Conservatives love to rail against “big government.” But the surge of cynicism engulfing the nation isn’t about government’s size. It flows from a growing perception that government doesn’t work for average people but for big business, Wall Street and the very rich—who, in effect, have bought it. In a recent Pew poll, 77 percent of respondents said too much power is in the hands of a few rich people and corporations.
That view is understandable. Wall Street got bailed out by taxpayers, but one out of every three homeowners with a mortgage is underwater, caught in the tsunami caused by the Street’s excesses. The bailout wasn’t conditioned on the banks helping these homeowners, and subsequent help has been meager. The recent settlement of claims against the banks is tiny compared with how much homeowners have lost. Millions of people are losing their homes or simply walking away from mortgage payments they can no longer afford.
The Court Battle Over Health Care Is a Struggle For a Future Vision for America: 6 Things You Need to Know
By Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet
Posted on March 22, 2012, Printed on March 25, 2012
http://www.alternet.org/story/154662/the_court_battle_over_health_care_is_a_struggle_for_a_future_vision_for_america%3A_6_things_you_need_to_know
On Monday, March 26, when the U.S. Supreme Court begins three days of hearings on the centerpiece of President Obama’s new federal healthcare law, the requirement that all U.S. citizens and residents have health insurance, it is not just the fate of a historic reform affecting one-sixth of the nation’s economy and everyone’s access to care that will be at stake, but the role and scope of government for years to come.
The Affordable Care Act, called Obamacare, is a vast effort to redistribute how Americans receive and pay for healthcare. It starts by ending barriers that have kept tens of millions of Americans uninsured by forcing private insurance companies, businesses, states and individuals to play a more communitarian role in improving access to care and controlling costs. Opponents—Republican political leaders, "free market" and religious conservatives and business lobbyists—see the law as a terrible example of government overreach, increased spending and liberal policy, even if it would cover an additional 32 million Americans by 2019, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates. (Universal coverage is not on the table.)
In other words, the Obamacare battle that will come before the Supreme Court in the longest hearings in nearly a half-century is a proxy fight between the seemingly irreconcilable differences in American politics. On one side are centrist Democrats, who, like Obama, believe that the social safety net needs mending and that the private sector and all citizens have obligations to support that effort. On the other side are Republican opponents who do not want to see federal government do much beyond waging wars, and who do not even want their states to pay for current obligations—whether as health programs, pensions or education—and amazingly, do not even offer an alternative but instead posture behind their survival-of-the-fittest, let-the-market-fix-it ideology.
Implications Are Far-Reaching in States’ Challenge of Federal Health Care Law
By ROBERT PEAR
WASHINGTON — A major issue in the Supreme Court battle over the new health care law is whether Congress can force states to make a huge expansion ofMedicaid, to add millions of low-income people to the rolls.
States say the federal law is unconstitutionally coercive because all their Medicaid money would be at risk if they flout the new requirement.
The states’ argument has implications that go far beyond health care. It raises questions about Congress’s ability to attach conditions to federal grants to the states for other purposes, like education, transportation, law enforcement and protection of the environment.
The implications for the health care overhaul are also enormous. The Congressional Budget Office says that about half of the people expected to gain coverage under the new law — 16 million of the 31 million people — will get it through Medicaid.
The Obama administration denies coercion and says the terms of the deal are exceedingly generous to states.
Groups Blanket Supreme Court on Health Care
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
WASHINGTON — Justice Clarence Thomas likens all the outside political pressure that the Supreme Court is facing over its review of the Obama administration’s sweeping health care law to the distraction faced by a free-throw shooter confronted with fans waving wildly behind the basket. Neither, in his view, has much impact in the end.
“Why do you think they’re never distracted? They’re focusing on the rim, right?” Justice Thomas said when asked at a forum two weeks ago about the pressures of the health care case. “That’s the same thing here. You stay focused on what you’re supposed to do. All that other stuff is just noise.”
With three days of arguments scheduled for this week, the nine justices will need the steely nerves of a clutch free-throw shooter to block out all the noise surrounding a case that has generated perhaps the most intense outside lobbying campaign that the court has ever seen.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which has helped lead opposition to the health care law, has been hosting moot court sessions to prepare lawyers involved in the case. Advocates on all sides of the issues, including Tea Party leaders who are against the law and health care professionals who favor it, are planning rallies. Many groups, like the American Constitution Society, liberal backers of the law and of Congress’s power to regulate commerce, are setting up war rooms and daily briefings on the Supreme Court steps.
As Supreme Court justices review health-care law, stakes will be hard to ignore
By Robert Barnes,
The Supreme Court on Monday joins the nation’s vitriolic debate over the landmark health-care law and the limits of federal power. And though thousands of pages of legal arguments about the Constitution’s history and the court’s precedents have landed on justices’ desks, the outcome may also hinge on less tangible factors.
Public opinion. The nation’s volatile political climate. The court’s self-consciousness about its own partisan divide. And the pivotal role it plays in deciding the nation’s thorniest social issues.
Experts say all of those go into the mix as justices consider the extraordinary step of striking down — for the first time since the New Deal — a monumental domestic program proposed by the president and passed by Congress.
The three days of arguments that begin Monday are the inevitable result of a legal battle that began the moment the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act became law two years ago. And the court’s conclusion will land in the summer heat of a presidential campaign in which each of President Obama’s Republican challengers have made opposition to the law an unshakable pledge.
Such a charged political atmosphere is not the court’s favored environment. The justices are protective of their charge as neutral arbiters of the law, what Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. described as umpires calling balls and strikes.
Five myths about the health-care law
By Walter Dellinger,
1. The “individual mandate” forces everyone to buy health insurance.The law states that, beginning in 2014, individuals must ensure that they and their dependents are covered by health insurance. Taxpayers who do not meet this requirement will have to pay a penalty that the law calls a “shared responsibility payment.” It begins at $95 for the first year and never exceeds 21 / 2 percent of anyone’s annual taxable income.
A large majority of Americans, of course, have health insurance through their employers, Medicare or Medicaid and are already in compliance with this requirement. Given the relatively modest payment required of those who choose not to maintain insurance, no one is being forced to buy a product they don’t want.
The challengers argue that the mandate is a binding requirement that makes anyone who goes without insurance a lawbreaker. The government has determined, however, that those who pay the penalty, like those who are exempt from the penalty, are not lawbreakers. As a practical matter, the so-called mandate is just a relatively modest financial incentive to have health insurance.
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