As soon as I heard the decision I tweeted two things. First I asked "How do I pay tax on something I have not purchased."
Then I stated that "A government that taxes you on what you don't buy will then tax you on what you don't sell."
Within a minute I received a new Twitter follower. This person had never tweeted before, had no followers, was following no one but me, and had replied to my tweet about the government with a rebuttal about car insurance. Sadly I blocked the person because it felt like a White House skunkworks tactic, and lost the tweet. But the message was something to the effect that "You already have to buy car insurance, so health care is just the same."
Minutes later, Bill Maher tweeted:
@billmaher Its not a tax on healthcare its a tax on freeloaders who weren't paying but using; wld be like calling a speeding ticket a driving ticket
It had been retweeted over 500 times.
So I'd like to clear something up. The mandatory portion of car insurance is liability insurance. My car can swerve out of control and can kill someone or destroy someone's property.
I can't kill anyone with my health insurance policy. I can't kill anyone by not having health insurance, either.
Regarding the opinions of the esteemed Bill Maher, if he feels that freeloaders should pay for the services they receive, I'm all for that.
Otherwise he is 100% wrong.
By choosing not to carry health insurance, it does not make me a freeloader. There is no logic to support his position. If the mandate really is about freeloaders, then freeloaders should "mandated" to pay for what they receive. Instead, the socialist approach is to create a new tax that forces others to make up the difference.
It's unfortunate that the language repeatedly used in the media says that "an additional 30 million people will be covered" under the Affordable Care Act. Wrong. An additional 30 million people will be forced to pay for it.
The supreme court has just ruled that the government can tax not only what I buy, but what I don't buy.
I do not buy health insurance for the simple reason that it does not cover what I use. When I did need acute health care -- surgery -- after a gruesome ski accident a few years ago, I calculated that if I'd been carrying health insurance at an ideal deductible and monthly premium ($5,000 and $150/mo. -- try to find that anywhere) I'd have already paid for the medical bills incurred by my accident based on the number of years I'd gone without health insurance. Instead I negotiated a 30% reduction since I was paying out of pocket and paid the bills by installment . . . every penny.
Perhaps health care is 30%-50% more than it should be simply because insurance companies "pay" the bills.
All of this pales in significance compared to what I read this morning, however. CBS News reported that Roberts switched views to uphold health care law. Here's the condensed version:
Word of Roberts' unusual shift has spread widely within the court, and is known among law clerks, chambers' aides and secretaries.
After the historic oral arguments in March, the two knowledgeable sources said, Roberts and the four conservatives were poised to strike down at least the individual mandate.
In the court's private conference immediately after the arguments, he was aligned with the four conservatives to strike down the mandate.
Over the next six weeks, as Roberts began to craft the decision striking down the mandate, the external pressure began to grow.
There were countless news articles in May warning of damage to the court - and to Roberts' reputation - if the court were to strike down the mandate. Leading politicians, including the president himself, had expressed confidence the mandate would be upheld.
Some even suggested that if Roberts struck down the mandate, it would prove he had been deceitful during his confirmation hearings, when he explained a philosophy of judicial restraint.
It was around this time that it also became clear to the conservative justices that Roberts was, as one put it, "wobbly," the sources said.
It is not known why Roberts changed his view on the mandate and decided to uphold the law. At least one conservative justice tried to get him to explain it, but was unsatisfied with the response, according to a source with knowledge of the conversation.
Reading this article raised my suspicion that Chicago-style politics may have played a role in Roberts' decision. Or, as much as I'd hate to admit it, maybe Michael Savage was correct when he postulated that epilepsy meds affected Roberts' cognition. Savage, along with nearly everyone else in the conservative media, is someone who spews so much negativity that even when I agree with him I can't stand to listen to him.
Up until I read the CBS article, I could make the case that maybe Roberts was thinking well down the road by voting to pass the Act while explicitly calling it a TAX. Now I'm not so sure. How this man could so cogently write the following opinion, yet vote for the tax, is beyond my comprehension.
“As expansive as our cases construing the scope of the commerce power have been, they all have one thing in common: They uniformly describe the power as reaching ‘activity.’ It is nearly impossible to avoid the word when quoting them . . . .
“The individual mandate, however, does not regulate existing commercial activity. It instead compels individuals to become active in commerce by purchasing a product, on the ground that their failure to do so affects interstate commerce. . . .
“People, for reasons of their own, often fail to do things that would be good for them or good for society. Those failures — joined with the similar failures of others — can readily have a substantial effect on interstate commerce. Under the Government’s logic, that authorizes Congress to use its commerce power to compel citizens to act as the Government would have them act. That is not the country the Framers of our Constitution envisioned.”
I agree with every word. I disagree with his decision.
Remember the previous car insurance logic? Ruth Ginsburg used it as well, and made me wonder how she ever became a judge in the first place. She is obviously a highly intelligent person, but doesn't seem to have the slightest understanding of a free market or the constitution.
Her entire argument, eloquent as it is, rests on the faulty logic that if a person who hasn't previously wanted broccoli suddenly decides to buy broccoli she would do so at the expense of another broccoli consumer because the other broccoli consumer was forced to pay a higher price because the first consumer didn't want it for so long.
“Maintaining that the uninsured are not active in the health-care market, the Chief Justice draws an analogy to the car market. An individual ‘is not ‘active in the car market,’ the Chief Justice observes, simply because he or she may someday buy a car. The analogy is inapt. The inevitable yet unpredictable need for medical care and the guarantee that emergency care will be provided when required are conditions nonexistent in other markets. That is so of the market for cars, and of the market for broccoli as well. Although an individual might buy a car or a crown of broccoli one day, there is no certainty she will ever do so. And if she eventually wants a car or has a craving for broccoli, she will be obliged to pay at the counter before receiving the vehicle or nourishment. She will get no free ride or food, at the expense of another consumer forced to pay an inflated price.”
To understand her twisted logic, it must be understood that she feels that "every uninsured person impacts the market price of medical care and medical insurance."
That means me, even if I don't use it. And even if I do pay for it when I use it. That's why it's called a Patient Protection Act. She seeks to protect people from those like me.
This is a brilliant opportunity. I'm gonna go out and create a product that will be impacted by every person that doesn't buy it, then get the government to make them bitches BUY IT.
Thus Ginsburg's entire position, her entire argument, rests on a sweeping generalization -- an assumption.
"Upholding the minimum coverage provision on the ground that all are participants or will be participants in the health-care market would therefore carry no implication that Congress may justify under the Commerce Clause a mandate to buy other products and services. Nor is it accurate to say that the minimum coverage provision "compel[s] individuals . . . to purchase an unwanted product."
SINCE YOU WILL SOMEDAY NEED OR WANT BROCCOLI, YOU MUST PAY FOR IT NOW, MORONS, AND WE CAN MAKE YOU DO SO BECAUSE YOU ARE ALREADY ACTIVE IN THE BROCCOLI MARKET BECAUSE IT'S INEVITABLE THAT YOU WILL SOMEDAY WANT OR NEED THE DAMN BROCCOLI.
"If unwanted today, medical service secured by insurance may be desperately needed tomorrow. Virtually everyone, I reiterate, consumes health care at some point in his or her life. Health insurance is a means of paying for this care, nothing more. In requiring individuals to obtain insurance, Congress is therefore not mandating the purchase of a discrete, unwanted product. Rather, Congress is merely defining the terms on which individuals pay for an interstate good they consume: Persons subject to the mandate must now pay for medical care in advance (instead of at the point of service) and through insurance (instead of out of pocket)."
BROCCOLI NOT WANTED TODAY MAY BE DESPERATELY NEEDED TOMORROW, SO WE CAN REQUIRE YOU TO PURCHASE IT BY DEFINING THE TERMS IN WHICH YOU PAY FOR IT, YOU STUPID SHEEP.
“The Act before us here exceeds federal power both in mandating the purchase of health insurance and in denying nonconsenting states all Medicaid funding. These parts of the Act are central to its design and operation, and all the Act’s other provisions would not have been enacted without them. In our view it must follow that the entire statute is inoperative.”
They also reject that the individual mandate is a tax.
“ . . . to say that the Individual Mandate merely imposes a tax is not to interpret the statute but to rewrite it. Judicial tax-writing is particularly troubling. Taxes have never been popular, see, e.g., Stamp Act of 1765, and in part for that reason, the Constitution requires tax increases to originate in the House of Representatives.”
Here's the best part (emphasis added):
“. . . Congress has impressed into service third parties, healthy individuals who could be but are not customers of the relevant industry, to offset the undesirable consequences of the regulation. Congress’ desire to force these individuals to purchase insurance is motivated by the fact that they are further removed from the market than unhealthy individuals with pre-existing conditions, because they are less likely to need extensive care in the near future. If Congress can reach out and command even those furthest removed from an interstate market to participate in the market, then the Commerce Clause becomes a font of unlimited power, or in Hamilton’s words, ‘the hideous monster whose devouring jaws . . . spare neither sex nor age, nor high nor low, nor sacred nor profane.’”
This, in the words of chief justice Roberts himself "is not the country the Framers of our Constitution envisioned.” I think that's precisely the point.
The country that our framers created was so full of individual freedoms that people who crave power over others have been trying to destroy it ever since. They have nearly succeeded. But I think they have vastly underestimated how dearly we Americans love and revere our constitution, even though we may be ignorant of how it's been defiled.
True patient protection will not begin until individuals take responsibility for their own bodies instead of blindly taking drugs prescribed by pharmaceutical reps posing as doctors.
Until then, realize that a government that can tax you on what you don't buy can tax you on what you don't sell. Think of that the next time you wonder what your house or your portfolio or your coin collection is worth and then imagine being taxed on that figure, simply because it's there.
Because even if everyone is forced to purchase health insurance, what will the government do if prices keep rising another 30%-50% from current levels once everyone is all-in?
You don't want to know what they'll do.
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