the first year alone, 98 percent of tax filers "got it right." A total of 44,000 residents in a state of 6 million paid a penalty.

"I will say that the fines have gone down," current Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick (D) said Friday morning on MSNBC, "because more and more people, as the statistics you cited indicate, have taken up insurance."

As recently as 2008, Romney was comfortable with the idea that such a penalty constituted a tax. But the contours of the debate have changed dramatically since then. And in the wake of the Supreme Court's decision to uphold the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act's individual mandate under Congress' taxing authority, the presumptive Republican nominee has begun denouncing the mandate as a major tax hike in the strongest possible terms.

"But the people of America, I think, recognize that this legislation is not right for America. It will cost $500 billion in taxes," Romney said at a fundraiser on Friday morning.

In a conference call organized by the Obama campaign, Patrick insisted that the mandate did not constitute a tax. "This is a penalty," he said.

A top Obama administration official, meanwhile, said that if Romney were to argue that Obamacare included a massive tax hike, the president was prepared to respond that, by logical extension, Romney raised taxes in Massachusetts.

A request for comment from the Romney campaign was not immediately returned.

UPDATE: Romney spokesperson Andrea Saul responded in an email, which noted (accurately) that Obama insisted the mandate wasn't a tax while crafting reform. But Saul did not account for how that makes it any different from what Romney passed as governor.

Supernova wrote:

And what happens if people CAN'T pay the $116 a month? I heard something about and I don't know if this is right, but I heard with this plan now, our options are either to pay for health insurance or pay a fine for not having it, and if people could afford either they would've HAD insurance in the first place.

Nystyle709 wrote:Damn Mitt is stupid.

Nystyle709 wrote:Damn Mitt is stupid.