The Supreme Court hearing Tuesday on the controversial federal health care law will be one for the history books.
With the fate of President Obama’s health care law hanging in the balance at the Supreme Court on Tuesday, a lawyer for the administration faced a barrage of skeptical questions from the four of the court’s more conservative justices.
Conservative justices expressed fears Tuesday that forcing Americans to buy health insurance would open the door to other intrusive requirements from the federal government.
On the second day of oral arguments over President Barack Obama’s landmark health law, the Supreme Court grappled with the linchpin of the legislation — the individual mandate.
Critics of the law argue that if the U.S. government can require Americans to buy medical insurance, it could require virtually anything else that might improve health or lower health care costs, like forcing Americans to join a gym or buy broccoli.
A potential swing vote on the court, Justice Anthony Kennedy, turned to that point early in Tuesday’s session, asking Solicitor General Donald Verrilli Jr. if the government could require purchase of certain food, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Verrilli was also asked if the government could require the purchase of cellular phones or burial insurance, early news reports said.
“The federal government is not supposed to be a government that has all powers,” Justice Antonin Scalia said, according to Bloomberg News. “It’s supposed to be a government of limited powers.”
The aggressive questioning from conservative justices led Tom Goldstein, the publisher of SCOTUSblog and a prominent Supreme Court litigator, to declare that “there is no fifth vote yet” for the mandate.
“The individual mandate is in trouble—significant trouble,” he wrote in an update from the court, while warning that the first half of an argument session can often seem one-sided. “The conservatives all express skepticism, some significant.”
During the early questioning, at least three of of the liberal justices, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor, challenged the conservative wing, according to news reports.
Ginsburg argued that forcing people to buy food is different than requiring them to purchase insurance, citing a friend-of-the-court briefing that uncompensated care leads to higher costs for all consumers, the Journal reported. Uninsured people are passing their costs on to others, and that’s why Congress can regulate them, Ginsburg suggested, according to the Journal.
At stake in Tuesday’s arguments is not just the individual mandate but the potential resolution to a bitter political fight between Democrats and Republicans over the limits of government power when it comes to health care. It also will mean vindication or defeat for Obama, who staked his presidency on muscling a massive health care overhaul through Congress on a partisan vote.
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8 Responses
1. If they decide the individual mandate is really a tax, they can “punt” at any time. The Supreme Court is notorious for trying to avoid political questions.
2. One can’t tell for certain what the justices feel during the debate.
3. The prohibition against discrimination based on pre-existing conditions probably could surive regardless – but it will have more serious economic effects if not coupled with a requirement that everyone buy insurance.
4. Given the many people with pre-existing conditions and other health issues that make them bad insurance risks (e.g. belonging to group known for having many babies), the problem won’t go away.
there are lots of ways to fix health care in US w/o Obummercare
4. Given the many people with pre-existing conditions and other health issues that make them bad insurance risks (e.g. belonging to group known for having many babies), the problem won’t go away.
Health Insurance Premiums are based on current risk data based on zip codes (the most expensive Zip codes are in the village) and I don’t think that they belong to a group known to have many babies.
Oh, I hope they knock it back into tuesday
#3- as many frum businesses and institutions discover,when the private insurer discovers that it is a group including lots of frummies, they lose interest (or want to exclude pregnancy as a covered condition). From an insurance perspective, frum women are a problem.
Indeed, our community benefits greatly from the SCHIPS program that Obamacare expands (bad fiscal policy, but good for the Jews).
Of course, a real danger of Obamacare is that they will insist that people covered get all required preventive care (which Democrats insist include contraceptions – which now can be conviently given in ways the patient can’t easily reverse).
IF this was ruled upon based on its constitutionality, it would be shot down 8-1 because there’s NO WAY this can be constitutional, but alas the Supreme Court is made up of four judges who despise our Constitution and they try to chip away at it every chance they could.
For this alone we should never elect a democRAT.
#6- don’t be so sure of the unconstitutionality of this – one example that fortunately the liberals will never site, that at one time adult white men of a certain age could be required to acquire firearms and participate in the militia, or otherwise pay a fine (at times when Jews didn’t have the right to bear arms, we paid the fine – and a suit on the matter was very important historically).
if you see the debate about “health care” rather then “health insurance”, a troubling analogy is that one loses the right to send ones children to public school (a valuable right to everyone but us)if you don’t vaccinate them — you are fined the amount it will cost to educate a child privately if you don’t do what you’ve been told to do
In the early 19th century in northern states, slave owners were often required to educate their soon to be freed slaves (to allay the fear they would end up in the poorhouse).
While it may be costly, unwise, unAmerican and fascistic -there are precdents for individual mandate
So my unprofessional opinion after reading the transcription of the arguments today is this:
I think scalia is safe. He brought up the raich issue and distinguished it unconvincingly. But then, he was the only one who held of the issue anyway.
I think Kennedy is leaning toward liberty. He asked much more questions to the govt, and they were tougher questions also.
I think we may have this cat in the bag.