I think that the healthcare insurance system in the US is screwed for the forseeable future. This is due to a number of factors which have all been covered here to one extent or another:
Americans on the whole don’t like change. Once something is a certain way, then that is the way it should stay. Forever. For example, just try to remove the paper dollar bill. Or eliminate the penny. Forget it… that would be different, and people will not stand for that. And of course, don’t even think of debating removing “Under God” from the pledge of allegiance. Those words have been in there for the past 750 years, amiright?
Americans on the whole like to think of themselves as strong and independent. They do EVERYthing themselves. Nobody helped them to get where they are. If you are not successful, you are personally responsible for being a loser. Most other countries think that living in a cohesive societal unit conveys benefits as well as responsibilities. Libertarianism is a distinctly American phenomenon. The thought of helping someone out through a group effort (via your elected government) is distinctly un-American
2a. Working together to achieve a common goal is COMMUNIST. The Anti-commie scares of the 1950’s continue to have a deep effect on Americans
Of course, the levers of power in the United States are moved by those with large amounts of money. These days that means large corporations. Once large corporations are benefiting from for-profit health care, there is virtually no possible way to dislodge them, short of a complete revolution.
Well, besides the entire body of the federal appeals court which ruled against the plaintiffs, including the four Republican-nominated judges, as you’d know if you’d actually read the article;
OMFG, how many bites at the legal apple do you get if you have money and are crazy? At this rate in 2037 the news of Mark Watney’s rescue will be overshadowed by lawsuits going to SCOTUS about PPACA and the Oxford comma.
It originated in the HOuse only by violating the spirit of the origination clause. Which is normal procedure, of course, but let’s be real now. Once Ed Kennedy died, the Senate bill wasn’t going to be changed, so the HOuse had to pass it pretty much as-is. Which they did. The bill originated in the Senate in all but the most technical sense.
They may be lawyers, but we don’t have to be. This is the Straight Dope, not the Legalistic Dope.
I disagree. No law has been so assaulted with suits. Not even civil rights legislation. A well-funded group of people have attacked every iota and jot of the PPACA, time and again and again and now again. We may reach the point when there are more anti-PPACA lawsuits than there are words in the PPACA law. I think we’ll have peace in the Middle East before this abuse of process stops.
And why? Costs are coming down, insurance company profits are up, insurance companies are now guaranteed more customers, and those customers will have access to health care and therefore be less expensive for the insurance companies. Who is fighting this? Who, even in their wrong mind, is fighting this?
You want a principled fight on Constitutional grounds? How about overturning the Executive branch’s legal basis for kidnapping or murder of any person anywhere on the planet - including US citizens, and including US soil. Or Uncle Spy’s legal basis for reading all our emails and recording and indexing all of our phone calls. Those are much more noble goals than keeping some poor sick kid from getting medicine.
Are you now going to argue that the Patriot Act and any number of hundreds of other routine acts of Congress which were passed by similar means are also unconstitutional?
Man, it’s going to take generations to turn this around. New data in The Economist using a pretty graph - data for healthcare seems to take forever to come through, this is still for 2013:
The bill technically originated in the House because the final version had a House number. That’s why the lawsuit will fail.
But the rule has never been followed because it is a pointless rule that really can’t be followed. Both houses must pass a bill, so it doesn’t matter where it comes from. The Senate simply works on its own bill, then waits for the House to send its bill and amends the entire bill to replace the language with its own before sending it to a conference committee. This happens with many bills, by the way. The Senate doesn’t, and shouldn’t, sit around and wait to work on a bill like this until the House sends its bill over - it knows it is coming over from the House.
If the House didn’t want a revenue bill passed, it would simply not pass one, even if the Senate passed a version first. So the rule is completely pointless.
(By the way, the rule only mentions revenue, the origination of spending bills from the House is a tradition but not part of the rule).
I have to thank those guys anyhow for reminding me and many others that the next president is more likely to appoint new supreme court judges. So a Democrat it should be.
What does it matter? Let me correct that … it doesn’t matter to Republicans. The status quo prior to ACA would be fine with them. Haven’t you noticed that the country has been crumbling into ruins since it was passed?
Yeah, well, some other guy on the internet is paying twice as much now!
He’s doing that because he’s too ignorant to know that pre ACA he had a useless catastrophic plan that would do nothing for him if he got sick. But you know, tyranny.