No idea if mandatory purchase has existed before or what the legal ramifications are. Logically the government has done lots of equivalent things (subsidies to certain industries) but that’s not legal analysis.
Dejin
3302
I saw an article (NY Times IIRC, although it might have been LosAngeles Times or possibly the Atlantic) claiming that Kagan would have to recuse herself. The article did not say why.
Hrm, good point. 4/4 decisions let the lower court decision stand.
Alstein
3304
But what if the decisions are contradictory?
This judge ensured it goes up- where activist judges can rule in favor of big business as they usually do. And yes, this is judicial activism- especially given the flaws in the guy’s legal arguments- but he is a Bush appointee after all- this is the guy who let a but of barely-accredited Regents college (Pat Robertson’s diploma mill) follks into the Department of Justice.
Yeah, I try not to be too partisan- but that one I’m bitter on.
sinfony
3305
If different circuits come out differently on this issue, and a SCOTUS decision comes in 4-4, we’re in some shit.
Also, the next person who says “judicial activism” gets punched in the fucking face. It’s fucking newspeak for “judge who disagrees with my political views.” Stop it.
This is a common misunderstanding of social security. Social security is NOT a retirement account and never was. It’s welfare for old people, where the only standard for receiving it is that you are old. Working people have ALWAYS paid for every recipient of social security and there’s no guarantee that you’ll get it yourself. It’s a simple social welfare program with an exceptionally arbitrary and weird qualification criteria (I am personally of the opinion that social security, as it is, should be abolished and replaced with welfare, which is what means-testing hopes to achieve, but a hell of a lot more direct).
Houngan
3307
Well, a mislabeling perhaps, but SS funds are figured into retirement projections. The difference is too small to see.
H.
And while we are at it, let’s start means-testing for a whole bunch of other things, please. Farm subsidies, corporate subsidies, educational subsidies, etc. Public assistance should be for those who need help, not for those with the best government ties or the best lawyers, or those who can best figure out how to game the system.
Yeah, yeah, and Lucy is in the sky with diamonds, I know.
Do you have links to these cases, as the wiki article on the bill only mentions 3 cases.This one, the florida one, and one that was dismissed for lack of standing.
This is an uncommon misunderstanding! You don’t get Social Security automatically; you have to work for some number of years, and your benefit is tied to your working year salaries. There’s some mild progressiveness built in, but it’s not at all like Medicare, where the only requirement is that you be 65.
It’s not a coincidence that it’s called Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance. It’s effectively a mandatory minimum-level retirement investment program, with some related stuff around disability (which you also have to work to get).
You’re both wrong!
No, really. Brain is correct that it isn’t a retirement investment fund, and never has been. Current benefits always come from current taxation. The idea of “savings” didn’t get involved until the overhaul under Reagan.
Jason is correct in pointing out “insurance” in the title, but misses the point that “insurance” really applies to all of it, rather than just disability. The program behaves very much like health insurance, except that you collect if you survive past a certain age, rather than if you get sick. Like most insurance programs, the benefits are unequal, depending on who lives and who doesn’t. Like insurance, you have to pay premiums to qualify for the benefits. The premiums aren’t saved for you, they go into the pool that pays out current benefits to other policy holders. It’s an odd form of insurance in many ways, but that’s what it most closely resembles, not a retirement fund.
I should have been clearer: it’s not actually a mandatory minimum level retirement investment fund, but from a worker perspective it’s effectively the same thing.
No, but the government’s argument (and it’s a good one, IMHO) is that health care is not analogous to any other product that people purchase. Health care is not something that people decide to purchase or not–if you are alive, it’s pretty much guaranteed that you will need it. It’s also guaranteed that it will be given to you, regardless of your ability to pay for it, and possibly without even your permission (i.e. you are brought into an emergency room unconscious). Therefor, the argument that people should be able to make a choice to not partake in health care is specious, because in reality, that’s not necessarily a valid option. The only thing they can do now is choose not to pay for their health care. Which, of course, makes it a lot more expensive for everyone else.
Ya, the government is allowed to levy taxes. You don’t “buy” social security. You pay a tax, and then you eventually are paid money by the government.
The practical difference boils down to semantics, though. Any money that the government requires to to spend is effectively a tax. I will say that this is one reason why a government-run, single payer system would have been a lot better, though.
Except that what you get out is only loosely related to what you put in, and is based (theoretically) on sufficiency. If the benefits paid out accelerate beyond whatever imagination inflation rate we want to apply to the theoretical fund that the first paying generation paid into, that difference gets made up through the payroll tax. Social Security (again, theoretically) can never come up short of what you need it to in the same way a real retirement account would. No matter what, on balance you’re going to end up transferring wealth from current workers to the retired. It is more accurately represented as a simple welfare program than as a complex compulsory-participation retirement plan, and, frankly, it’s implemented that way. Getting social security benefits for retiring teachers is piss easy, which I know because the guy who taught the pre-calculus class at my high school went to work in the book store at the university I then went to work at in a different capacity (paying payroll tax) for something like nine months just to get that in addition to his other retirement.
I suppose it’s most accurate to say that it’s a plan that’s intended to be and wants to perform as a social welfare program that, for the sake of appearances, tries to disguise itself as a retirement fund (because conservatives hate welfare, and people in the United States in general have an historical preference for staying off the dole). The result is a particularly confused sort of transfer payment sent to a specific protected population group. You are correct in that there are vagaries to qualification that aren’t present with other entitlements (i.e. Medicare), but I would contend that those are almost entirely for show and don’t play into the function of the program itself.
Where you’re getting this? Have you looked at the eligibility charts?
Getting social security benefits for retiring teachers is piss easy, which I know because the guy who taught the pre-calculus class at my high school went to work in the book store at the university I then went to work at in a different capacity (paying payroll tax) for something like nine months just to get that in addition to his other retirement.
Ah, anecdata, that’s where.
Yeah, but the law is all about semantics. :-) The Dems went thru various contortions to avoid calling the fine a “tax” - understandable from a political perspective in an election year, but it drops the provision into this legal limbo quagmire. IMHO, the simplest solution (if we presume single-payer was truly DOA) would’ve been to start a new health-care tax, with any payments made into a private health-insurance plan being tax-deductible, so the net effect is people with private health insurance pay nothing extra. Said taxes are used to offer vouchers to people to buy insurance off the exchanges, which in theory would offer better rates than what individual health-care plans currently provide (collective bargaining FTW!).
But God forbid anyone ever suggest raising taxes to pay for the shit people consume anyway.
OMG (Arizona) government death panels!
Effective at the beginning of October, Arizona stopped financing certain transplant operations under the state’s version of Medicaid. Many doctors say the decision amounts to a death sentence for some low-income patients, who have little chance of survival without transplants and lack the hundreds of thousands of dollars needed to pay for them.
JeffL
3318
This is a horrible situation/bureaucratic decision. Sorry, you’re too poor to live.
What is interesting is that a Republican Governor apparently led the cuts, and a Republican state senator is pledging to restore the budget for this.
Timex
3319
This is a horrible situation/bureaucratic decision. Sorry, you’re too poor to live.
To play devil’s advocate here, assuming that you have a finite amount of resources to dedicate to public healthcare, is it possible that the government is able to use the resources to improve the healthcare of many other people, rather than dedicating it all to saving one person?
Ultimately, that kind of decision needs to be made. Improving the health of many other people at the expense of a few, isn’t necessarily the wrong (or even an immoral) decision. It’s just a very hard decision, as is any decision where you have to weigh things like human lives.
Resources aren’t infinite, and if the government wants to provide a sustainable system, then they can’t pay to save every person. The article cites AZ’s study, suggesting that one of the transplants cut from coverage resulted in 13 out of 14 patients dying within 6 months after the transplant anyway. If we ignore the argument that the study was poorly conducted (as some outside experts suggest), then in a case like that? Ya, it’s really not the best use of those hundreds of thousands of dollars. You could help a lot more people with that money.
While the term “Death Panel” is idiotic, and designed to inspire irrational fear, the reality is that any system that provides care (and this is just as true for any private insurance company as well) needs to draw a line between what they’ll pay for, and what they won’t. And there are always going to be people who fall on the “you’re screwed” side of that line.
If folks cite this as a case of death panels though, and use it to argue against public healthcare, they’re ignoring the fact that the private insurers make exactly the same kind of decision all the time.
jpinard
3320
Timex -if we had proper health coverage in this country this wouldn’t be an issue - PERIOD.
You know what would allow more money to be available for transplants? NON PROFIT HEALTH INSURANCE. ONE PAYEE SYSTEM. End of story.
It’s really great that corporate America has said “screw terminally ill people, no matter how short a life you’ve had, you’re not worth it!”. And if it were up to Democrats… they would be covered. This is all about the right-wing deciding who gets to live and who gets to die. Pretty damn ironic since the Tea Party and Republicans were the ones screaming about death panels, and now THEY ARE THE ONES INSTITUTING DEATH PANELS.
Timex, you don’t want to call it a death panel? What about the fact these people were in line for a new lease on life and now are not? What else would you call this? A life panel? Are Republicans saying, lets pay .01% more in state taxes so we don’t need to make horrible decisions like this?
How many billions of dollars have corprorations and individuals donated to politcal funds and PACS?
How many lives could that money have saved? Anyone supporting this kind of crap should be ashamed. Nothing like being born with a terminal illness in the Freaking United States of America and being told you’re going to die because you’re not worth a $200,000 transplant. All the while knowing it could give someone the chance at a normal life. Meanwhile, people who do nothing for society like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh hoard over a billion dollars in income for themselves.
Cystic Fibrosis patients who receive lung transplants do amazing post-transplant if they survive the surgery and post-op situation. I wish to God you anti-healthcare reformists worked with patients like I do. Only then would you understand how criminal our system is at neglecting the middle & lower class Americans who aren’t lucky enough to have those jobs with great benefits… which is becoming a scarce resource in this country.
I wish someone like Brettmcd were forced to look a child, a teenager, or a young parent in the face and say, “You’re not worth keeping around because people who have some money need a tax break more than you need your life”. It is so easy for poeple to say “Oh well tough decision” and be glad it’s not their family, their loved ones, their children, their friends who are affected.
