The Supreme Court Should Rule With the People
Sunday, 17 June 2012 12:43By Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese, The Real News | Op-EdSix years after Massachusetts enacted the state version of Obama's health law, the people of Massachusetts are not happy. According to a June 11th poll in Massachusetts, 78% of patients say the cost of care in Massachusetts is a serious problem and 63% say it has gotten worse in the last five years. Patients report longer waits, higher premiums, higher co-pays and are less satisfied with health care. Thenumber of bankruptcies due to medical illness and costs has continued to increase in Massachusetts too.Despite what the corporate media report, Romney-Care, on which Obama-Care is modeled, is not working.Americans want the Supreme Court to find the Obama law unconstitutional. More than two-thirds of Americans hope the Supreme Court will overturn some or all of the 2010 health care law, according to a June 7th New York Times-CBS poll. A mere 24% said they hoped the court "would keep the entire health care law in place." Forty-one percent of those surveyed said the court should strike down the entire law, and another 27% said the justices should overturn only the individual mandate, the requirement that people purchase private insurance if they are not insured or pay a fine.
Life After the Health Care Ruling
What would the future hold if the Supreme Court strikes down the most controversial part of the health care law, the individual mandate? Read More »
THE CANADIAN HEALTHCARE SYSTEM
Lecture at Lyndon State College, Vermont
Antonia Maioni
http://www.katv.org/vod/lectures/2011/cadhc102011
The folly of Obamacare
By Robert J. Samuelson,
We pay our presidents for judgment, and President Obama committed a colossal error of judgment in making health-care “reform” a centerpiece of his first term. Ahead of the Supreme Court’s decision on the Affordable Care Act (ACA) — and regardless of how the court decides — it’s clear that Obama overreached. His attempt to achieve universal health insurance coverage is a massive feat of social engineering that, by its sweeping nature, weakens the economic recovery and antagonizes millions of Americans.Let’s review why the ACA (“Obamacare”) is dreadful public policy:
(1) It increases uncertainty and decreases confidence when recovery from the Great Recession requires more confidence and less uncertainty. The ACA isn’t highly popular; the Kaiser Family Foundation finds that 44 percent of Americans now view it unfavorably and 37 percent favorably. Given the ACA’s complexities, people can’t know where they’ll get insurance and what it will cost. In 2014, the ACA requires all employers with 50 or more full-time workers to provide insurance or pay fines (“the employer mandate”). On the one hand, formal economic studies conclude that most employers now offering insurance will continue to do so; on the other, in direct surveys of firms, 30 percent or more say they might drop insurance and pay fines. Uncovered people must buy insurance (“the individual mandate”) or face penalties, though government will subsidize households with incomes up to four times the poverty level ($92,200 for a family of four in 2012).
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