Tag: individual mandate

Contraceptives Mandate Brings ObamaCare’s Coercive Power into Sharper Focus

By
Michael F. Cannon

President Obama is catching some well-earned blowback for his decision to force religious institutions “to pay for health insurance that covers sterilization, contraceptives and abortifacients.” You see, ObamaCare penalizes individuals (employers) who don’t purchase (offer) a certain minimum package of health insurance coverage. The Obama administration is demanding that coverage must include the aforementioned reproductive care services. The exception for religious institutions that object to such coverage is so narrow that, as one wag put it, not even Jesus would qualify. HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius reassures us, “I believe this proposal strikes the appropriate balance between respecting religious freedom and increasing access to important preventive services.” Ummm, Madam Secretary…the Constitution only mentions one of those things. The Catholic church is hopping mad. Even the reliably left-wing E.J. Dionne is angry, writing that the President “utterly botched” the issue “not once but twice” and “threw his progressive Catholic allies under the bus.”

As I wrote over and over as Congress debated ObamaCare, anger and division are inevitable consequences of this law. I recently debated the merits of ObamaCare’s individual mandate on the pages of the Wall Street Journal. Here’s a paragraph that got cut from my essay:

We can be certain…that the mandate will divide the nation. An individual mandate guarantees that the government—not you—will decide what medical services you will purchase, including contraceptives, fertility services that result in the destruction of human embryos, or elective abortions. The same apparatus that can force Americans to subsidize elective abortions can also be used to ban private abortion coverage once the other team wins. The rancor will only grow.

Or as I put it in 2009,

Either the government will force taxpayers to fund abortions, or the restrictions necessary to prevent taxpayer funding will reduce access to abortion coverage. There is no middle ground. Somebody has to lose. Welcome to government-run health care.

The same is true for contraception. The rancor will grow until we repeal this law.

ObamaCare highlights a choice that religious organizations – such as the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, where my grandfather served as counsel – have to make. Either they stop casting their lots with Caesar and join the fight to repeal government health care mandates and subsidies, or they forfeit any right to complain when Caesar turns on them. Matthew 26:52.

Topics: 
Government and Politics, Health Care

WSJ Debate: Should the Government Require You to Purchase Health Insurance?

By
Michael F. Cannon

In today’s Wall Street Journal, I debate ObamaCare’s individual mandate. Here’s the teaser:

Should Everyone Be Required to Have Health Insurance?

Yes, says Karen Davenport of George Washington University, because it’s the key to making health care more affordable and accessible. No, says Michael F. Cannon from the Cato Institute, because it will make health care more costly and scarce.

I did not write that unfortunate title, which uses the passive voice to conceal who’s doing the requiring. Hint: we ain’t talking about your conscience. I like to say that if we banned the passive voice–e.g., doctors are paid on a fee-for-service basis–it would take two minutes to realize that government creates most of our health care problems, and we would repeal all subsidies, mandates, and regulations within two hours.

Davenport’s article makes one claim to which I was not able to respond: that under ObamaCare, “global payment approaches and other payment changes are designed [gaa! passive voice!] to improve care for patients with chronic illnesses.” Fortunately for humanity, I already dispatched that claim last week in a blog post titled, “Oops, Maybe ObamaCare’s Cost Controls Won’t Work after All.”

So here are your assignments for today. Read both articles. Don’t forget to take the quiz. Then, watch the related 2008 video I posted under the title, “Does Karen Davenport Owe Me $40?”, and decide for yourself whether Karen Davenport does indeed owe me $40. If you think yes, be sure to tell her so in an email to the address provided at the end of her article.

Topics: 
General, Government and Politics, Health Care

Published: My First Year Battling Obamacare

By
Ilya Shapiro

Back in June, I wrote about a law review article I had just completed that detailed my first year or so of activities surrounding the Obamacare lawsuits.  Well, now it’s officially published, in the Florida International University Law Review.  Here’s the abstract:

This article chronicles the (first) year I spent opposing the constitutionality of Obamacare: Between debates, briefs, op-eds, blogging, testimony, and media, I have spent well over half of my time since the legislation’s enactment on attacking Congress’s breathtaking assertion of federal power in this context. Braving transportation snafus, snowstorms, and Eliot Spitzer, it’s been an interesting ride. And so, weaving legal arguments into first-person narrative, I hope to add a unique perspective to an important debate that goes to the heart of this nation’s founding principles. The individual mandate is Obamacare’s highest-profile and perhaps most egregious constitutional violation because the Supreme Court has never allowed – Congress has never claimed – the power to require people to engage in economic activity. If it is allowed to stand, then no principled limits on federal power remain. But it doesn’t have to be this way; as the various cases wend their way to an eventual date at the Supreme Court, I will be with them, keeping the government honest in court and the debate alive in the public eye.

Go here to download “A Long Strange Trip: My First Year Challenging the Constitutionality of Obamacare.”

Topics: 
Health Care, Law and Civil Liberties

Va. Gov. McDonnell (Sort of) Takes My Advice, Defers Creating ObamaCare Exchange

By
Michael F. Cannon

In June, I testified in Richmond before Virginia’s Joint Commission on Health Care that Virginia should refuse to create one of ObamaCare’s health insurance “exchanges”:

[ObamaCare’s] health insurance “Exchanges” are scheduled to become operational in 2014.  These new government bureaucracies would enforce the law’s regulations that will drive up health insurance premiums, and would distribute hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to private health insurance companies, thereby driving up the national debt…

Neither the Commonwealth nor the federal government has money to waste on new government agencies that might be repealed or overturned tomorrow…

At a minimum, Virginia should defer the question of creating an Exchange until the courts dispose of the constitutional challenges brought against this law.  Legal scholars expect the U.S. Supreme Court to rule on this law in the summer of 2012…If the Court voids the law, Virginia will be glad she waited.

Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) has inexplicably been gung-ho to create an ObamaCare Exchange. According to the Richmond Times-Dispatch, however, McDonnell may be modulating his tune:

McDonnell said he does not want to create an exchange legislatively until after the court makes its decision on the mandate’s constitutionality. The court will hear arguments in the case in March and possibly rule in July, just after a federal deadline for states to seek grant money to set up exchanges.

“Any major expense prior to the court decision is irresponsible and a waste of money,” the governor said at a luncheon meeting with members of the Capitol press corps.

Unfortunately, McDonnell is still laboring under the misapprehension that creating her own Exchange will let Virginia retain a measure of control over her health insurance markets:

McDonnell said he hopes the Supreme Court will strike down the law’s individual mandate, rendering an exchange unnecessary, but he made clear he wants Virginia to operate the exchange if the law stands.

“If we have to do it, I clearly want to have a state-based exchange,” he said.

To read about why Virginia doesn’t “have to do it,” and why there is no defensible rationale whatsoever for an ObamaCare opponent such as McDonnell to create an Exchange, read my Missouri testimony.

To learn how McDonnell may end up saving ObamaCare from repeal by creating an Exchange, read this Wall Street Journal oped by Jonathan Adler and me.

Topics: 
General, Government and Politics, Health Care

You Can’t Make a Silk Purse out of ObamaCare’s Poll Numbers

By
Michael F. Cannon

The Kaiser Family Foundation’s November 2011 poll results on ObamaCare (“the ACA”) are now available.  The gist:

After taking a negative turn in October, the public’s overall views on the ACA returned to a more mixed status this month. Still, Americans remain somewhat more likely to have an unfavorable view of the law (44%) than a favorable one (37%).

The survey also finds that individual elements of the law are viewed favorably by a majority of the public. The law’s most popular element, viewed favorably by more than eight in ten (84%) and “very” favorably by six in ten, is the requirement that health plans provide easy-to-understand benefit summaries. Also extremely popular are provisions that would award tax credits for small businesses (80% favorable, including 45% very favorable) and provide subsidies to help some individuals buy coverage (75% favorable, including 44% very favorable), as well as the provision that would gradually close the Medicare doughnut hole (74% favorable, including 46% very favorable) and the “guaranteed issue” requirement that prohibits health plans from denying coverage based on pre-existing conditions (67% favorable, including 47% “very” favorable)…

Far and away the least popular element of the health reform law is the individual mandate, the requirement that individuals obtain health insurance or pay a fine. More than six in ten (63%) Americans view this provision unfavorably, including more than four in ten (43%) who have a “very” unfavorable view.

I’ve written about such spin-heavy polls before, including here:

Rather than confront their own errors of judgment, [ObamaCare supporters] self-soothe: The public just doesn’t understand the law. The more they learn about it, the more they’ll like it…

This denial takes its most sophisticated form in the periodic surveys that purport to show how those silly voters still don’t understand the law. (In the mind of the ObamaCare zombie, no one really understands the law until they support it.) A prominent health care journalist had just filed her umpteenth story on such surveys when I asked her, “At what point do you start to question whether ObamaCare supporters are just kidding themselves?”

Her response? “Soon…”

And here:

Asking people whether they support the law’s pre-existing conditions provisions is like asking whether they want sick people to pay less for medical care.  Of course they will say yes.  If anything, it’s amazing that as many as 36 percent of the public are so economically literate as to know that these government price controls will actually harm people with pre-existing conditions.  Also amazing is that among people with pre-existing conditions, equal numbers believe these provisions will be useless or harmful as think they will help…

[T]he pre-existing conditions provisions cannot exist without the wildly unpopular individual mandate because on their own, the pre-existing conditions provisions would cause the entire health insurance market to implode.

If the pre-existing conditions provisions are a (supposed) benefit of the law, then the individual mandate is the cost of those provisions. If voters don’t like the individual mandate–if they aren’t willing to pay the cost of the law’s purported benefits–then the “popular” provisions aren’t popular, either.

Or, as Firedoglake’s Jon Walker puts it, ObamaCare is about as popular as pepperoni and broken glass pizza.

See you again next month.

Topics: 
General, Government and Politics, Health Care

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