Wall St. Journal: “One of America’s leading libertarian legal scholars handicaps whether the Supreme Court will find ObamaCare’s insurance mandate constitutional. . . . So would ‘any constitutional law professor’ be right to scoff at the case against ObamaCare? Not according to this law professor. ‘The challenges to ObamaCare are serious legal challenges within the existing doctrinal framework’,”
Cato Institute: “the health-care law did include a new tax on real estate profits. . . . It’s only a 3.8 percent tax on some real estate sales, no doubt only a minority of sales . . . .”
The Cato Institute published “Bad Medicine: A Guide to the Real Costs and Consequences of the New Health Care Law.” Here’s the abstract of the detailed article.
“The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act represents the most significant transformation of the American health care system since Medicare and Medicaid. It will fundamentally change nearly every aspect of health care, from insurance to the final delivery of care.
“The length and complexity of the legislation, combined with a debate that often generated more heat than light, has led to massive confusion about the law’s likely impact. But, it is now possible to analyze what is and is not in it, what it likely will and will not do. In particular, we now know that:
- While the new law will increase the number of Americans with insurance coverage, it falls significantly short of universal coverage. By 2019, roughly 21 million Americans will still be uninsured.
- The legislation will cost far more than advertised, more than $2.7 trillion over 10 years of full implementation, and will add $352 billion to the national debt over that period.
- Most American workers and businesses will see little or no change in their skyrocketing insurance costs, while millions of others, including younger and healthier workers and those who buy insurance on their own through the non-group market will actually see their premiums go up faster as a result of this legislation.
- The new law will increase taxes by more than $669 billion between now and 2019, and the burdens it places on business will significantly reduce economic growth and employment.
- While the law contains few direct provisions for rationing care, it nonetheless sets the stage for government rationing and interference with how doctors practice medicine.
- Millions of Americans who are happy with their current health insurance will not be able to keep it.
“In short, the more we learn about what is in this new law, the more it looks like bad news for American taxpayers, businesses, health-care providers, and patients.”
Arizona Republic: “State and university employees with families can expect to see their monthly health-insurance costs rise as much as 37 percent next year, depending on the type of plan they choose. . . . [Two reasons insurance will sky rocket under Obamacare] One is a requirement that insurance plans provide coverage for dependent children up to age 26. The other is the federal legislation’s ban on lifetime limits, an insurance-industry practice that cuts coverage once an individual’s medical expenses exceed a set amount over their lifetime.”
Professor Edward A. Zelinsky of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law has written an article called “The Health-Related Tax Provisions of PPACA and HCERA: Contingent, Complex, Incremental and Lacking Cost Controls.” The abstract states:
“Americans must, into the indefinite future, confront difficult issues pertaining to health care and health care costs. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) and the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010 (HCERA) do not alter the status quo as much as their advocates and their detractors contend nor do PPACA and HCERA resolve the fundamental challenges confronting the U.S. health care system, including the problem of escalating health care outlays. In important respects, PPACA and HCERA will exacerbate that problem.
“Four factors underpin this sobering assessment. First, PPACA and HCERA, while significant, are more incremental in nature than either their proponents or their opponents acknowledge. These laws build upon – indeed, extend – the existing systems of private health insurance and employer-provided health care. Second, many provisions of PPACA and HCERA have delayed effective dates. It is an open question whether future Presidents and Congresses will allow these deferred provisions to go into effect as scheduled. Third, key provisions of PPACA and HCERA are enormously complex. By virtue of such complexity, these laws will impose prodigious enforcement burdens upon the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and equally immense compliance obligations on taxpayers, in particular, small businesses and many individuals of modest means. The prospects for a complexity-induced political backlash to PPACA and HCERA are considerable. Fourth, these acts merely postpone the tough decisions that must be made about health care and about health care costs in particular. These laws’ efforts to control health care outlays are tepid and deferred. Moreover, PPACA and HCERA, by expanding access to medical services, will increase demand for such services and thereby stimulate health care expenditures.
“While Republicans and Democrats alike portray the adoption of PPACA and HCERA as a pivotal moment in American life, we Americans are fated to conduct a prolonged – indeed, an indefinite – debate about health care and its costs. PPACA and HCERA write an important, but hardly final, chapter in that debate.
“This is not surprising. Democracies rarely make radical breaks from the status quo nor should they. Cost control entails sacrifice which the American political system is today incapable of demanding from the American people.”