Obamacare Rant - 3/31

In closing arguments this week in the Supreme Court on Obamacare, one of the justices spoke favorably on severability, the ability for them to strike down certain aspects of the act as unconstitutional. The positive aspect of this concept in this case is that the current argument in front of the court is in regard to one aspect, the individual mandate. This is because the mandate forces anyone born in this country not exempted by the government to purchase health insurance by threat of fine and imprisonment if that fine is not paid. The justice speaking was speaking in favor of removing the individual mandate, citing this tact as a conservative approach. Certainly this justice, who was once employed as general counsel for the ACLU, did not mean conservative in the political sense. This argument has gained in popularity on the coat tails of two popular clauses in the law, allowing children to remain on their parent’s policies to the age of 26 and disallowing the preclusion of prior conditions to new enrollees. While it sounds reasonable, to get rid of the bad while preserving the politically popular, simply severing the individual mandate is not a workable solution. First, it is not the duty of the court to determine what the law should look like. That’s the job of the legislative branch and the law is what it is, warts and all. Second, congress did not include a severability clause so that certain aspects could be removed if they were later found to be unconstitutional. Second, the current case questions the individual mandate, but does not yet take to account other possibly questionable aspects. Based on this one decision, should the court consider all 2,700 pages of the law in order to determine what should and should not be included? Which brings us back to the first point, making or editing laws is simply not the duty of the Supreme Court. Last, the individual mandate is the core of the entire act’s Rube Goldberg pyramid scheme structure, remove it and the whole thing becomes even worse financially.