To start with, I really believed that the Supreme Court would overturn “Obama Care.” First of all, I really do not like most features of this law. The only one that I do like is the requirement that health insurance companies take clients with existing disease conditions. This is important to me because I have a number of these. If my husband did not have a job that provides health insurance, the only insurance I would have is medicare. This is very limited insurance. The more I looked at the law, however, the less likely I think the health law will be completely overturned.
The Supreme Court held hearings on three areas of the law. These must be the areas that they are most concerned about, or the areas that the lower courts reviewed. The first area was the mandatory requirement for health insurance. While the constitution does require some mandatory actions by us citizens, it does not require us to buy something from any private company. Two examples are paying and filing taxes and the money that is deducted from most of us for medicare out of every paycheck. These are fees that go directly to the goverment. They don’t go to private companies for a service. Past reviews by courts have determined this to be lawful under the ability of government to tax. However, even the Obama administration does not believe health insurance is a tax. They are stating that since the government can regulate commerce, the government can order consumers to buy a product. This is a poor arguement that I don’t believe will fly. However, the Supreme Court could look at this part of the law as similar to payments that are made for medicare, another health program. I think the Supreme Court could limit madatory health benefits to benefits paid to the government for government programs. We are already doing this. The Court could also uphold the complete law.
The second thing that the Supreme Court looked at was if Congress could change the requirements for Medicare. I am not exactly sure why this part of the law is being reviewed. Since Congress created this program, and continually changes requirements for it, it would seem to me that Congress could certainly change the age for this program. Yes, the cost of medicare will most likely increase due to the extra people on the plan. Lowering the age won’t add much to pay for the program, since these people are already contributing to medicare if they are working. That is not the issue, here, however. The issue is can Congress change this program? I certainly think the answer is yes.
The other issue Congress looked at is if the law could stand up if parts of it were declared unconstitutional. I think the answer here is yes. Other laws have done so, and as the law is presently constructed, it could. Keeping parts of the law would result in a new requirements by the goverment without funding the organizations that they are imposed upon. This happens all the time to business, doesn’t it? So, the law would not be that different than many other laws.
Looking at the whole picture, I think the Supreme Court will uphold all if not most of the law. Obama care does a lot of good things for health care. The big problem with it is the law does not pay for itself. This is probably not the time to take on such as large burden for our goverment when you consider the debt the government currently has. But then, that is not really part of this discussion.