Today on Uncommon Knowledge, law professors and constitutional scholars Richard Epstein and John Yoo discuss the constitutionality of Obamacare’s Individual Mandate.
The Federal government does not have power under the Constitution to compel people to enter the marketplace…What is unprecedented about Obamacare is that if you are a 25-year-old kid in good health, who just wants to sit on your couch, and play video games and you do not want to buy health insurance, this Federal law forces you to.
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I'm getting an error when I try to get the video of this on iTunes, you might want to check that. I'd really like to watch it.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe core issue is not the individual mandate. It's how to pay for and who pays for uncompensated care.
If the healthy 25 year old kid without insurance is in a car wreck and shows up at an ER, he's going to get treated. So who pays for it? How about the lower wage laid off guy with a family who's suddenly stuck with a $1,500 a month COBRA payment when his unemployment benefit is only 700 bucks.
The trivial and stupid Republican response to the uninsured is that the hospitals should eat the costs when uninsured people show up at the ER or they should not be treated at all. As if those institutions don't have bills to pay or will toss out their moral compass when someone presents at the ER with a busted appendix and no insurance card.
What would Epstein and Yoo do in those cases?
That's the real and political problem with Republicans, the "I got got mine, let everybody else eat cake." The individual mandate may or may not be constitutional. But Espstein's argument that people can choose not be cared for is totally bogus in real life.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseYes, I agree entirely. While I think that upholding the federal individual mandate would portend horrible things for the future, I'm incredibly disappointed how the GOP, and conservatives in particular, have ignored the rest of the issue.
Forget about the 25-year old male who suffers some kind of traumatic injury or some other kind of debilitating illness, just think about all the births in this country that - because of the EMTALA - that are provided gratis by American hospitals. Someone pays that cost, and that someone is usually a person who already has insurance, or it's the American taxpayer (usually both).
Lastly, when the American people have decided that they want their preexisting conditions covered by their insurer - and they have - then health insurance stops being insurance, and it starts being something else. This is where we are at today. Irrespective of how the Supreme Court rules on the mandate, 80% of the American people want preexisting coverage and yet the Republicans have absolutely no idea how to make this work and still keep a truly free market health care system. It's a problem.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseMany (most?) hospitals are non-profits. That is, they receive tax breaks in exchange for performing a service useful to the public. Non-profit hospitals are supposed to be providing charity care rather than paying six-figure salaries to a brigade of executives (see the Chuck Grassley hearings from a few years ago).
If a private hospital does not want to provide uncompensated care then it can exempt itself from EMTALA by opting out of Medicare.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseA better example than the 25 year-old slacker "kid" is the 25 year-old man with a low-paying entry-level job, struggling to pay his rent and in many cases his college loans. The one thing he has is good health which means on average he shouldn't have a large medical bill, just as generations of his prdecessors haven't.
But insurance companies, eager for more revenue and overjoyed at the prospect of healthy young people being forced to pay for elaborate coverage, have succeeded in first one state and now the nation in getting their tame politicians to force these young healthy people to buy far more extensive coverage than they need.
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