You know your taxes got cut today. Actually you may not know that, because much of the media coverage is leading people to believe that only the rich got tax cuts. That's not true, and if you don't understand that now you will when you get your first or second paycheck in February. But you know taxes were cut. Everyone does.
What you may have missed in the understandable hubbub of the tax cut is the one of the most important policy imperatives of the past five years was also achieved today: The ObamaCare individual mandate is gone.
This is absolutely huge.
It's almost gotten lost in the midst of the tax changes, but in its own way it's as important to the nation - and to your freedom - as any other aspect of the bill
Recall that many of us expected the individual mandate to be the basis for the Supreme Court's tossing of the entire law. It is so clearly beyond the constitutional authority of Congress to mandate people buy a product from a private company, it seemed inconceivable that the conservative majority on SCOTUS would allow it to stand. Astonishingly, it survived when Chief Justice John Roberts decided the "fine" associated with violating the mandate was actually a "tax," and upheld it on the grounds that Congress has taxing power.
He broke from the other four conservative Justices in taking that position, and to this day it's impossible to make sense of his legal reasoning. But one thing he said in announcing the decision was true: It's not the job of the Supreme Court to rescue America's voters from their political decisions. In 2008, America overreacted to its annoyance with George W. Bush by electing Barack Obama and a filibuster-proof Democrat majority in Congress. Democrats had been saying for decades that they would nationalize health care if they could. No one should have been surprised that they did.
The rest of ObamaCare still stands, but getting rid of the individual mandate is both a boon for consumers and a likely death knell to what remains of the law.
For consumers, it means the return of your own discretion on the question of how you will pay for your health care. Health insurance for many people is a terrible value. You pay far more in premiuims than you would ever pay if you just paid your own doctor bills with your own money. There's a need to insure against the risk of catastrophic costs, but ObamaCare doesn't allow you to do it that way, and the result has been skyrocketing premiums every year since the law took effect. Don't think those premiums are a good value for you and your family? Too bad. The law said you had to pay them anyway.
Now it's once again your decision, not the government's.
You can't have freedom because we need money to keep our promises!
And the elimination of the mandate is like kicking a leg out from under a table. ObamaCare was already collapsing and this will hasten its death. Want to know why? Ask the Democrats themselves. They included the mandate because it was the only way to make the law's insane economics work even in theory. ObamaCare puts the old and the sick in the same risk pool with everyone else while severely limiting the size of the premiums that can be charged to those who will be larger consumers of health care services.
How can you possibly make that work? The Democrats knew it was a problem, so they figured they would mandate that people who didn't want to be in the risk pool had to join it anyway. Only by getting young, healthy people in the same risk pool, paying the same premiums but not using much in the way of services, would you ever collect enough in premiums to pay for all the sick people.
But it didn't work. Even facing tax penalties of more than $600 a year, many young and healthy people thought it was more in their interests to just pay the penalty and stay out of the ObamaCare insurance racket. ObamaCare enrollment consistently fell short of the CBO's forecasts, which is why premiums rose so much.
Democrats screamed that repealing the mandate would cause people to "lose" their health insurance. It won't cause anyone to lose their health insurance if they want to keep it. It will stop forcing people to buy who don't want to buy.
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If all that had happened today was the end of the individual mandate, it would still have been a historic and great day
Confront Democrats with that argument, and they reply that without mandating healthy people to buy, it will be too hard to pay for the sick. In other words, they're admitting that the entire economic model of ObamaCare was unsustainable if you left people to make their own rational decisions about what was best for them. You can't have freedom because we need money to keep our promises!
There's a solution to that. Repeal the whole thing. And now that the individual mandate is gone, the rest of ObamaCare will tumble down in short order. We can only hope it happens in 2018 while Republicans still control both the House and the Senate. Maybe some of the Senate Republicans who refused to vote for repeal the last time around will see the necessity of replacing it now.
By the way, this will also save the government money, because every time someone who couldn't afford insurance bought it anyway to comply with the mandate, the federal government had to subsidize the premiums.
But regardless of how it affects Washington, you got some of your freedom back today. It was added on to the tax cut bill, such that it almost became an afterthought. But if all that had happened today was the end of the individual mandate, it would still have been a historic and great day.
You know your taxes got cut today. Actually you may not know that, because much of the media coverage is leading people to believe that only the rich got tax cuts. That's not true, and if you don't understand that now you will when you get your first or second paycheck in February. But you know taxes were cut. Everyone does.
What you may have missed in the understandable hubbub of the tax cut is the one of the most important policy imperatives of the past five years was also achieved today: The ObamaCare individual mandate is gone.
This is absolutely huge.
