What have they done, that you consider, “whatever they want”? Have they required insurance companies to provide cotton candy on demand?
Whatever they want is an absurd overstatement. It’s up to you to show that what they have done is out of comport with the law.
Complex things are complex. If you’re complaining about the size of the bill, you’re just engaging is raw exultation of ignorance and intellectual laziness. Legal shit is long and complex. That doesn’t mean it’s stupid. It doesn’t mean it’s inept. It means that it’s long and complex.
It’s for a year. Doesn’t that seem to you like something that the people in charge of the implementation could do?
RE the OP: Assuming it’s still a democracy, the party/politicians elected have a mandate from the people to carry out whatever it was they campaigned on.
So, for example, if a party ever decided to campaign on the abolition of universal healtcare and won the election, they could do it. Of course, no party would be stupid enough to promote such a policy because it’s electoral suicide.
You know another law that unfolded exactly as it was written? Prohibition. Which was in fact more than just a law, it was a freaking constitutional amendment!
The object lesson here is the lesson of unintended consequences, sometimes requiring tweaking (as in the ACA) and sometimes requiring throwing an unworkably bad idea out the window, as in Prohibition.
The law didn’t call for policy cancellations, and it most certainly did not call for the insurance industry to shamelessly and opportunistically gouge its customers. It simply called for minimal standards of coverage and even provided grandfathering provisions on the condition that no substantive changes were made in the policy. The responses that resulted were determined solely by the industry, and my own take on this is that many of the ACA’s proponents were genuinely surprised by the insurance industry’s avaricious greed – although I doubt that Wendell Potter was surprised. If this sounds naive or simplistic, I rank health insurance companies at about the same ethical level as Mafia racketeers. The ACA is a paltry, weak first step to try to rein them in, and they reacted with predictable malice until Congress modified the law to let them engage in precisely the profiteering they have just engaged in, principally by eliminating the public option that would have forced them to be genuinely competitive.
Which was done by enacting another amendment, not by the executive deciding to throw the original amendment “out the window”. That’s not just a bad analogy, it’s a spectacularly bad analogy.
BrokenBriton: We’re not talking about a “party”, but an individual elected as the executive. I don’t understand what it is you are advocating, but it sounds like something more applicable to a parliamentary system, which the US does not have.
I did! You apparently don’t like the examples, but I provided them. The law defines certain policies, if not grandfathered, non-compliant. Obama has decreed that needn’t be enforced. You were the one who responded that HHS being in charge gave them the power to tweak the law. If you believe that, show your support. What legally confers that power on them, and what are the limits?
No, it doesn’t. I could see a tweak that circumstances required if, for example, it’s impractical to install a particular aspect immediately and the law would otherwise be stalled. That’s a circumstance where the president is executing his duties and showing proper deference to the legislature, if the choice is either “no law” or “the law with an unavoidable and temporary tweak.”
But this was not the situation here. That aspect of the law was unfolding exactly as it was written. It wasn’t impractical at all, it was doing exactly what was legislated. Obama reacted to a political shit storm in a politically expedient way, in contradiction to the law as written, when he didn’t need to do a thing, and the law (that portion of it) would have taken the effect the legislature wrote into it. All those crappy policies disappear, right? What administrative reason exists, what practical obstacle needed to be overcome, with regard to the cancelled policies? State them. Not political reasons–what administrative rationale is there for it? Because in the absence of such a reason, I’d say that the Executive branch needs to mind its own business and defer to the legislature, who has the only legitimate power to pass laws. In the absence of such a reason, the president’s power is limited to installing the law as written.
I may not have made my point clearly, and you seem to have misunderstood it. I’m not arguing about whether or not the executive branch has the right to make the kinds of changes Obama did. I’m simply arguing against the premise that he shouldn’t have because “the law is unfolding exactly as written”. No, it isn’t. And because of the unintended consequences, there is an excellent rationale for making those kinds of adjustments. Whether the executive branch has the constitutional authority to do so is entirely a different question.
Well, in that case I think you’re just wrong, as Stratocaster has already noted. Those policies that were not compliant were supposed to be cancelled. That was explicit in the law. If the law needs to be “tweaked”, then Congress is the body that is supposed to do the tweaking.
Yes, it is. The law defines compliant policies, and doesn’t permit non-compliant policies to be offered. Are you arguing that this part of the law was hypothetical and any reasonable person assumed no contracts would end up being non-compliant? That all insurers were going to remain with the policy terms that existed in 2010, never to be changed, ever? The law says that if certain policy terms changed–and they are legally permitted to be changed–then they’re non-compliant and can’t be offered. That’s what occurred. The law did just what it was supposed to do. And, frankly, your argument is particularly curious, since all Obama has done is postpone the law for a year, at which point the exact same thing will occur. Will the “unintended consequences” evaporate somehow over the course of the next year?
No, that’s exactly the question in this thread. If there’s no constitutional authority, then there’s no rationale that justifies such tweaks.
Just to be clear, while the 18th Amendment said that prohibition would be the law, it, like many other constitutional edicts, was not self-enforcing. The 18th Amendment gave Congress the power to enforce the law, which it did by enacting the Volstead Act. Congress could have chosen not to pass implementing legislation and the president might have chosen not to enforce any such legislation.
If it had gone up to the Supreme Court, I doubt very much that the court could have forced Congres s or the President to act.
I think it’s disingenuous, to say the least, to try to claim that a law which went to great lengths to authorize grandfathering can be regarded as “working as intended” when that pretty much never happened, and in many cases those policies were replaced with extortionately priced new ones.
One could argue that every law ever written always works exactly according to how it’s been written, but that’s not the same as “intent”. I’m pretty sure that Obama’s statement about being able to keep existing policies was made with the full expectation that in the vast majority of cases that’s exactly what would happen.
Forget about the ACA - I see nothing preventing a president from exercising their discretion to enforce *any *law. What would be the consequence and where is that stipulated if they chose not to enforce…all federal drug laws, immigration law, etc? We already have precedent where states who try to enforce immigration laws were rebuffed (prop 187 in CA) being ruled unconstitutional even in the face non enforcement at the federal level.
Just like congress can pass laws to force everyone to buy broccoli or be subject to a tax, the president can suspend any federal law he wants to. I don’t think the limiting factor is the vested power in the office, but rather the political will.
His own administration knew this would occur. It was not a bug, it was a feature. And then, after it unfolded exactly as written and predicted, the shit storm occurred. His “tweak” was unambiguously a political move. BTW, again, how does postponing it a year remedy anything? How are the “unintended consequences” avoided? I missed that part in your response regarding my disingenuousness.
The motive behind the exercise of executive power is irrelevant, and “make a law work better” is in the eye of the beholder. I’m sure many people think that the President’s refusal to deport people who came here as teenagers make immigration law work better. Likewise, if a future President removes most of the requirements for what constitutes acceptable insurance under ACA, supporters of ACA will see that as “gutting” and opponents will see that as making ACA more workable.
The real question isn’t whether the President has pure motives, but exactly what he can and can’t do with his executive powers. Motive may be important in criminal cases from a legal perspective, but it has nothing to do with separation of powers considerations.
I think that the President may choose to not enforce certain laws because of “efficiency,” “prosecutorial discretion” or whatever other reasons he wants to label it. There are many good faith bases for executives to do this and there are outright power grabs as reasons to do this.
The difference is which label a majority of the House and 2/3rds of the Senate choose to place on it.
The quote doesn’t prove that when Obama made his statement a year earlier in 2009 that he was expecting his reform initiatives to lead to such cancellations. Does it seem credible that he would intentionally draft and promote legislation that would lead to – as you put it – a “shit storm”?
That said, the claim was not the smartest thing he ever said and much of the ACA is an indefensible mess. You do raise valid points. What I’m ultimately expressing here is my intense loathing for the very concept of private companies being in the business of financing, profiting from, and potentially denying human health care – essentially, private companies adjudicating human life and commercializing it as if it was a washing machine.
The most fundamental problem with the ACA is that tries to reconcile the civilized view that health care should be universal and unconditional with the mercenary and avaricious means by which access to it is managed in the US, uniquely among first-world nations. But that, I grant you, is a much larger topic for a different discussion.
Postponing it a year would remedy nothing if Healthcare.gov were not such a shambles and if the insurance exchanges were all operating as they should be, and if everyone thus had access to all the options that should be available to them and their costs and terms. But that’s not the case. The year is an opportunity to remediate some really serious implementation deficiencies.
While I hold no claims to constitutional scholarship, it seems to me that implementation of enacted laws and making changes to observed deficiencies in such implementation is the core purpose of the executive branch.
Deficiencies in implementation. Deficiencies in the law itself require changes to the law. If a President can determine that a law is deficient and make whatever changes he desires to remedy it, that pretty much removes the necessity for a legislature other than to pass broad outlines which the President can then use however he pleases.
Given the President’s actions, I wonder if Congress could have just saved themselves the time by writing a one-page bill describing what they wanted the health care system to look like and let the President do the rest.
But liberals are saying the ACA can be kept by ignoring the unworkable parts and enforcing the workable ones, even though the law itself doesn’t contemplate that kind of selective approach.
To that end, remember that conservatives believe Obama is breaking the law and being a dictator when he changes the way the ACA is implemented, but they were enthusiastic when Romney said he was going to give waivers to every state that didn’t want to participate in the law.