Plaintiffs Challenging Affordable Care Act In The Supreme Court Admit That The Law IS Constitutional

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Plaintiffs Challenging Affordable Care Act In The Supreme Court Admit That The Law Is Constitutional
By Ian Millhiser on Jan 30, 2012 at 1:00 pm


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In their attempt to see the entire Affordable Care Act fall, however, several of the plaintiffs challenging the law committed what should be a fatal blunder — they effectively admit that their entire constitutional challenge to the law is garbage.
http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/11-393-11-400-bsac-Am-Medical-Student-Assoc.pdf

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............consider the following passage from the private plaintiffs’ brief arguing that the entire law must fall if the insurance coverage rule goes down:

The mandate was intended to be a direct subsidy to insurance companies, as compensation for requiring them (in the guaranteed-issue provision) to insure against “risks” that have already come to pass and forbidding them (in the community-rating provision) from using actuarially sound insurance premiums. The mandate thus works to counteract the powerful inflationary impacts of these other provisions, which would otherwise make premiums in the individual insurance market prohibitively expensive, thereby frustrating Congress’ goal of affordable health insurance. And Congress further viewed the mandate as necessary to prevent “adverse selection” to “game” the new insurance rules, which proponents warned would spark a “death spiral” in insurance.

The guaranteed-issue and community-rating requirements thus cannot operate without the mandate in the manner intended by Congress. Rather, “their associated force—not one or the other but both combined—was deemed by Congress to be necessary to achieve the end sought.” To strike the mandate alone would impermissibly eliminate a central quid pro quo of the Act. If the mandate falls, the guaranteed-issue and community-rating regulations must therefore fall with it, as the Government itself has conceded.

So the plaintiffs admit that, without the insurance coverage requirement, premiums will become “prohibitively expensive” and that the ACA’s provisions protecting people with preexisting conditions or who otherwise are highly likely to need health care (what are known as “guaranteed-issue” and “community-rating” laws in the jargon of health policy) “cannot operate without the mandate in the manner intended by Congress.” This is a flat out admission that the Scalia Rule applies in this case. Guaranteed issue and community rating are regulations of interstate commerce, and thus Congress has “every power needed” to make them effective — including the power to enact the insurance coverage requirement.


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more:
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/01/30/414335/aca-opponents-give-up-the-farm/