11/10/13, "Immediate lessons from health-care reform," Washington Post, Larry Summers
"The Affordable Care Act, which legislates near-universal health insurance, was passed after more than a century of failed efforts to achieve this progressive dream in this country."...
"Lawrence Summers is a professor and past president at Harvard. He was Treasury secretary from 1999 to 2001 and economic adviser to President Obama from 2009 through 2010."
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Added: Even if ObamaCare "legislated" health insurance as Mr. Summers says, it's by no means "near-universal," so he got that wrong too:
6/10/13, "If Obamacare is fully implemented, 30 million people will still be without health insurance." PolitiFact
Gibbs’ statement that 30 million people will be uninsured after the health care law’s full implementation is close to the CBO’s latest estimate."...
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Added #2: The Supreme Court said ObamaCare was only legal as a tax and that states could not be forced to sign up for it. (parag. 9 at link). These are two among changes to the bill submitted to the Court. Following USA Today op-ed by Randy Barnett, the Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Legal Theory at Georgetown University Law Center and Josh Blackman, a law professor at the South Texas College of Law. (I post it here because the authors explain the law. Whether matters apart from the Supreme Court ruling are partisan or not is irrelevant):
10/31/13, "Dems may have to admit Obamacare tax increase: Column," USA Today,
"The individual insurance mandate can't be a requirement to buy insurance because that unprecedented demand was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.
Instead, the court identified the mandate as a tax on millions of Americans. If that's true, it must be forthrightly identified as such and scored by the Congressional Budget Office....
When defending the law before the Supreme Court, the administration...insisted that the law did not compel people to purchase insurance. Solicitor General Donald Verrilli emphatically denied that there was an "entirely stand-alone" requirement to buy insurance.
It was this concession by the administration that Chief Justice John Roberts used to save the law. Under Roberts' saving interpretation of the ACA, no one is required to purchase health insurance, so there is no mandate. There is only a tax on people who don't buy insurance. And, the Court said, that tax must be low enough to preserve the "choice" or option to not buy insurance. No one can be punished for being uninsured.
So if there is no longer any "individual mandate," then the Democrats are proposing to delay the tax that John Roberts wrote into the law, but which was never enacted by Congress. When the Affordable Care Act was written, Democrats deliberately labeled it a "penalty." Had the law been called a tax, the president could never have mustered the votes to pass it. As Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell noted, the tax-free ACA "was one of the Democrats' top selling points — because they knew it would have never passed if they said it was (a tax increase)."...
Any suspension of this tax must be scored by the Congressional Budget Office so the public knows the size of the tax increase that will be imposed on the American people when the delay ends and the tax kicks in....
(To) insist that the penalty is not a tax...will be admitting that it is unconstitutional under the Supreme Court's decision. If Congress contradicts what the administration told the Supreme Court, a new challenge can be brought under the precedent of NFIB v. Sebelius."...
"Randy Barnett is the Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Legal Theory at Georgetown University Law Center and co-author of A Conspiracy Against Obamacare: The Volokh Conspiracy and the Health Care Case. Josh Blackman is a law professor at the South Texas College of Law and author of Unprecedented: The Constitutional Challenge to Obamacare."
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Added #3: 10/2/13, "Obamacare can be defunded without Senate approval," Examiner.com, Christopher Collins
"“Chief Justice Roberts actually ruled the mandate, relative to the commerce clause, was unconstitutional. That is how the Democrats got Obama-care going in the first place. This is critical. His ruling means Congress can’t compel American citizens to purchase anything, ever. The notion is now officially and forever, unconstitutional. As it should be.”
“Next, he stated that, because Congress doesn’t have the ability to mandate, it must, to fund Obama-care, rely on its power to tax. Therefore, the mechanism that funds Obama-care is a tax,” said Atkinson. “He struck down as unconstitutional, the Obama-care idea that the federal government can bully states into complying by yanking their existing medicaid funding....Roberts ruled that is a no-no.”"...
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Added #4: Two days after Obama’s re-election John Boehner enthused that ObamaCare was “the law of the land” due to Obama’s re-election. ObamaCare isn’t the "law of the land to this day" for at least one reason. Speaker Boehner failed to hold a standalone vote in the House up or down on ObamaCare as a tax. All taxes must be approved by the House:
- 11/8/12, “John Boehner: ‘Obamacare is the law of the land’,” Politico, David Nather
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