Four Reasons Why The Court’s Decision To Uphold Obamacare Is Good News For The Economy
Four Reasons Why The Court’s Decision To Uphold Obamacare Is Good News For The Economy
By Travis Waldron
Jun 28, 2012
The Supreme Court today upheld the Affordable Care Act, the health care reform law signed by President Obama in 2010, ruling 5-4 that the law was constitutional. Chief Justice John Roberts joined Justices Sonya Sotomayor, Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Elena Kagan on the opinion. The individual mandate, the requirement that all Americans purchase health insurance or pay a fine, was upheld as legal under Congress’ taxing ability.
Health care reform isn’t important just because it expands access to quality, affordable care, but also because rapidly rising costs and the fact that 30 million Americans don’t have insurance are weighing down the American economy. Here are four reasons why the Court’s decision is good news for the still-struggling economy:
1) Obamacare will reduce the deficit. The Congressional Budget Office estimated in 2011 that Obamacare will reduce the federal deficit by $210 billion over the next decade. The law is expected to save about $1 trillion over its second decade, according to other CBO analyses. The CBO found that repealing the law, as Republicans attempted to do in 2011, would increase the deficit by $230 billion over the next 10 years.
2) Health care costs for young Americans won’t skyrocket. More than 3.1 million young Americans have insurance thanks to Obamacare. Without the law, the cost of acquiring an equivalent health care plan would have risen dramatically at a time when young people are still struggling with the effects of the Great Recession.
3) Millions of jobs will be created. Health reform will help create roughly 4 million jobs over the next decade, according to a 2010 Center for American Progress report, by reducing the cost of health care and making it cheaper for businesses to hire. The law will create between 250,000 and 400,000 jobs a year, and they will be spread across sectors: according to the study, the law will help create more than 200,000 manufacturing and 900,000 in the service sector by 2016.
4) It will be cheaper for employers to provide health care. American businesses are under tremendous pressure thanks to rising health care costs, and these costs are often passed on to customers (one study estimates that each car sold by General Motors contains $1,200 in built-in health costs). The ACA, however, will make it cheaper for businesses to provide care, and not just by reducing the cost of care. Small businesses are already receiving tax credits contained in the law to help insure their employees, and it has already offered more than $4.7 billion in reinsurance payments to companies that are providing health care to retirees who aren’t yet eligible for Medicare.
Even a judge who was a finalist for appointment to the Supreme Court under George W. Bush agreed that striking down health care would have had disastrous consequences for the American economy. “States’ rights are important in many spheres, but the benefits of a national economic policy must also be considered,” federal appeals court Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson wrote in February. “A vibrant economic order requires some political predictability, and the prospect of judges’ striking down commercial regulation on ill-defined and subjective bases is a prescription for economic chaos that the framers, in a simpler time, had the good sense to head off.” Fortunately, a majority on the Supreme Court agreed.
Read More: http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/06/28/505510...
The millions already covered by the ACA sure will not be voting for the candidate who wants to repeal it, nor will the adults of the rest of the 30 million who will now have an opportunity to be finally insured in 2014. Their base won't be energized as much as this base no matter how much the GOP demagogues it again.
•Loss of coverage. Obamacare puts in place new rules that prohibit plans with annual limits. While limited health plans may not be a long-term solution, some coverage is still better than none. Several colleges across the country have already stopped offering low-cost plans to students because of the new regulations. For example, for the 2012–2013 academic year, one college offered a plan that cost students $445 a year with an annual limit of $10,000. But Obamacare requires a minimum cap of $100,000 this year, which would...
•Loss of coverage. Obamacare puts in place new rules that prohibit plans with annual limits. While limited health plans may not be a long-term solution, some coverage is still better than none. Several colleges across the country have already stopped offering low-cost plans to students because of the new regulations. For example, for the 2012–2013 academic year, one college offered a plan that cost students $445 a year with an annual limit of $10,000. But Obamacare requires a minimum cap of $100,000 this year, which would increase student premiums to more than $2,000 for the new level of coverage, thus making coverage through the school an unaffordable option. For the 2013-2014 school year, the minimum cap is set at $500,000, and after that, no payout cap is allowed. This will likely lead more colleges to drop coverage, since, as a Government Accountability Office study states, "Nearly all (96 percent) of the 194 student insurance plans we reviewed established a maximum benefit amount."
•Government takeover of student loans. A provision neatly tucked into the massive health care law is an effective nationalization of the student loan industry. Obamacare ends government subsidies to private lenders and puts the federal government in charge of originating and servicing federally backed student loans. As almost anyone is eligible for a student loan, Heritage's Lindsey Burke explains that "these policies only exacerbate the college cost crisis, continuing a vicious cycle whereby college costs rise in tandem with ever-increasing federal subsidies.... Colleges will once again be able to increase costs, and students with easy access to low-interest loans will once again be able to pay."
•Less money for education. Obamacare's massive expansion of Medicaid, which will add almost 20 million more Americans to the program, will be difficult to sustain on already strained state budgets. As states are forced to redirect a growing portion of their budgets to Medicaid, less funding will be available for other state priorities, such as education. The Medicaid expansion will increase state spending by an additional $64 billion through 2020, and it only gets worse as federal contributions gradually decline.
•Crushing fiscal burden. Younger generations will be left footing the bill for Obamacare and its irresponsible spending. Despite his many lofty promises, President Obama's law does not reduce health insurance premiums, spending, or the deficit. The latest cost estimate for Obamacare's insurance provisions is $1.5 trillion over the next 10 years, which still doesn't include a full decade of spending, since the most expensive provisions don't begin until 2014. As the national debt approaches $16 trillion and the cost of Obamacare continues to rise, younger Americans will be saddled with crushing taxes to pay for it.
Well, be that way. But *I* won't!
And of course, the funniest part is that the Heritage Foundation INVENTED the Health Care Mandate.