Or heaven forbid you have something like a pregnancy and lose coverage, a situation my wife and I would have found ourselves in before the ACA.
Or something like one of my wife’s relatives had. They had insurance, but it was individual coverage (self employed). Some health issues started to come up, but fearing the massive premium increase if they went to the doctor, they ignored it for a while.
Eventually it put them in the hospital, and the long term effects have basically rendered them disabled. They have been unable to work since. So the previous insurance regulation meant that a person who was a part of the workforce was nearly killed, and has since been forced to draw on state benefits after being unable to remain in the workforce.
Good lord, that should be a rallying point for Republicans! You want people to work, and not rely on government benefits so strongly? Make it so situations like that can’t happen.
You can’t reject people from the ER, but the standard of care is not the same for people with better paying insurance.
I pull up hospital records for new patients at a private clinic and anyone with good insurance gets more through workups. Whether these workups are necessary or not, that’s another question.
Mm, then short term savings it will depend on how much more expensive is non-insured ER treatment versus insured non-ER treatment. And how likely uninsured people were to go to the ER previously. The situation here is different in that ER was still almost free even if you didn’t have access to regular healthcare, so people kept using the ERs, and thus why providing public health care was cheaper than not.
One thing that has struck me as odd in all of this hoopla about the law referencing “the State” in all of this, is that the capitalization in the law seems to indicate what is meant by the law.
In a case where you are talking about simply a state in the union, wouldn’t it normally be lower case? Wouldn’t the use of a capitalized “State”, as is done in the law, mean that it is using the term “the State” as a proper noun to reference “the government”?
I mean, this isn’t a novel use of that word. This is actually a fairly common use of the word, especially for the rest of the world outside the US. Generally, when people say, “the State”, they mean the government. What’s funny, is that many on the right, when arguing against government intervention, OFTEN refer to it as “the State”.
For instance, some additional information here:
A 1959 essay about the individual vs. the State. Where “the State” simply refers to the government. (in this case, Russia)
This is merely one example of this use… There are a multitude of papers which have historically used the term “the State” to mean the government in general, and not literally a state in the US.
In your face, idiots. When will these people realize they’ve been beat? AND no one wants what they’re selling?
BTW, Timex, regarding your question: I noticed when I was studying Political Science in college that in Congressional language they often capitalize words like State as a matter of course, so “the State” is simply the singular of “the States” and refers to any particular US state in question.
EDIT the second: I know what you’re saying though about the colloquial use of “the State” which we actually get from French (I’m guessing–after all Louis the XIV said “L’État, c’est moi.”).
How so? This is the federal government giving federal subsidies through the federal tax system. There is no infringement on states’ rights here that I can see. It’s more akin to the mortgage interest tax break, the FHA loan program, student loans or pretty well any federal tax deduction that is already in place.
The language of the law is clear. The roll of the SCOTUS is to rule, not legislate. Rule against the law and let Congress legislate it to include all exchanges. Problem solved. Instead, SCOTUS legislated what the law should read rather than ruling what it does read.
Since I’ve had pre-existing conditions for the past 24 years, I benefit greatly from the Obamacare subsidies. But I don’t want the SCOTUS legislating law, as they aren’t elected by the people.
I’m guessing Mysterio is referring to the actions of the Supreme Court, not the law itself. Key quote by Chief Justice Roberts: “In this instance, the context and structure of the Act compel us to depart from what would otherwise be the most natural reading of the pertinent statutory phrase.” The law itself says “Exchange established by the State” but the SCOTUS decided to read it as “Exchange established by the State or the Federal Government”.
It’s the job of SCOTUS to go by what the law says, and to check the Congress. i.e. if Congress wants it to include the Fed Government, they should pass a law saying so. This is probably getting into the whole “how should SCOTUS interpret laws” debate. But personally, I see this as a sad day for Separation of Powers because it eases the standard that Congress is held to when constructing laws. I would rather laws be interpreted explicitly, so we know exactly what we’re getting. Seems like a slippery slope to let Congress retroactively say “we said X, but we really meant X and Y.” If it wants X and Y, it should say so. There’s already so much corruption from laws containing extra pork. No reason to make it even easier.
But that already happens all the time! Look how things in the constitution have been reinterpreted, and how often the court makes decisions based on trying to divine the framers intent. The courts have a long history of expanding or contracting the scope of any given law.
Isn’t there a “reasonable persons test” in law, or is that specific to certain types of law? I seem to recall that it allows for context to be used. I can understand the appeal of a clearer restriction on what the Supreme Court can and cannot mess around with in the same way that I can see the appeal to a strict Constitutional Constructionist interpretation of our government, but it just doesn’t seem to jive with reality very well on a consistent basis. note: IANAConstitutionalScholarNorALawyer.
What’s interesting to me is that in both of the ACA cases, we’ve seen Roberts the conservative jurist, as opposed to political conservative, at work. A conservative jurist looks to uphold the constitutionality of a statute, even if he disagrees with it, by any defensible means, even if it it’s a means not relied on by the litigants. That’s what Roberts did in the first ACA case, by upholding the individual mandate as a tax, rather than a penalty. As long as there’s a Supreme Court, people will argue about the correctness of that ruling, but that was clearly the action of a conservative jurist.
A conservative jurist also looks to effectuate a statute where possible. That’s what Roberts did today by finding the words “established by the State” ambiguous and the resolving the ambiguity in favor of the Administration. Again, you can argue forever about the correctness of that finding, but there again Roberts is playing the role of conservative jurist.
Political conservatives have been whining since the days of the Warren Court about judicial activists, claiming that they want justices who effectuate the will of the legislature and who do not legislate from the bench. Well, they got one in Roberts and who’s complaining now? Of course, what they really wanted was another Alito - a true political conservative, but that’s not what they have in Roberts.
I have seen actual Constitutional scholars who are lawyers of indeterminate political affiliation express both Dan_Theman and Jason Levine’s sentiment regarding how baseless and silly Burwell was in the last year.
The majority opinion pretty clearly explains it though. It makes no sense to interpret a law in such a way that would run counter to the stated purpose of the law.
It’s nonsensical to interpret the text in such a manner that would destroy healthcare markets, when the entire purpose of the law was to improve healthcare markets.
It’s also silly to believe, as the plaintiffs suggest, that the intention of this one sentence from the law’s text was meant to directly encourage individual states to set up exchanges, when NO ONE noticed this part of the text for years. If the text was actually meant as a motivator, then it would have been made apparent, so it could actually motivate the states. You don’t add in a motivator, and then hide and ignore it… because then it won’t do its job.
If the supreme court had rulled differently, it would have been an absurd decision that ran counter to logic and common sense, in favor of a strict semantic interpretation. That’s not what courts are supposed to do. The raw text of laws are rarely ever going to be so ultimately perfect as to be able to be interpreted in a vacuum without context. It’s virtually impossible to do so with any non-trivial law. That’s why we have courts… to make sensible judgements about what they really mean, in a manner that goes deeper than just the raw text.
The only part of this being discussed is the mention of the term “the State”.
And as we’ve already established, that term is WIDELY used to refer to a federal government. The idea that it “obviously means an individual state” is simply false, on its face.
