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VIDEOS: Obamacare at the Supreme Court

Heritage was at the Supreme Court for the past three days to observe the oral arguments over the constitutionality of Obamacare. Heritage’s Todd Gaziano and Hans von Spakovsky sat in for each day’s arguments and provided immediate reaction after each session. For your convenience, we have corralled these videos and blog posts below.

Monday, March 6: Anti-Injunction Act

The biggest news from the Supreme Court’s first day of oral arguments on Obamacare was that no justice indicated he or she would be troubled reaching the merits of the larger constitutional challenges to the law. At issue was whether the Anti-Injunction Act (AIA) would bar the Court from considering the challenge to the individual mandate in the President’s health care law, and all eight justices who asked questions seemed satisfied that one of several exceptions to the AIA applied, thereby allowing them to hear the other legal issues. 

Read the rest on The Foundry…

Tags: Anti-Injunction Act, Individual Mandate, Medicaid spending, ObamaCare, severability, Supreme Court case, videos

Online Chat on Obamacare at the Supreme Court

This week, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments for National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius and Florida v. The Department of HHS to evaluate the many legal questions raised by the passage of ObamaCare, including whether Congress exceeded its constitutional power when it enacted the individual mandate. Join us on March 30 from 12-1 ET for our “Lunch with Heritage” online chat. Heritage’s legal expert Robert Alt will be answering all of your questions about the issues before the Court, possible decisions the Court could reach, and consequences those decisions could have on public policy.

 Read the rest on The Foundry…

Tags: Individual Mandate, ObamaCare, online chat, public policy, Supreme Court case

Seven of Obamacare’s Biggest Failures from the Last Two Years

It has been two years since Obamacare was signed into law, and although the major provisions don’t begin until 2014, some have already been implemented. The parts of the law already in effect were thought by its proponents to be its most popular, but as detailed in Heritage’s “The Obamacare Two-Year Checkup: More Reasons for Repeal,” the law is already proving ineffective in some cases and harmful in others. Here are some of the biggest failures of Obamacare highlighted by the paper:

• The disappearance of child-only policies. Obamacare requires insurers who sell child-only plans to accept all applicants regardless of health condition. This allows parents to wait until their children are sick to enroll them in health plans. Two years later, one survey found that “17 states indicated that no insurers were selling child-only policies to new enrollees, and 39 states responded that at least one insurer exited the child-only market since the new law took effect.”

Read the rest on The Foundry…

Tags: child-only policies, harming Americans, Obamacare failures, two-year anniversary

Obamacare at the Court: Day 3, Severability and Spending

If the individual mandate is the blockbuster issue before the Court, Medicaid and severability may be sleeper hits that ultimately have tremendous impact.

If the Court strikes down the mandate, then what is to be done with the Russian novel-length ObamaCare? Should the Court just tear out the few pages that contain the mandate, or the mandate plus related sections (whatever that means), or is the mandate so central to the law that the Court should throw out the whole thing? This is what in legal jargon is known as “severability.” To answer this question, the Court looks to what Congress intended—namely, would Congress have preferred a health care bill without a mandate to no health care bill at all, or would ObamaCare work as Congress intended stripped of the mandate. Here’s what to watch for at today’s oral arguments:

First, what do the justices think about the convoluted legislative maneuvering that led to Obamacare’s passage with hardly a vote to spare? Recall that Congress repeatedly tweaked the legislation to arrive at a favorable (if fictional) budget score, meaning that nearly all provisions are (at least in terms of Congress’s budgetary goal) interrelated. The final bill squeaked through the House with the President lobbying furiously to save the whole enterprise. There were votes traded in exchange for the “Cornhusker Kickback” and the “Louisiana Purchase,” and the whole deal was capped off with a dubious use of a budget reconciliation maneuver to avoid a filibuster. Will the Court really believe, given all of this, that Congress would have been happy to pass ObamaCare without the mandate, or that given this delicate budget scoring, that ObamaCare will work as Congress intended with the mandate excised?

Read the rest on The Foundry…

Tags: coercion, Medicaid Expansion, oral arguments severability, Supreme Court challenge

Video: Individual Mandate Under Fire: Obamacare at the Court, Day 2

The packed hearing room of the Supreme Court was a who’s who of lawyers and political leaders this morning, all of whom witnessed what was an undeniably bad day for the Obama Administration and its defense of the President’s health care law. Paul Clement and Michael Carvin, attorneys representing those challenging Obamacare, battled Solicitor General Donald Verrelli, who was defending the law, and urged the Supreme Court to find the individual mandate in ObamaCare unconstitutional. Present in the courtroom were about twelve state attorneys general, including those from Utah, North Dakota, Florida, Texas, and Virginia, as well Eric Holder, Kathleen Sibelius and U.S. Senators such as Mitch McConnell, John Cornyn, and John Kerry.

The hostile questioning for Clement and Carvin from the liberal justices, particularly Steven Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor, left little doubt as to their collective view that requiring individuals to buy health insurance was within the Commerce Power of Congress – an argument that liberals advanced in defense of the individual mandate’s constitutionality. And at times when Verrelli was faltering in answering tough questions from other more skeptical justices like Antonin Scalia, Justices Ginsburg and Breyer would step in to help him, posing arguments in favor of the government as if they were questions.

Read the rest on The Foundry…

Tags: constitutionality, government powers, Individual Mandate, NFIB, ObamaCare, oral arguments, States, Supreme Court

Obamacare at the Court Preview: Day 2, The Individual Mandate

Call it the main event: after a day puzzling over whether Obamacare’s fines on those who don’t buy insurance constitute a tax or a penalty—an important threshold issue, to be sure, but one that hasn’t quite captured the public’s imagination—the Court today will hear oral argument regarding one of the most important issues before it in 65 years: whether the Constitution empowers Congress to require that virtually all Americans purchase or obtain health insurance coverage.

The answer to that question will determine whether the federal Leviathan truly remains a government of limited, enumerated powers, or whether the division of powers between the federal government, on the one hand, and the states and the people, on the other, has finally been obliterated. In short, today’s argument cuts to the very heart of our “federalist” republic, pitting against each other two drastically different visions of the role of the national government in our lives.

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Tags: commerce powers, congress, freedoms, Individual Mandate, overreach, Supreme Court challenge, unconstitutional

Why Religious Liberty Is Important for Institutions

Obamacare’s anti-conscience mandate has raised many questions about freedom. One of them is whether religious liberty is only for individuals or also for institutions.

America’s founders thought that the Constitution’s “first freedom” is for both, a view backed up by the U.S. Supreme Court as well as numerous federal and state statutes.

Why is religious liberty important for institutions? Because of our relational nature as humans.

We are relational beings at our core. Everyone exists in some form of relationship to others. In fact, we become who we are—we develop our own unique habits and views—in the context of these relationships. We need to think of ourselves and others not merely as self-standing individuals but as persons in community.

Read the rest on The Foundry…

Tags: first freedom, HHS anti-conscience mandate, institutions, religious freedom

Monday’s Obamacare Argument: A Taste of Things to Come

The biggest news from the Supreme Court’s oral argument on Obamacare today is that no justice indicated he or she would be troubled reaching the merits of the larger constitutional challenges to the law. The issue today was whether the Anti-Injunction Act (AIA) would bar the Court from considering the challenge to the individual mandate in the President’s health care law, and all eight justices who asked questions seemed satisfied that one of several exceptions to the AIA applied, thereby allowing them to hear the other legal issues.

The justices’ questions only hinted at those larger issues a few times today, including Justice Samuel Alito’s questioning of Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr., arguing on behalf of the United States and in defense of Obamacare. Verrilli opened his argument saying that the case was one of great import and that the AIA did not bar the Court from resolving it. Justice Alito fired the first question to the government asking, essentially, thus: “You say it is not a tax today, but it is a tax tomorrow?” The government attempted to parse the legal distinction between the two arguments, but the question really laid bare the larger contradiction.

Read the rest on The Foundry…

Tags: Anti-Injunction Act, justices, legal issues, ObamaCare, Supreme Court challenge

VIDEO: Doctor-Turned-Lawmaker Sen. John Barrasso Fights Obamacare

Sen. John Barrasso earned the nickname “Wyoming’s Doctor” after working for 24 years as an orthopedic surgeon in Casper. Today he represents the state in the U.S. Senate and is one of the leading critics of Obamacare.

More than two decades with patients gave Barrasso a firsthand glimpse of government’s involvement in medicine — and that was before President Obama signed his unpopular health care law in 2009. Last week Barrasso visited Heritage to share his concerns about the doctor-patient relationship and other side effects of Obamacare.

“It seems every new regulation takes away from the time you get to spend with a patient because you’re filling out paperwork and forms,” Barrasso said in an interview with Heritage. “I don’t want anybody between a doctor and a patient — not an insurance company bureaucrat or a Washington bureaucrat.”

Read the rest on The Foundry…

Tags: government involvement, medicine, ObamaCare, Sen. John Barrasso

Obamacare Comes before the Supreme Court

Rare is the occasion when the nine justices of the U.S. Supreme Court gather to hear three days of arguments, and rarer still is when it is for a case like Obamacare — one that cuts to the core of the Constitution and whose outcome could fundamentally alter the role of the federal government and its power over the people. But today the Court will do just that when it open its doors and begins weighing the arguments on the constitutionality of President Barack Obama’s seminal health care law.

Were the American people to vote on the issue, they would fall decidedly against Obamacare, as recent polls have shown. But for the Court, the decision is not as cut and dried as an up or down vote, but one that involves the interplay of a series of issues raised by those who are challenging Obamacare — more than half the States of the Union and a collection of interested organizations and private parties — and those brought by the Obama Administration, which is defending the law. And they come to the Supreme Court after conflicting appellate court rulings which have left undecided the question of whether Obamacare is permissible under the Constitution.

Read the rest on The Foundry…

Tags: Anti-Injunction Act, Individual Mandate, Medicaid Expansion, ObamaCare, oral arguments, severability, Supreme Court challenge