11th Circuit Court of Appeals slams Individual Mandate

Post Reply New Topic

Socialized medicine is based on your ability to pay. If you made 100 dollars a month recycling beer cans your health care premium would be 10 bucks a month which hardly covers the actual premium cost of $1000 per month so you would be considered a free loader.

Well do you suggest we try and squeeze juice out of a dried tomato?

I would suggest someone needs to cut their alcohol consumption by a lot.

Referring to the beer can example.

It would also likely lead to a scenario like we have with credit card issuers, which - if you've noticed - are overwhelmingly legally based in Wilmington Delaware, due to loan-shark-friendly Delaware laws.

Certain types of policies would likely become largely available from only particular states, as the "free market" would allow the insurers to pick which set of state laws they wish to comply with for any given policy.

For those without adequete access to healtcare, beer and alcohol in general is a gift from god. I actually plan to do a study on this at some point even if it is not for profit.......don't know if the scientific community would take it seriously but most alcoholics I know of have already existing mental or physical health issues and are using it to self medicate. Yes it is a class thing in my opinion....I always see more liquour stores and bars in areas with a large population of mentally ill, mentally disabled, physically disabaled, lower class, divorced people people do not become alcoholics unless they have problems as a rule.....a bit off topic but this sort of thing is real.

Legally, if there is not a severability clause, to strike down part = all is struck down.

This court improperly imposed a legal opinion into a ruling. The court struck the whole law down but cited that absent this part, the rest of the law appeared to be constitutional.

Courts DO NOT have the authority to rewrite the law. If a provision is not severable in how the law is drafted, to strike down the provision invalidates the law in its entirety.

I do not believe that you have correctly summarized the state of the law.

I suggest that the operating presumption in law is that all statutes are severable unless they are expressly declared not so to be, or a legistlative intention to make them unseverable is manifestly apparent.

Marbury v. Madison (1803) 5 U.S. 137 is the very first example of a Court declaring a statute unconstitutional--and the court invalidated only those parts of a statute that were found to be unconstitutional. And in case you see that as archaic, the court did so more recently in Booker v. United States (2005) 539 U.S. 220. Lying contrary to that are, of course, the examples of total invalidity.

I think you might have a stronger argument if you determined that the relevant test is legislative intent.

This is a result of two factors: changes in the tax code that were implemented under George W. Bush, and the economic crash that occurred under George W. Bush. The percentage of Americans paying no income tax peaked at 49% in 2008- under the Bush administration. Obama has reversed neither Bush's tax policy nor the poor state of the economy, so that percentage has not changed much since he took office. It dropped a little bit back down to 47%.

Actually, from a Constitutional Standpoint zer0netgain is right. Most laws have a severability Clause written into it, and that's how pieces of those laws can be thrown out, while the bulk of the law remains in effect.



You left out the fact that the thing that caused the housing bubble was actually a change to the CRA from the Clinton Administration. Furthermore, you left out the fact that Democrats controled the House and the Senate when the economy crashed. Democrats (including Obama) bear at least as much responsibility as Bush and maybe moreso.

To the economy side of it, there is plenty of blame to spread around. A very large share of it belongs to Republicans and Bush. Obama bears some blame in that he has done little to fix the problem- but the problem predates his administration, and it cannot sensibly be blamed on him. There are many things for which Obama deserves blame- the number of Americans not paying income tax is not one of them.

And the tax policy side here is also significant, and that is purely a result of Bush's agenda.

Which is due to expire in the not-too-distant-future.

The conclusion I have reached is that we are governed by congenital incompetents. Party makes little difference.

ruveyn

The Democrats really should have stood up to that twat, and made a stand against his stupid tax cuts, stupid agricultural subsidies, and stupid wars.

Precisely.

In fact, this was debated at length about Obamacare....why wasn't the personal mandate made severable as they KNEW it would meet constitutional challenge in the courts?

Some proposed that this was a way for Obama/Democrats to take credit for passing national health care but not worry if ultimately it never came to pass.

Others proposed that the real purpose for Obamacare was to further entrench government meddling in individual lives. The "commerce clause" is a vastly abused portion of the Constitution to expand government power and influence. The latest upheld expansion enabled government to regulate your behavior for doing something that took you out of the stream of commerce (growing your own wheat rather than buying what's at the store). Obamacare would mandate you participate in the stream of commerce rather than do nothing.

In any case, the crafters of Obamacare did not want to allow this part of the law to be removed. Many said that without it, the law itself would never accomplish anything meaningful. Perhaps that is so. In any case, by the court saying it is unconstitutional, the rest of the law goes away with it. The courts CAN NOT redraft laws. There is no presumption of severability. I've not heard of any such thing. There may be laws that incorporate other laws by reference, and hence those unconstitutional referred to laws can be ruled against without taking out the referring to law, and maybe similar things happen to regulations drafted pursuant to a law...the regulation is unconstitutional but not the law, but when it's the corpus of the law itself, without a severability clause, it is all or nothing.

Ruveyn, they were already due to expire last year. Obama renewed the Bush tax cuts once, and he will probably do it again. Eventually those tax cuts will likely become permanent.


The Democrats did stand up against the tax cuts. That's when the Republicans rammed it through Congress using reconciliation to overcome the filibuster.

That is bad news. The U.S. government will continue to deliver $1.50 worth of government for ever $1.00 collected in tax revenues and fees. If anyone ran a business that way, they would be bankrupt in short order.

ruveyn

Actually it's cheaper because they don't have to pay for obnoxious advertisements. Also, it isn't in the pharmaceutical industry's interest to find actual cures if they can make more money pushing new pills on patients with chronic conditions. Drug R&D hasn't done jack s**t for depression in the past ten years, yet they make plenty of money and that is all they care about. Even try reading medical journal articles and you will see that the entire field is geared towards making money instead of advancing the science. It's really sick and dysfunctional.