Is this what we have to look forward to?

rickyp wrote:fate

Is this what we have to look forward to?

What are you claiming here Fate? That the Mass insurance plan is causing all the delays?
How?
Is there an increased demand for doctors care because people are suddenly insured? If so, what did these people do before the insurance?

For example, those people who used to go to ER's when they had the sniffles? Well, now they want to go see a doctor.

rickyp wrote:fate

For example, those people who used to go to ER's when they had the sniffles? Well, now they want to go see a doctor.

So you're saying it was preferable that they go to the emergency?

f you have a primary care physician problem, adrress that as a problem. But you had that problem Before universal health insurance.... And you had a improper use of emergency wards problem too.

Nope, I'm saying it's a lie to hand someone an insurance card and pretend that solves the problem

I'm also saying that the government interfering with it will make the shortage worse.

Purple wrote:A rhetorical question:

How much would you give up in quantity/quality of care for you and your family (waits, rushed docs, rationing, increased premiums, etc.) in order to extend that same degree of (diminished) health security to a neighbor and his family, who for whatever reason cannot secure it today despite trying hard to?

To six neighbor families?

To six million neighbor families?

(It is an extremely odd facet of human psychology that many people would give up more for the single hypothetical neighbor than for the mass.)

rickyp wrote:fate

Nope, I'm saying it's a lie to hand someone an insurance card and pretend that solves the problem

Doesn't that depend on the problem? If it was being uninsured, or being afraid to move jobs for fear of losing insurance, or fear of reaching a limit to insurance coverage over time ..... yeah thats a solution.
I don't think the idea of universal coverage of insurance was ever intended to solve any problems of primary care physician shortages...
If you have evidence that this was one of the things Obamacare sought to alleviate please provide proof.

Have a go at proving why the primary care physician shortage in Massachussetts was caused by Romneycare then too.

I'm also saying that the government interfering with it will make the shortage worse.

Based on what? Your certainty you know what "govenrment interference there will be?

Doctor Fate wrote:...as the pool gets larger and larger, you can be assured the "need" will sometimes be out of pure laziness.

Purple wrote:

Doctor Fate wrote:...as the pool gets larger and larger, you can be assured the "need" will sometimes be out of pure laziness.

Hmm. You can also be assured, as the pool gets larger, that ever more deserving and legitimately needful families will be included.

Do you suspect that a majority of the uninsured are simply "lazy"?

The Chief Justice did not simply change a label—as if Congress said something was a penalty when it was really a tax. Rather, these categories are defined by their purposes and effects, by how they operate in practice. Taxes are "exactions" whose main goal is raising revenue, while penalties punish individuals for breaking the law. The boundaries can blur—legitimate taxes may also have strong punitive aims—but scarcely so in this case. ObamaCare's mandate was designed to regulate individual conduct to help achieve universal coverage. If it succeeds perfectly, it should collect $0.

Even if Democrats had passed the mandate tax as rewritten by the Chief Justice, and they did not, the Supreme Court until Thursday has never held that Congress can call anything it wants a tax. The taxing power like the Commerce Clause is broad, and the courts are generally deferential. But all powers the Constitution enumerates are also limited, and these limits—unique to each power—must be meaningful and enforceable by the legal system.

The Chief Justice's compounding errors deprive the taxing power of any viable limiting principles. Article I, section 8 gives Congress an independent grant of power to "lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States." Taxes must originate in the House, the political body designed to be most responsive to voters. There are also important additional safeguards on the type of exactions known as "direct taxes."

Indirect taxes—"duties, imposts and excises"—are taxes on activities and products. They are passed on by a seller, triggered by a transaction and more or less optional: Consumers don't have to buy taxed goods and services. Direct taxes, on the other hand, are those that the federal government is empowered to impose on individuals as citizens. They cannot be avoided because they are levied on the existence of people.

America has its origins in a rebellion against arbitrary and pernicious taxation and the Framers wanted to make it extremely difficult to impose or raise direct taxes. These can easily morph into plenary police powers, the regulation of private behavior and conduct that the Constitution vests in the states. For this reason, while the taxing power in addition to raising revenue can achieve regulatory results, those regulatory results must be constitutional themselves.

***

That boundary held for 225 years until Thursday's ruling, as the Court had repeatedly struck down Congress's efforts to arrogate to itself police powers under either the Commerce Clause or the taxing power. The Chief Justice ruled instead that the mandate was an unconstitutional exercise of federal police powers under the Commerce Clause, only to transform the taxing power into a license for the federal government to impose taxes whose defining feature is commanding people as members of society.

Chief Justice Roberts concedes that "Congress's ability to use its taxing power to influence conduct is not without limits" and that in the 19th and early 20th centuries the Supreme Court "policed these limits aggressively, invalidating punitive exactions obviously designed to regulate behavior otherwise regarded at the time as beyond federal authority." But then he writes that "more recently we have declined to closely examine the regulatory motive or effect of revenue-raising measures."

His error—or more likely, his deliberate sleight-of-hand—is that this modern jurisprudence does not deal with direct taxes but indirect taxes and income taxes. Income taxes were authorized in 1913 by the Sixteenth Amendment, which was necessary to bypass the other important limit on direct taxes, called apportionment.

The Constitution says that "No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or enumeration herein before directed to be taken." Colloquially, direct taxes are known as head taxes and they must be spread among the states according to population. Apportionment's onerous limits were meant to protect against abuse and sectional favoritism. If Congress uses direct taxes, the residents of South Carolina will pay the same overall share as Massachusetts, and so forth.

But apportionment would defeat the mandate tax's "whole point," the Chief Justice writes, since every state will have a different percentage of citizens that are uninsured. So he cryptically rules that "A tax on going without health insurance does not fall within any recognized category of direct tax."

But if not a direct tax, then what kind of tax is it? It is not an indirect tax because it applies to a failure to purchase something, what the Chief Justice calls "an omission," not an optional transaction. It is not a tax on income because that merely hits "accessions to wealth," not what people choose or choose not to do with those accessions.

The result is that Chief Justice Roberts has created the only tax in U.S. history that exceeds its own constitutional limits and is meant to execute powers that the Court otherwise ruled were invalid. His discovery erases the limiting principle—apportionment—that constrains the taxing power for everything besides income and excises.