Now-now, just bite your tongue, little sheep dog. Like our ma ma taught us, if you can’t say anything nice, then say nothing at all. Of course, where I come from, speaking the truth is still nice and considered very OK. Also-Know-As America. So-sorry about the tongue joke. My Bad. That would hurt.

I dont mind reading the law. It is better so no one tell you what is all about. The justices do not work for the American people any more.

They have made a big mess of the constitution. The constitution is supposed to help not to make man slave of it. Laws are instruments to help man survive not to make man a slave of the elite.

In a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of.
Confucius

There are laws that are immoral, and there are things that are unlawful or illegal that are moral. It all depends whether our moral compass is well calibrated to distinguish between right and wrong and between good and evil. The health care law is a moral law. It says that even though we have to be responsible for our selves there is a net in case there are some that cannot pay for their health care. It is a law against the abuses of big insurance companies. But of course we are counting with insurance companies not being greedy. That is an impossibility. If it is an insurance company then the drive is money, greed.

The bill wasn't read by congress before it was passed. Why should the SCOTUS read it?

@ afrommi, the SCOTUS has never worked "for the people." That's not their job. Their job is to protect the Republic from a mob majority by defending the constitution.

This law is not "moral." The law is utilitarian. It sacrifices individual liberty for the sake of the mob.

The bill wasn't read by congress before it was passed. Why should the SCOTUS read it?

This is about the most illogical argument you've came up w/ yet sam. SCOTUS' job is to understand legislation and interpret that legislation as it pertains to the US Constitution. As for Congress- Congress had over a year to read the approximately 2,000 page bill. The fact that Congress chose not to do this is on them. I can read that many pages in 2 days. It would've taken a weekend for everyone in Congress to read the bill and become familiar w/ it, but for whatever reason many chose not to do this. Or they did read the bill, but then chose to pretend like they did not read the bill. Either way that was a deliberate choice made for the purpose of politicization. SCOTUS is supposed to be beyond such acts.

It's the Supreme Court's job to decide on the arguments made before it, not to interpret the legislation, or to ferret-out considerations in it that neither side brought, at issue, before it.

This is a difficult one for the Court. The Supreme Court is not a Sophomore "bull session" and the Court does not normally pontificate on issues unless an adversary proceeding is brought before it, in which one party sues the other for damages it has suffered. The Court is then able to rule on the claims of the litigants, while at the same time deciding on the Constitutional issue raised. (This reduces the "what if" types of speculation that was evident in the Justices' questions). When no one is damaged, nor complains about legislation, it stands.

See the painstaking language in the decision about "standing" and decisions based on potential "future effects" of the "Obamacare" legislation.

II. DOES THIS COURT HAVE JURISDICTIONOVER PLAINTIFFS’ CLAIM?

Standing requires plaintiffs to demonstrate “actual present harm or a significant possibility of future harm.”

http://aca-litigation.wikispaces.com/file/view/CA6+decision+%2806.29.11%29.pdf

Mouzer, first off that's a lie. No one can read and understand that much legal information in two days.

Second, the individual mandate is what is going to bring this law down and is unconstitutional.

Third, you just said one of the most ignorant things I've ever heard.

"The fact that Congress chose not to do this is on them."

Really? Are you serious? It's not on them, it's on us! We're on the hook for this law! If you really believe what you just said, you have no business giving anyone your opinion about anything and you don't deserve the right to cast a vote! This just shows that no thought goes into your political opinion, just emotion.

I've heard some world class ignorant things on this blog but that might take the cake.

I, like I believe are most head of household's, am a bottom line kind of person.

Back during the debate period of this Bill I received an email from a supporter forwarding an email from a high positioned government employee stating this person can answer any question I would have about the Affordable Care Act. After many attempts I received no response and have yet to find anyone that can come up with a definitive answer. Maybe one of you can help.

What, exactly, is this going to cost me and my family per month and what goods and services, exactly, can I expect for my money?

I find this to be very basic and "need to know" information before entering any contractual agreement. If the evolution and expansion of Social Security is any indication of how this is going to be handled by the government, I want no part of it!

No one can read and understand that much legal information in two days.

Well then we can thank our lucky stars that you do not work as a judge or a lawyer or an insurance agent or a criminal investigator. If you did you would know that on a daily basis these professions require that you read hundreds of pages worth of legal documentation. My point here, of course, was that you as an average citizen probably could not read through 2,000 pages of legal information in a timely manner because you have other stuff going on in your life. You have a job and you have a family to take care of. This limits the amount of free time that a person has to dedicate to things like reading congressional bills. This would be an entirely different story, however, if your full time job was to read bills. This is what I think you're uncomprehending

the individual mandate is what is going to bring this law down and is unconstitutional

And you are basing that it's unconstitutional on......?

"The fact that Congress chose not to do this is on them."

Really? Are you serious? It's not on them, it's on us! We're on the hook for this law! If you really believe what you just said, you have no business giving anyone your opinion about anything and you don't deserve the right to cast a vote! This just shows that no thought goes into your political opinion, just emotion.

I've heard some world class ignorant things on this blog but that might take the cake.

The only thing ignorant here is the laughable extent to which you would attempt to manipulate the language people give you in a rebuttal solely so that you can throw out an ad hominem. Your statement was that neither congress nor SCOTUS could be expected to read the ACA. I explained to you that yes, in fact, people who make a living out of reading policy can clear that many pages in a very short time period. This is hard for you to do because you aren't in the career field of policy and legal interpretation. Someone like a SCOTUS justice, or a judge, or a congressional representative is in an entirely different situation. I then responded that in fact congress had over a year to read the bill- if they made the choice not to read the bill then this is on them. In other words that means that they (i.e. the congressional representative who didn't read the bill) made a conscientious choice to not read the bill and therefore they bear the moral culpability and responsibility. The idea that you'd go to this laughable extent to try to make it seem like I was insinuating that federal laws don't effect us personally is just....crazy. I mean that's one thing if you want to debate about how bills get read (divided up works, summaries, PR positions, etc), or if you want to debate about how we hold congressional and SCOTUS persons accountable for when they pass bills/interpret that they don't read or don't understand, but to even attempt to say that I don't understand that federal law affects us???? Totally nuts. You have basically just destroyed every ounce of credibility you had by making this statement.

Beyond this- when exactly have I expressed emotion when writing towards you? You make a very huge leap in logic here now don't you? Me thinks you are protesting wayyy too much.

what goods and services, exactly, can I expect for my money?

Those people are happiest with their health insurance plan who have not had to collect on its benefits. What you can expect from the (Patient Protection and) Affordable Care Act, (PP)ACA, is that, in the unfortunate instance that you must collect on your benefits, there will be fewer arbitrary limits imposed on payment of your medical expenses, and that your coverage will not be dropped as you become an albatross on the insurance company's bottom line. In general, when more people pay premiums in to a health insurance pool, the cost per member should go down. Just be happy if your premiums rise less steeply than they have in the past.

We ought not to confuse "health" insurance with health care. Insurance is a financial instrument. What health insurance protects is not your health, but your wealth, against the ravages of the costs of health care. It is primarily for the wealthy: as a wealthy person, I don't want to pay for health care (which could easily bankrupt me), I want to pay for health insurance, a predictable amount for which I can budget (so that I can leave my wealth to my heirs). Poor people would rather not spend what money they have on health insurance, for which they do not have an immediate need: they want to pay for it when their need arises. The insurance companies will not cover preexisting conditions, nor remove caps on coverage, nor commit to not dropping high risk members, until such (currently) healthy people are added to their risk pool, by government mandate or subsidy.

What's so great about extending health coverage to everyone?!! In the old days, your physician was sensitive to your ability to pay. Only the wealthy died in hospitals of named diseases: most died of "old age", at home. You live the life you can afford (not vacationing in St Tropez). Why not live the death you can afford? All of a sudden, at the end of life, you want to be treated as well as a millionaire??? Work hard and earn a million instead of extending your hand to the government! Let those who can afford to vacation in St. Tropez be the ones who get health coverage (the only reason they want you in their group is so the costs of their care can be spread more widely and they can pay lower premiums).

I have taken college courses that had easier questions than judy king raises.

It is possible for a party to seek leave of the Court to file an additional brief. See S. Ct. Rule 25. I think that Solicitor General Verrilli would be well advised to consider filing such a request, based on the fact that relevant material was misstated to the Court by counsel for the challengers and that questions from several of the Justices seemed to reflect their misunderstanding of the very point misstated to them.

Whatever analysis a swing Justice might wish to apply to the matter, it will always be better for the law to appear "narrowly tailored to Congressional purpose" than for the law to appear to be "overbroad".

Some decisions expand on the long-term, societal effects of a decision, which may not have been raised by either side of litigants.

So then reading law should have started in 1947, or do you mean that reading trivia this obscure should just be inside base ball for SCOTUS?

Well it seems everything is a war these days. Hey !! Let's have a War against war !!?? Ouch !! Darn, I am getting that headache back !??

They don't "have the numbers"...just the cash and the willingness to lie and deceive to gain power.

If by "numbers" you mean low information, faith based voters, then yes, they do have the numbers, especially if they are successful in curtailing Democratic voters.

They are not interested in being a rational, moderate, impartial body. Their goal is to erase the last 110 years. And they will.

maybe, maybe not. As a child I exspected flying cars in 2012. So If you feel let down, where should I place my disappointment ?

As soon as 40 senate republicans realized they could shut down the agenda of the majority by overusing the filibuster...they began to filibuster everything.

Just when 5 right wing justices realized they were untouchable, above the code of conduct for justices, they began to overrule our democracy (Bush v Gore; Citizens United...) and behave like powerbrokers for the wealthy. There are things beyond their control however that are unpredictable and unexpected. "...The best laid plans of mice and men oft times do go asunder..."

They do still have to write a reasoned rationale for their decision.

not really

On the issue of catastrophic coverage, Justice Scalia seemed pretty clearly to be making an "overbreadth" argument, i.e., an argument that the mandate was more onerous than it needed to be. There are two aspects to such an argument. One is a general liberty argument - an infringement of freedom should be no bigger than necessary. The second suggests that Congressional overreach bespeaks an impermissible Congressional purpose. Was Congress trying only to deal with the free-rider problem or was it trying to pillage the wallets of young "Golden Geese". The latter is a favorite Tea Party talking point and plainly something that the conservative justices cared about.

If the mandate is actually no more onerous than it needs to be to deal with free-rider problem, then the "Golden Geese" claim falls apart.

As a general proposition, when a provision of legislation is challenged, the law is easier to defend if it is "narrowly tailored to the problem Congress sought to solve" than if it is "overbroad".

I think it might have had considerable impact - on Justice Kennedy - if Solicitor General Verrilli had responded to Justice Scalia's query about catastrophic coverage by saying, "Yes, Justice Scalia, and that is precisely what Congress did." He still can, by seeking leave to file a supplementary brief.

Thanks, Ratman66. I really have appreciated your tutorial on SCOTUS - just what I was hoping to learn, in fact. Do you think Verilli will file the supplementary brief? Any way we can learn if he is considering it or when it might be submitted?

Thanks for the compliment, Judy.

I presume attorneys in SG office include a number of people who have clerked at SCOTUS and who can make the judgment as to whether an additional brief is the right approach. A number of bloggers, now joined by the Kaiser Family Foundation, have been "megaphoning" the issue. So, if you are an Assistant SG who just happens to know that that one of Justice X's clerks is an avid reader of, say, the "Balkinization" legal blog, you might just leave well alone. Or, if you knew that Justices and their clerks act with juror-like ignorance of such stuff, then maybe you would ask the court for leave file a supplementary brief.

One thing I do know is that the Justices and their clerks are for the most part a very bright group of people. Even if no supplementary brief is filed and even if Supreme Court clerks are not tuned into Maddow Blog, there's a good chance that one or more of them will be stimulated to delve into the catastrophic coverage issue, just as were the people who have been blogging this issue.

Excellent observation! Why didn't the government lawyer say "the ACA does allow for this in section...." Well, two logical conclusions immediately come to mind:

1.) the government lawyer didn't read the ACA so they didn't know it

OR (much more likely)

2.) the ACA doesn't provide for these now claimed service.

I went back and read the links to the ACA and the legalese is not easy to read. It seems any "catastrophic" plan would still have to cover 3 primary visits AND tons of other stuff once some "cost sharing" expense limits are met. This does not sound like just a catastrophic plan to me, but I'm not a Supreme Court Justice or a government lawyer.

The point of requiring coverage for the three office visits is to provide a safety valve that helps avoid catastrophic incidents by incentivizing insureds to pay attention to problems sooner rather than later. These reduce the cost of catastrophic plans. Most of the other services bundled with catastrophic plans are free preventative services, which have the same purpose. So, it makes a lot of sense for catastrophic coverage to include a very carefully calibrated array of other services - they actually make the purchase of catastrophic coverage LESS onerous, not more onerous.

Ratman66, when the SCOTUS justices challenged the government lawyers on this, they didn't try and say, "the law does allow for the purchase of catastrophic coverage,"...they didn't say that because the catastrophic coverage in the ACA is better than the catastrophic coverage you can get now? That's why they according to Jim, didn't correct it "as the time?" Wow.

Robdon, as the "xpostfactoid blog" has pointed out, it certainly is counter-intuitive to have to defend a law by saying "don't worry, the ACA has an option for sucky coverage". And it's probably even harder, on the fly, to move on to explain that broader sucky coverage is actually cheaper than narrower sucky coverage". This certainly could have contributed to Verrilli's failure on this point. But I don't think that was it.

And the justices interrupted him repeatedly, and threw multiple questions out all at once; this is not unusual but it hard - even for the best advocate - to remember to respond to every point. But I don't think that was it.

I think the most important factor was that no one anticipated that the issue would arise. It did not arise in lower court litigation, in the opinions below, or in any of the briefs at the Supreme Court level - even though there were dozens of amicus briefs filed in addition to the briefs by the parties. So, my best guess is that Verrilli just had no idea this was coming.

At bottom, though, I do think Verrilli should have been able to parry the argument when it came up. Anyone who defends the constitutionality of a legislative enactment should have "in their DNA" a predisposition to paint the challenged provision as presenting the smallest possible burden commensurate with achieving the legislature's purpose. To execute that approach requires a firm grip on the details of what the law actually requires. For whatever reason, Verrilli and the DOJ people who developed the argument seem not to have had the instinct that would have readied them for the unexpected.

In any event, I categorically reject the idea that Verrilli deliberately refrained from responding because he "knew" that the act did not allow catastrophic coverage. Even leaving aside the express availability of Catastrophic Plans, anyone can fulfill the mandate by purchasing a Bronze Plan, and every Bronze plan would qualify - under pre-ACA law - as a high-deductible plan to support tax-favored treatment of medical savings account. And those plans are precisely what insurance experts mean when they refer to "catastrophic plans".

In fact, about 80% of policies in the individual market that are sold in connection with tax-favored medical savings account have a scope of coverage nearly indistinguishable from what the ACA requires for Bronze policies - yes, including mental health, substance abuse, and preventative care. They are "catastrophic" policies only in the sense of being designed to meet catastrophically high total medical expenses. So, sure, ordinary office visits are "covered medical expenses", for which you pay out of pocket before satisfying that multi-thousand dollar deductible, but then receive benefits once catastrophe causes you to exceed the deductible.

And just today (4/27), the Kaiser Family Foundation weighed in on this precise question and concluded that ACA Bronze plans are indeed "catastrophic coverage".

The government compels me to buy flood insurance (at almost triple the cost of my regular homeowner's insurance).

Of course, while many of the founders were in Congress, legislation was passed requiring all able bodied males to buy guns and ammunition to help defend the country and sailors were required to buy health insurance neither of which acts were apparently appealed. Maybe because their constitutionality was so obvious?

The Affordable Healthcare Act makes a citizen act or be fined.

No it does not. You are charged a higher amount on your taxes when you go to file if you do not have health insurance. It works the exact same way as whether you rent/own your home outright versus if you mortgage. If you mortgage you pay a net effective lower tax rate than if you rent. That is your 'fine' for not mortgaging a home.

...Health Insurance is intrastate commerce not interstate commerce...

No intrastate health insurance carriers, exist, incorporate in Delaware as most Companes do?

I completely missed that Rich:

There actually are only a handful of health insurance companies that exist solely in one state. The majority of health insurance companies operate interstate having to abide by each state's individual policies and under the brow of the insurance regulatory commission for each state. But as for the company itself, it is free to hop from state to state to provide services. Companies like Kaiser and Blue Cross/Blue Shield are good examples of this.

Which yes, if you're wondering, would make it an interstate issue. In fact the only way for it to indeed be intrastate would be if you were barred from purchasing health insurance from another state and were barred from using health insurance from another state. So if I live in OK I could only use OK based insurance and not TX insurance. If I went to CA for vacation, CA would not be allowed to accept my OK insurance. Otherwise it become interstate.

You're right John... it is just that simple. Forcing EVERY American to purchase something, whether they want to or not, is a direct violation of the individual rights that the constitution protects.

You aren't being forced to purchase anything. Unless you believe you're forced to have a mortgage?

You can contribute to the healthcare pool by participating in an insurance plan or you can pay a fine. The fine will go toward those expenses you cannot pay when you seek treatment as an uninsured.

I don't want to pay for flood insurance on my home (it's almost triple the cost of my regular homeowner's insurance), but I live in a FEMA-designated flood zone.

to buy a new car, you must purchase one with seat belts...is that unconstitutional?

We are unwilling to apply to human life that principle "let the house burn, just make sure the fire does not spread to the house of the neighbor that bought protection". For example, we might not encroach on your personal liberty to drive without a seat-belt, or ride a motorcycle without a helmet, except that we know we will be paying for your treatment in an injury. In modern societies, we are not dispassionate about hosing your brains off the pavement and sending you home to fend for yourself (there are still many places in the world where this is the rule).

rimbauda

The bit about driving without a seat belt. I had a friend who refused to wear a seat belt. She was convinced she would be in a car accident and enable to get out of a car because of wearing a seat belt. Well she was in a horrible car accident and because she wasn't wearing a seat belt she flew out of a car through the windshield and unto a highway. She died.

Sometime hosing brains off and sending someone home isn't an option. Be this a cautionary tale.

How are you being forced?

Print, separate, give one to each family member, sign and carry:

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0ByXeNy3Q9xUPYU9Vc1M0bHBRUHlzUXV4bFUzU2tnQQ/edit?pli=1#

One of original class representative plaintiffs in the district court in Florida made exactly the same kind of protestations in sworn evidence. "I will be responsible for myself." She withdrew from the case at the Eleventh Circuit level. Turns out she had experienced a medical catastrophe, was unable to pay for the services rendered, and left the costs of her care to be shifted to others.

And she probably still votes Republican.