Will the Supreme Court uphold or overturn Heathcare

[General Zod]

I would argue not paying taxes is tax avoidance and thus an action. I'm not arguing that Obamacare should have been struct down. It just feels the courts kind of changed what it was to something almost identical but distinctively difference almost for convenience sakes.

It sounds like you're shifting the goalposts.

[Alyrium Denryle]

I would argue not paying taxes is tax avoidance and thus an action. I'm not arguing that Obamacare should have been struct down. It just feels the courts kind of changed what it was to something almost identical but distinctively difference almost for convenience sakes.

Either you are shifting goal posts, or you are about as dense as a block of lead.

It has been established that the government can provide tax credits for just about anything it wants.

It has also been established that the government can charge penalties if you do something that it would like to discourage you from doing. Filing late, withdrawing 401K funds early. It really does not matter whether it is an action or an inaction.

It also does not matter that the congress tends to encourage things rather than discourage them. Separate court cases are not required for every single subclass of an action. The only constitutional limit on the ability of the congress to levy whatever taxes it likes is that the taxes be uniform. Not necessarily the same rate, but the same tax code must be used across all states and for all classes of persons.

[Alphawolf55]

Either you are shifting goal posts, or you are about as dense as a block of lead.

Or perhaps I'm not shifting the goal post because I'm asking for a precedent on something you've yet to provide one for. Breaking the law is not an inaction through tax avoidance is not an inaction especially since there are outright laws against it. Especially since there's no constitutional question that taxes themselves are legal.

It has been established that the government can provide tax credits for just about anything it wants.

I never disagreed with this.

It has also been established that the government can charge penalties if you do something that it would like to discourage you from doing. Filing late, withdrawing 401K funds early.

Yes it has been established that taking certain actions can result in penalties.

It really does not matter whether it is an action or an inaction.

I'm not asking whether it's legal. I'm asking is there a precedent for it happening. Tax avoidance is not a precedent because it's outright breaking the law the mandate was never a law against not having health care. If there's no outright precedence for a penalty like this just say so.

[General Zod]

Either you are shifting goal posts, or you are about as dense as a block of lead.

Or perhaps I'm not shifting the goal post because I'm asking for a precedent on something you've yet to provide one for. Breaking the law is not an inaction through tax avoidance is not an inaction especially since there are outright laws against it. Especially since there's no constitutional question that taxes themselves are legal.

Changing the criteria after an example was given is shifting the goalposts. Now you're just whining that you don't like the examples you asked for.

[Alphawolf55]

Either you are shifting goal posts, or you are about as dense as a block of lead.

Or perhaps I'm not shifting the goal post because I'm asking for a precedent on something you've yet to provide one for. Breaking the law is not an inaction through tax avoidance is not an inaction especially since there are outright laws against it. Especially since there's no constitutional question that taxes themselves are legal.

Changing the criteria after an example was given is shifting the goalposts. Now you're just whining that you don't like the examples you asked for.

Clarifying what I'm asking is not moving the goal post. Expanding my questions it not either. I'm not taking up a position that the Supreme Court is wrong or that the this is Unconstitutional. I'm asking questions about how this decision was reached, is there precedent for it among other things because when discussing it with people, I want to address the type of shit they're going to say.

Seriously almost no one here thought that this was going to be held up. Almost no one even thought the idea that the law would reinterpreted as a tax would happen. Now you're acting like it's the most obvious thing ever.


I

[General Zod]

Clarifying what I'm asking is not moving the goal post. Expanding my questions it not either. I'm not taking up a position that the Supreme Court is wrong or that the this is Unconstitutional. I'm asking questions about how this decision was reached, is there precedent for it among other things because when discussing it with people, I want to address the type of shit they're going to say.

Seriously almost no one here thought that this was going to be held up. Almost no one even thought the idea that the law would reinterpreted as a tax would happen. Now you're acting like it's the most obvious thing ever.


I

Examples of currently existing tax penalties?

But in what cases is a penalty offered on the Federal level I'm asking.

Is there precedent for taxing inactivity?

Clarifying your questions implies something was unclear. Your questions were very straight forward, so either you're not thinking before you post or you just don't like the answers you're getting.

[Alphawolf55]

Or maybe you don't understand the concept of following up on questions by asking for different examples of things. I mean if this is not the place to ask those questions that's fine but the idea that following up is somehow moving the goal post is stupid.

[Knife]

It does read like you're moving the goalposts, whether or not if that was your intent. According to the law, it doesn't matter if you categorize it as action or inaction. Philosophically you could say inaction is an action, anyway, it is clear that the government can encourage or discourage an action with penalties or tax cuts whether you think you're actually doing something or not. More down to earth, if you feel like you're not using the health care system in anyway, I would argue you're one car crash from substantially using the system in excess of thousands of dollars that you have yet to put into the system. Not paying your share is an action, not a lack of one.

[Zed Snardbody]

I feel like if I'm going to have to pay this tax I should be paying for something, not being penalized. My tax dollars pay for my unemployment insurance, my social security benefits, my border guard, my solider, my road. This tax should pay for my health insurance.

"My employer didn't offer me insurance this year or I'm a contractor this year doctor, I paid my taxes though, so you can bill Uncle Sam."

But that would be single payer or some such nonsense and that's evil and will ruin the country.

That is my main issue with calling it a tax. A tax usually pays for something.

[Losonti Tokash]

Alphawolf: if not filing your taxes is technically an action since you're avoiding taxes, wouldn't going without health insurance also be an action under that criteria?

[Serafina]

If you can hand out benefits to people who have taken a certain action, then you can penalize people who didn't take a certain action - functionally it's the same thing.

I'm pretty sure there are a whole damn many actions in United States that can give you tax-breaks, and no one is whining about those.

[Alphawolf55]

Alphawolf: if not filing your taxes is technically an action since you're avoiding taxes, wouldn't going without health insurance also be an action under that criteria?

The problem Im sure my conservative and libertarian friends will bring up is that we have outright laws against not paying your taxes, there is no law against not having health care. Additionally you don't owe taxes in a void. You pay taxes because you have a job or you own a house, or because you inherited money. You're only paying taxes in the first place because you took an action.

I mean I guess what we could say is the penalty is a requirement in the same way car insurance is. That the law isn't that everyone must get health insurance but rather if you wish to have a job you must, if you wish to accept inheritance you must and if you wish to own a house you must and that group of people is just so large it includes everyone in a practical sense but I don't know if the act was written that way. In fact it seems Roberts rejects that it does in his writing from what Im reading since the Interstate Commerce Act would've been used as justification not a tax.

If you can hand out benefits to people who have taken a certain action, then you can penalize people who didn't take a certain action - functionally it's the same thing.

Um that's not necessarily true. I'm not saying you're wrong in the legal sense of American law but the two concepts are different and one does not mean the other has to be true.

I

[Civil War Man]

I feel like if I'm going to have to pay this tax I should be paying for something, not being penalized. My tax dollars pay for my unemployment insurance, my social security benefits, my border guard, my solider, my road. This tax should pay for my health insurance.

"My employer didn't offer me insurance this year or I'm a contractor this year doctor, I paid my taxes though, so you can bill Uncle Sam."

But that would be single payer or some such nonsense and that's evil and will ruin the country.

That is my main issue with calling it a tax. A tax usually pays for something.

The money raised from the penalty will be used for something, since it is money coming in. But it wasn't set up as a revenue generator, but as an incentive to get people and companies to buy insurance. In an ideal world no one will have to pay the penalty because everyone will be insured in some way, whether they pay for it themselves, get it through their jobs (or their spouse's/parents' jobs), or through a government program like Medicare or Medicaid.

And the government already does that in other areas. See the punitive taxes on cigarettes that are in place in addition to the local sales taxes.

[Simon_Jester]

The problem Im sure my conservative and libertarian friends will bring up is that we have outright laws against not paying your taxes, there is no law against not having health care.

There is now.



Anyway, this is what we get for trying to keep the private sector involved in health care without letting it kill or impoverish normal people to save money. You get pretty weird kludges when you try to reconcile two interests that point in opposite directions at the same time.

Yes, legally it's a chimera. I'm going to be honest, I have some serious reservations about whether it's constitutional to require me to do business with a private entity myself. We'd be on much stabler ground with the public option, because that would just be the state setting up an insurance company. Or with a single-payer system, because THAT would be a straightforward case of "your tax dollars at work," part of the existing constitutional network of "government taxes people, government uses the money to build tanks/rocketships/highways/schools/police stations/whatever."

[ArmorPierce]

Unrelated to the subject of the thread but why have people continued voting after the supreme court made their decision? When the court made the decision it was at 3 for that it will pass but now it's up to 15.

[Guardsman Bass]

For fun, I suppose.

On topic, the fight now shifts to Congress and the Presidency. If Mitt and the Republicans win both houses of Congress as well as the Presidency, they'll overturn the bill even if it requires them to stretch the reconciliation process to do it. Hell, they probably wouldn't even need to over-turn the whole thing in reconciliation - if they can nuke the funding for the bill, all that will be left will be a bunch of regulations, and they could likely get a couple conservative Democrats in the Senate and House to vote for killing the rest of it off.

Although . . . as much as I hate to say it, if they win big in this election, again, then maybe they ought to overturn it. After all, that would be two consecutive elections where Republicans ran on an explicit promise of repealing PPACA in its entirety, and two elections where Americans voted them into increasing power.

[General Mung Beans]

\

Although . . . as much as I hate to say it, if they win big in this election, again, then maybe they ought to overturn it. After all, that would be two consecutive elections where Republicans ran on an explicit promise of repealing PPACA in its entirety, and two elections where Americans voted them into increasing power.

Never mind. Misread the post.

[Omega18]

For fun, I suppose.

On topic, the fight now shifts to Congress and the Presidency. If Mitt and the Republicans win both houses of Congress as well as the Presidency, they'll overturn the bill even if it requires them to stretch the reconciliation process to do it. Hell, they probably wouldn't even need to over-turn the whole thing in reconciliation - if they can nuke the funding for the bill, all that will be left will be a bunch of regulations, and they could likely get a couple conservative Democrats in the Senate and House to vote for killing the rest of it off.

The catch is they would need a full 60 votes in the Senate to defeat a filibuster to get rid of the rest of it, and you're talking about many of the clearly popular elements of the health law.

To repost what I wrote on another board...

Republicans can get rid on the mandate and the other effective taxes raised by the bill without 60 Senate votes, but they can't get rid of other items like the insurance exchanges and crucially the bar on denying insurance based on preexisting conditions or excessively jacking up premiums on such individuals. Such a move would effectively put insurance companies in an impossible situation financially, with a significant portion of the American population concluding the logical thing to do would be to avoid paying for health insurance until they get sick and then sign up with the knowledge they can easily do so and they will be fully covered. With Republicans hypothetically in charge of the Presidency and all of Congress, if they did this the Democrats could simply sit back as insurance companies and others denounce Republicans as unfit to be city dogcatchers and wait to retake Congress in two years.

This means in practice repeals of most major parts of the Affordable Health Care Act are going to be incredibly difficult to get rid of barring a proposal that can actually get 60 votes in the U.S. Senate. (Republicans could try to get somewhere regarding the Medicaid expansion provision, but if they try to get too creative on this subject and go beyond simply allowing some states with Republican governors to avoid the expansion, they could run into lawsuits that they could well lose, and such a move would in practice put financial pressure on insurance companies who are already going to have to absorb other aspects of the law which don't count as purely financial measures.)

[Knife]

*sigh* the 2010 GOP 'resurgence' was little more than a correction of the last 10 years of democrats getting into positions in Red States and a backlash effect of Obama getting elected. The thought of the GOP getting both houses and the white house is ridiculous. Anyway, while Obama care isn't no where close to perfect, it's not got roots in the ground and can be changed ever slowly, as congress critters work, to something good.

[Blayne]

The seats coming up for grabs though aren't really all that safe for dems though is what I've heard.

From Wikipedia:

4.1 Democrats/Independents retiring

4.1.1 Joe Lieberman of Connecticut (Independent)
4.1.2 Daniel Akaka of Hawaii
4.1.3 Ben Nelson of Nebraska
4.1.4 Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico
4.1.5 Kent Conrad of North Dakota
4.1.6 Jim Webb of Virginia
4.1.7 Herb Kohl of Wisconsin

4.2 Democrats/Independents seeking re-election
4.2.1 Dianne Feinstein of California
4.2.2 Tom Carper of Delaware
4.2.3 Bill Nelson of Florida
4.2.4 Ben Cardin of Maryland
4.2.5 Debbie Stabenow of Michigan
4.2.6 Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota
4.2.7 Claire McCaskill of Missouri
4.2.8 Jon Tester of Montana
4.2.9 Bob Menendez of New Jersey
4.2.10 Kirsten Gillibrand of New York
4.2.11 Sherrod Brown of Ohio
4.2.12 Bob Casey, Jr. of Pennsylvania
4.2.13 Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island
4.2.14 Bernie Sanders of Vermont (Independent)
4.2.15 Maria Cantwell of Washington
4.2.16 Joe Manchin of West Virginia

4.3 Republicans retiring or defeated in primary
4.3.1 Jon Kyl of Arizona
4.3.2 Richard Lugar of Indiana
4.3.3 Olympia Snowe of Maine
4.3.4 Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas
4.4 Republicans seeking re-election

4.4.1 Scott Brown of Massachusetts
4.4.2 Roger Wicker of Mississippi
4.4.3 Dean Heller of Nevada
4.4.4 Bob Corker of Tennessee
4.4.5 Orrin Hatch of Utah
4.4.6 John Barrasso of Wyoming

It's a bit of a toss up, regaining 60 seats is vaguely implausible and vaguely plausible to lose a few more seats.

[Losonti Tokash]

At least I can assure everyone that whoever replaces Ben Nelson of Nebraska is virtually guaranteed to be less of a shitheel.

[Omega18]

It's a bit of a toss up, regaining 60 seats is vaguely implausible and vaguely plausible to lose a few more seats.

Uh, frankly to be explicit on this matter, right now the Democrats have 53 Senate seats, and losing 13 of them simply falls under the incredibly wildly unlikely occurrence category. You simply historically almost never get that kind of shift in the Senate period. Since direct elections of Senators began as effectively the law of the land in 1914, there has only been one case where a shift to this degree arguably occurred with a 14 Senate seat shift, and two of those Senate seats were due to the State of Alaska being formally admitted into the U.S., which is obviously a different situation than we are currently looking at.

While Democrats theoretically have more seats vulnerable, a bunch of those Democratic Senators really lack creditable Republican challengers, and furthermore many of those seats are in very Democrat leaning states. Its simply incredibly hard to see a scenario where things could change enough to alter this picture sufficiently for a 13 seat Republican gain in the November election, and would take something really incredibly dramatic happening to possibly change this. (If it looks like Republicans are likely to have control of the Senate and the House, that makes politically Democrat leaning voters in the states even more likely to support a Democrat for Senate to ensure that there is at least some check on Republican power, although control of the Senate is more realistically at stake than the filibuster.)

One final point to note about current election scenarios is its looking overwhelmingly likely that Angus King running as an Independent is going to win what is currently Olympia Snowe's (R) Senate seat in Maine. It simply appears that a bunch of Democrats in the state, and a bunch of Democratic organizations in general, have made the decision that they are going to at least effectively support him in order to avoid a scenario where the left leaning vote gets split too much and allows the Republican to win. (In particular the creditable Democrat challengers dropped out once it became clear Angus King was definitely running.) While Angus King is strictly running as an Independent, he has tipped his hand in key respects by already publicly saying that intends to vote for Obama for President this year and he specifically supports the current health care law. (Meaning he's essentially certain to side with the Democrats if it comes to a filibuster to block an outright repeal of the current law or anything close to that without a remarkably persuasive alternative to replace it.) This makes the odds of the Republicans somehow getting close to 60 votes to defeat a filibuster on a health care repeal attempt even worse.

A more realistic optimistic scenario (from the perspective of Republicans) gives them a 51 or 52 seat Senate majority which puts them nowhere remotely close to being able to break a filibuster on this issue.

[Guardsman Bass]

Republicans can get rid on the mandate and the other effective taxes raised by the bill without 60 Senate votes, but they can't get rid of other items like the insurance exchanges and crucially the bar on denying insurance based on preexisting conditions or excessively jacking up premiums on such individuals. Such a move would effectively put insurance companies in an impossible situation financially, with a significant portion of the American population concluding the logical thing to do would be to avoid paying for health insurance until they get sick and then sign up with the knowledge they can easily do so and they will be fully covered. With Republicans hypothetically in charge of the Presidency and all of Congress, if they did this the Democrats could simply sit back as insurance companies and others denounce Republicans as unfit to be city dogcatchers and wait to retake Congress in two years.

They could probably claim that the funding is so intertwined with the rest of the bill that they can nuke the whole thing via reconciliation. It's not like they've not been manipulative of parliamentary procedure before; back when Trent Lott was Senate Majority Leader in a Republican Congress, he fired the parliamentarian when he tried to limit what they could do with reconciliation.

[Omega18]

They could probably claim that the funding is so intertwined with the rest of the bill that they can nuke the whole thing via reconciliation. It's not like they've not been manipulative of parliamentary procedure before; back when Trent Lott was Senate Majority Leader in a Republican Congress, he fired the parliamentarian when he tried to limit what they could do with reconciliation.

Its unlikely that would hold up in court, so it wouldn't actually do Republicans much good. (They would probably need to employ the nuclear rule and get rid of the filibuster to manage this with just the majority, which would have all sorts of political consequences, many likely negative for Republicans.)

It should also be noted that health exchanges start going into effect January 1st, so getting rid of everything by the time the Republicans could be fully in power would have notable impacts on a significant number of Americans.

[Knife]

Blue dog democrats got decimated in 2010 and will probably still be sniped at in 2012. Ben Nelson is a prime example, as is Matheson in Utah, a Representative, not a Senator. These are the dems that got into power in a very Red State or District that have been falling like dominoes the last election cycle. Similarly, I'd expect the opposite to happen in Snowe's district in Maine, and other places where a moderate GOPer has been and now the seat is up for election.