Bloomberg View columnist Jonathan Alter said that if the Supreme Court rules the health care individual mandate unconstitutional, it could pull "a thread on the whole blanket of one seventh of the American economy."
"If you're an insurance company and there's no mandate," Alter told The Ed Show host Ed Schultz, "you can't stay in business."
The individual mandate is the portion of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that requires all Americans to seek health care coverage or face a penalty. Alter argued that striking down the mandate would make it impossible for health care companies to survive the other requirements imposed on them by health care reform, such as a ban on charging higher premiums for consumers with pre-existing conditions.
MIT economist Jonathan Gruber has made similarly dire predictions. In a February 2011 paper for the Center for American Progress, he wrote that "no alternative to the individual mandate can cover more than two-thirds as many uninsured as the Affordable Care Act does." Furthermore, "any alternative imposes much higher costs on those buying insurance in the new health insurance exchanges as the healthiest opt out and the less healthy face increased premiums."
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So if one part gets declared unconstitutional, and removing that part would make the whole system collapse, isn't it possible that the whole thing wasn't hammered out properly to start off with? That maybe the Act should have been written to account for this very possibility that people were talking about before it was even voted on initially?
Independent of what happens with the Supreme Court
ruling on the Affordable Care Act (ACA), how might the general election affect
reform? http://www.healthcaretownhall.com/?p=4907
I hear everyone talking about the economics of the Supreme Court's upcoming ruling but nowhere have I read any discussions about the lives that will be lost or harmed when people lose their insurance because they're uninsurable or they've reached their lifetime cap -- and the insurance companies no longer have to insure them anyway. Many of us are waiting on "Insurance Death Row" to see if we live or die, depending on what the Supreme Court decides. It's not a comfortable place to live.
Oh, and by the way -- I have had my own private insurance for twenty-five years. I bought the best recommended policy, but nobody bothered to tell me that one million dollars would be reasonable for an annual - not lifetime -- cap. Also, alternatives available in September 2010, when a portion of the Law kicked in, no longer exist. Repealing the Obama Health Care Act will leave me -- and others -- uninsured and uninsurable. I've checked ....