Obamacare Going Down?

[drone]

Also, I can't wait to hear everyone cry when SCOTUS takes out the individual mandate and suddenly their state government can't force people to buy car insurance anymore.

Bad counterargument.

• Obamacare relies on a twisted interpretation of the commerce clause to be constitutional. The commerce clause covers interstate commerce. What state governments do within their borders is (theoretically) their own business.
• Driving or owning a car is not mandatory. You can make the choice not to have a license. Obamacare does not give you a choice.

[rvg]

Driving or owning a car is not mandatory. You can make the choice not to have a license.

Precisely. You don't need car insurance if you don't drive. All you need to be obligated to buy Obamacare is a pulse.

[a completely inoffensive name]

Bad counterargument.

• Obamacare relies on a twisted interpretation of the commerce clause to be constitutional. The commerce clause covers interstate commerce. What state governments do within their borders is (theoretically) their own business.
• Driving or owning a car is not mandatory. You can make the choice not to have a license. Obamacare does not give you a choice.

Point of car insurance is to make sure costs that people produce when using the infrastructure are not offset onto someone else. The logic still applies to health insurance. Only difference being that everyone is allowed to use the infrastructure at any time, so of course the mandate is going to apply as long as you live. One reason why health care is so expensive is because people who can't pay have their costs dumped on others who can pay and/or have insurance, which is why just like we make sure every car has insurance, every body should have insurance.

[drone]

Point of car insurance is to make sure costs that people produce when using the infrastructure are not offset onto someone else. The logic still applies to health insurance. Only difference being that everyone is allowed to use the infrastructure at any time, so of course the mandate is going to apply as long as you live. One reason why health care is so expensive is because people who can't pay have their costs dumped on others who can pay and/or have insurance, which is why just like we make sure every car has insurance, every body should have insurance.

But the problem with your analogy is that people can opt out of using automobiles. Forcing people to purchase goods/services from private entities just for being alive is a bad precedent to make, especially considering the corporate influence over our current government. SCOTUS needs to kill Obamacare for this reason. Try again with a single-payer system.

[Lemur]

Driving or owning a car is not mandatory. You can make the choice not to have a license. Obamacare does not give you a choice.

Fair point, but you can also go from cradle to grave without owning a car, should you choose. Hard to picture the same for healthcare.

I think it's more like paying for the army. Whether you want it, like it or approve of it, a nation's gonna have an army. We all have to pay for it. We can argue about how big that army should be, what it should be doing in its spare time, whether they need the latest and greatest death robots, but the fact remains that it must exist and we must pay for it.

We are all going to use healthcare at some point. (In fact, for most people 90% of their healthcare dollars will be spent in the last three months of their lives.) The question is how we pay for it, and ration it, since the appetite for healthcare is infinite and the supply is finite. Right now we ration it via paperwork and insurance bureaucrats. I would actually rather we debated it in public and made it an issue of elections. That would be vastly more transparent than our current hybrid system.

Try again with a single-payer system.

Yeah, it's starting to look like that will be the only workable option.