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Judge Declares Obamacare Unconstitutional
Big breaking news out of Texas:
Published in GeneralObamacare was struck down by a Texas federal judge in a ruling that casts uncertainty on insurance coverage for millions of U.S. residents.
The decision Friday finding the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional comes just before the end of a six-week open enrollment period for the program in 2019 and underscores a divide between Republicans who have long sought to invalidate the law and Democrats who fought to keep it in place.
U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor in Fort Worth agreed with a coalition of Republican states led by Texas that he had to eviscerate the Affordable Care Act, the signature health-care overhaul by President Barack Obama, after Congress last year zeroed out a key provision — the tax penalty for not complying with the requirement to buy insurance. The decision is almost certain to be appealed all the way to the Supreme Court…
Texas and an alliance of 19 states argued to the judge that they’ve been harmed by an increase in the number of people on state-supported insurance rolls. They claimed that when Congress repealed the tax penalty last year, it eliminated the U.S. Supreme Court’s rationale for finding the ACA constitutional in 2012.
The Texas judge agreed.
“The remainder of the ACA is non-severable from the individual mandate, meaning that the Act must be invalidated in whole,” O’Connor wrote.
Thanks for this.
As a non-lawyer, this ruling seems to make sense to me. As I understand it, Justice Roberts voted to uphold Obamacare because of the tax penalty. If Congress took it out, the reason behind the Supreme Court ruling is no longer valid.
God bless Texas!
Wow. This is certainly not the end of the story, but it’s good to hear anyway.
Hey I agree with George!
Now to convince those having a bout of the vapors over this that Congress cannot force you to buy a particular product, such as health insurance, which was the original argument until the DC cocktail curcuit derailed Justice Robert’s brain.
Plus this good news from the linked article (emphasis added):
Where do I go to get my private practice back?
But since Congress removed the tax penalty, didn’t that effectively end the individual mandate? So now the law is Constitutional with the mandate, but un-Constitutional without it?
I’m no lawyer, but that sure seems backwards to me.
Rendering health insurance uncertain? Nay, this may actually render it legal.
Not that the President seems interested in keeping it that way.
There’s an astonishing lack of clarity all over the place. More in a moment . . . .
As I understand it, Obamacare largely consisted of two things: the pre-existing conditions coverage mandate and the individual mandate.
In other words–the ban on health insurance and the law forcing everyone to buy a different healthcare-financing product to make such financing possible.
CJ John Roberts ruled the individual mandate Constitutional when it was challenged, on the grounds that it was a tax. (Has anyone sued for the right to buy and sell health insurance? Probably not. If any lawyer wants to file something and needs citizens to sign on, I’m interested.)
Now a judge, according to the article, rules that Obamacare is unConstitutional because it lacks the part whose Constitutionality was previously challenged. I don’t see the sense in that.
When they actually quote the judge, they appear to be highlighting a different argument. This argument I can understand: The individual mandate is to essential so the whole scheme (and it is) that if it goes, the whole thing goes.
I don’t see any problem with that argument. I hope it works.
Another thing that confuses me is the reference to the Trump administration. (A funny thing happened a couple years ago; maybe you heard about it–Donald Trump was elected President. Ha!)
Why does the article cite Trump saying that requirements to cover pre-existing conditions should remain in place and also cite his administration calling for the removal of those requirements?
Is this not a contradiction?
And then there’s the usual labeling of a judge as “conservative.” What does that mean, and does it matter? Should I care what a federal judge thinks about fiscal policy, tax policy, gun rights, or anything else besides how he thinks we’re supposed to figure out what the Constitution means?
This has ‘too good to be true’ written all over it.
I will try to keep my hope and glee in check lest they be dashed.
But that’s not for a judge to decide, that’s a policy question. The whole discussion of which parts of a law are “severable” only comes into play when a court strikes down part of a law as unconstitutional. Since courts aren’t supposed to be making policy, they have to decide whether the rest of the law makes sense without the part the court struck down, or whether the whole thing should go.
Congress makes policy, so Congress can repeal any part of the law it wishes. Congress passes dumb laws and foolish policies all the time, it’s their specialty.
Seems right. So if the individual mandate goes by Court rather than Congressional action, it might be ok to kill the whole thing. If a judge kills the whole thing because Congress already killed a part of it, he’s just doing judicial activism in the worst way–writing law. Is that right?
Gee, I love the result. But I hope I’m not understanding the judge’s reasoning; otherwise . . . well, otherwise, I don’t like it. And I’m not too sure about the “conservative” label.
Maybe the real lesson here is that ordinary people have no business thinking they understand legal stuff from a few minutes in a newspaper.
(Blame it on the ordinary people if you must–or blame it on the reporters, or blame it on the lawyers and judges, or blame them all!)
That’s a wise attitude to take. Seems to me this will end up back at the Supreme Court, and unless the Chief Justice has changed his mind since the last go-round, I still count 5 votes to overturn this.
The other thing I would add is, when you force all of this into premiums, that is called “cross subsidization”, which is effectively regressive taxation. The reason they do this is, it makes the honest and productive miserable so they give in to single-payer. Same thing with the Cadillac tax.
If the GOP wasn’t smart enough to point that out and deal with it head-on, we are all screwed. It’s as simple as that.
The GOP had their chance to sell a sensible universal system like Avik’s Roy’s and they didn’t.
I have a very bad feeling about all this.
Clever Roberts. None of the other judges saw the clear rationale of making the act constitutional by making the penalty into a tax. He accomplished his goal of not being the Chief Justice who would strike Obamacare down (at least during Obama’s presidency), while at the same time (wink, wink) unveiling the Act’s Achille’s Heel, which he oh so nicely laid out on the table for Congress to find.
An entertaining thought.
I could buy it if the strategy involved tax bills not being allowed to originate in the Senate.
But when he saved Obamacare by calling the individual mandate a tax, it was the mandate itself that was being challenged, wasn’t it? That move didn’t save the preexisting conditions mandate, did it?
The other thing is the ACA’s stupid “risk adjustment channel” (I forget the real name) between insurance companies, never worked at all. I think it was out of balance by over 100% the whole time. One of the things the Democrats wanted to do, was keep subsidizing it. Well, you might as well scrap the whole thing and just subsidize it the honest and transparent way.
In my opinion, just that one issue indicates that the whole thing needs to be scrapped. The ACA is a terrible thing. It’s the Cloward and Piven strategy from hell, in the GOP hasn’t done anything right to stop it.
This guy is insanely smart on the ACA. Brutal.
What we should have done a million years ago was forced everyone onto direct primary care, straight indemnity catastrophic coverage, and a premium increase protection policy. The last one is sort of like whole life. You would still have to end up socializing somehow, but there would’ve been far fewer problems.
How did we get into this mess? They didn’t wipe out employer-based insurance after World War II. There were other factors as well. Everyone wants to cartel-ize this crap.
“Are you serious? Are you serious?”
I’m not an expert on this, but I think that universal multi payer, which is what we should be doing, is actually unconstitutional, but single-payer isn’t. This is such a disaster.
William Jacobson over at Legal insurrection has a good quick summary:
Here is a summary of the severability argument from 2012:
I’m worried about the ruling. Obamacare should have been found unconstitutional with or without the tax (thanks a lot, Justice Roberts).
All this ruling means is a future Democrat Congress and President can reinstate it, the law remaining dormant until then.
I was thinking about it. They got Gruber on tape bragging about how the complexity of the ACA gives the left a political advantage. They force the insurance companies to participate in the scheme, corporatism that they can’t say no to. The whole thing is largely funded regressively, so people hate it. They do all of this to force single-payer without being honest about it.
They could’ve just come up with a system that was transparently subsidized with progressive taxation right out of the US treasury. No one would’ve complained. You wouldn’t be stuck with a job just because of the benefits.
So now we have a situation where the right is trying to get rid of it, even if they’re being ham handed about it.
If the left wasn’t so devious and dishonest, all of this grief could’ve been avoided.
So it sounds like the judge didn’t rule the law unconstitutional, but only “invalid” or unworkable because the penalty is gone?
The thing that was so overlooked was that everyone already has health care. In one way or another, everyone is covered. Covered fantastically, or covered poorly, health care is available.
Mandating coverage is ridiculous. As others have tirelessly pointed out, health insurance is not insurance. Small-dollar stuff can be paid for out of pocket, or tax-free health savings accounts. True insurance could be offered for catastrophic medical events, when they occur.
Instead, Democrats pass BarryCare, everyone has to sign up, and the millions who were already covered under Medicaid, but not enrolled, sign up, and Democrats declare victory, by mandating a sign-up for something people were already eligible to enroll in.
I have an idea. Let’s have Congress stop fixing our problems for us. They are making things much more expensive than needed, much more cumbersome, and its net effect is getting people re-elected to Congress by their selling us the idea that we need them.