Supreme Court grants victory to President Obama, upholding constitutionality of 2010 health care law
WASHINGTON – The US Supreme Court Thursday handed President Obama a major victory by upholding the sweeping 2010 health care law, declaring that Obama and Congress acted within their powers in requiring most Americans to obtain health insurance.
The ruling reaffirms the most ambitious and controversial undertaking of Obama’s first term: attempting to guarantee that most of the 45 million Americans without insurance will get better access to medical care. Demonstrators supporting the healthcare law exploded in cheers outside the Supreme Court as news of the ruling emerged.
The justices ruled 5-to-4 that Congress acted within its authority to impose an ``individual mandate’’ by using its taxing powers to fashion the enforcement side of the requirement. Under the law, individuals who fail to obtain insurance will be required to pay a tax penalty. The requirement begins in 2014.
Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., an appointee of former President George W. Bush who often has sided with the conservatives on the court in close cases, sided with the more liberal wing this time and proved to be the decisive vote.
Raise Your Voice
Click to contact candidates or elected officials about this issue. There is some irony in the turn of events. As a US senator in 2005, Obama voted against Roberts’s confirmation. Now Roberts has handed Obama one of the biggest victories of his political life.
By maintaining the status quo, the Supreme Court has given Republicans in Congress a fresh rallying point, as they have vowed to continue their fight to legislatively repeal the sweeping law. But with the conservative-leaning court affirming the government’s power to intervene aggressively in the national healthcare market, the GOP faces a difficult path.
Obama and his Democratic allies have said they will continue seeking to persuade voters of the virtues of the law during the election season, including popular provisions that bar insurance companies from denying coverage for pre-existing conditions and that require insurers to cover children in family plans until they are 26 years old. The law also includes a massive expansion of the federal Medicaid program, which is expected to add 17 million new people to government-sponsored coverage by 2016, also remains intact.
The victory for Obama and Democrats bucked conventional wisdom and proved the futility of attempting to predict how the Supreme Court will act when fundamental and unprecedented questions about the power of federal government are on the line. Most analysts had anticipated a high-court setback based on the tone of questions during oral arguments and a recent conservative tilt of the court.
The president fulfilled a longstanding goal of the Democratic Party in 2010 when he pushed through the most sweeping expansion of healthcare coverage since the federal government established the Medicare insurance program for the elderly in the 1960s. The law included a vast expansion of the federal Medicaid program to include millions of new beneficiaries and set up an array of cost-savings and reforms in federal healthcare programs. Modeled on the landmark healthcare plan passed by former Governor Mitt Romney in Massachusetts, the federal law also calls upon states to establish healthcare exchanges where low-cost and subsidized plans would be offered.
But the political costs were extremely high to both the president and Democrats in Congress. The vastly expanded role of the government in the healthcare market spawned a conservative backlash that spawned the Tea Party movement and helped Republicans win back the House from Democratic control in the 2010 mid-term elections.
The negative reaction also helped Massachusetts Republican Scott Brown seize the seat left vacant by the death of Senator Edward M. Kennedy, who spent most of his career advocating for better healthcare coverage and was a crucial backer of the Obama effort until his death in August 2009.
Polls have shown Americans never fully understood or supported the benefits or costs of the complex law; a narrow majority continues to favor its total repeal. Even Obama has not campaigned aggressively on its passage in his 2012 re-election bid.
The most contentious aspect of the 2010 law is the ``individual mandate.’’ Requiring that most Americans obtain insurance is a critical tradeoff in barring insurance companies from denying benefits for pre-existing conditions and imposing other limits on coverage.
Without forcing healthy people to buy insurance and pay into the pot, not enough premiums will flow into an insurance plan to cover everyone who gets sick. In anticipation of the Supreme Court ruling, insurance companies in recent weeks have been scrambling to explain why they need this provision if they are going to be required to cover all comers, regardless of their medical history or condition.
Without the mandate, individual insurance premiums would rise to the point of becoming prohibitively expensive, and tens of millions more people would remain uninsured – the very problem the law was meant to address, analysts said.
Nationally, the sweeping health reform law was supposed to expand coverage to 30 million people who are currently uninsured by 2016, through a combination of employer-sponsored insurance, Medicaid expansion, private individual plans, and insurance exchanges. It is unclear how many would ultimately be covered without the mandate to buy insurance or pay a penalty starting in 2014.
Both Republicans and Democrats in Congress have been bracing for today’s decision. House Speaker John Boehner last week sent a memo to Republican members warning them against celebrating in the event the court strikes down part or all of the law.
“There will be no spiking of the ball,” Boehner wrote, mindful of a potential backlash against Republicans who have campaigned hardest against ObamaCare and in an attempt to keep the election focused on the economy.
“We will not celebrate at a time when millions of our fellow Americans remain out of work, the national debt has exceeded the size of our nation’s economy, health costs continue to rise, and small businesses are struggling to hire,” he said. “ObamaCare has contributed to all these problems. Repealing it completely is part of the solution . . . but it is only one part.”
Boehner advocated for replacing the law with incremental reforms that focus on access, choice and cost containment – not rushing to pass a massive bill that the majority of Americans do not support.
Congressional Democrats immediately fired back with a memo of their own touting the benefits of health reform, chiding Republicans for continuing to “cheer against the health benefits Americans are already enjoying.”
Dean Clancy, legislative counsel and vice president of health care policy for Freedom Works, a Tea Party group, said that while many Tea Party members want to repeal the entire law and replace it with nothing, Freedom Works advocates a step-by-step replacement of the law with lots of small incremental bills.
“For us, the goal is not expanding coverage with insurance,” Clancy said. “The goal is reducing cost and expanding individual freedom so people can make their own health care decisions.”
That means higher out-of-pocket expenses for patients, he said.
“People have to have skin in the game,” Clancy said. “The only way to control costs is to have patients control the dollars.”
Clancy hopes the reforms would include expanding health savings accounts, allowing the interstate purchase of health insurance, beefing up coverage pools for those with pre-existing conditions, preventing the uninsured from using emergency rooms as a doctor’s office, and full deductibility of medical expenses on taxes for everyone.
“Romney’s rhetoric on health care is good but we don’t trust him because of RomneyCare,” Clancy said.
Posted By: DAVID JOHNSON
Thursday, June 28th 2012 at 11:49AM
You can also
click
here to view all posts by this author...
