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2018-06-11 07:01 by Karl Denninger
in Health Reform , 322 references Ignore this thread
Welcome Destruction of The Treasury *
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Well well Justice Roberts, I am writing your obituary right here and now, and should you precede me I'll publish it too, even if it costs me a lot of money to do it.

"Justice Roberts was single-handedly responsible for the destruction of the American Government via its Treasury via his idiotic and legally-infirm contortions in ruling the Affordable Care Act was in fact a tax, rather than a constitutionally impermissible command."

As I wrote at the time Roberts destroyed what little was left of the Supreme Court's legitimacy, putting the final nail into a coffin built since Wickard .v. Filburn.  He justified this in his opinion through what is really called by any means possible I shall torture the law to save it, in that he cited a claim that the Courts are required that any fair means of interpretation exists that leaves a law intact the courts are required to find it.

Of course there was no such "fair means" which he also set forth in his own opinion, stating clearly that the statute reads as a command to buy insurance ("enter into a regulated activity") and that the Constitution prohibits that.

Indeed the Congressional record on the drafting and debate makes clear (if you bother to read it, which Roberts clearly did and then intentionally ignored it, which I also pointed out in a further article) that Congress knew they could not draft the PPACA as a tax because direct taxation on other than strict capitation is unconstitutional.

In other words the US Government can assess a $10 per person tax, per person, but they may not condition the amount of the tax or its imposition on anything other than being a person.  The 16th Amendment makes legal the imposition of taxes on income.  Indeed multiple other attempts to impose such a tax without a Constitutional Amendment had been previously struck as unconstitutional, so there's not only a legislative record but a judicial one as well.

Roberts didn't care.  I've often mused if someone has a video of him buggering a little boy and used it get him to write that "opinion."

But what Roberts didn't have, because he couldn't, is the ability to time travel.  And when Congress passed the TCJA reducing the penalty for not having coverage to zero starting January 1st of next year they destroyed the Constitutionality of both guaranteed issue and community rating, since both were by the Congressional record inextricably tied to the imposition of the penalty and thus are non-severable, as is specifically stated in the Congressional record.

Without the penalty there is no tax since the inherent property of a tax is that it raises revenue.  That's now gone and it was the sole pillar on which the Roberts court decision rested.

The problem is that the rest of the law isn't inseverable and the way law works is that except where severance is specifically declared inapplicable it applies unless the result would be nonsense.

That the result of non-severance will bankrupt you does not enter in the analysis.

Thus the brief referenced herein argues that both community rating and guaranteed issue are Constitutionally infirm and thus void come January 1st.  This is a winning argument, and if there is anything approaching a justice who can actually read it wins by declaratory judgment since the precedent to judge it by is in the original opinion and as a result there is no legal ground to cover in presentation of a case or argument before the court!

But once you do that both Treasury and private industry are irrevocably and instantly fucked.

Without community rating and guaranteed issue anyone with a pre-existing condition who becomes unemployed becomes permanently unemployable as they are uninsurable without destroying the business they go to work for.  Further, they can't engage in entrepreneurial activity either because there is no possible way for them to buy health insurance.  And finally, since the cost of that care has more than doubled since this problem was allegedly "addressed" by Obamacare they have no other option available.

I have often written about the utter necessity of getting rid of the medical monopolies as a political imperative, and for individuals to do everything in their power to get off the medical teat, which for most people means you damn well better not not be overweight or obese, you better have normal blood sugar which means no damned carbs to any material extent in your diet and it certainly means that intentional high-risk behavior like buttfucking, IV drug use or drinking to excess is an instant economic death sentence.

Of course what has occurred in the decade since Obama came to office and Pelosi and her pals rammed through their "vision" is that all of that has gone downhill in statistical terms for America.  There are more obese and abnormal-insulin and blood-sugar level people in this country than ever before, including a shocking number of teens for whom such was unheard of as recently as 30 years ago.  There has been an explosion of IV drug use including heroin and fentanyl.  And we have removed not just legal strictures but have mandated "tolerance and acceptance" under the law for extraordinarily-high risk social behaviors and in no small part covered that up with expensive, lifetime drug regimes that are utterly dependent on public financing to remain "affordable" for the vast majority of people.

The social issues are real but the cost issues exist only because neither Congress nor any State or Federal executive will take their justice departments and prosecute, throwing in jail, the medical monopolists.  Instead they kowtow to their lobbying, whining and claims of "necessity" to continue the trend of taking medical expense from 4% of GDP to nearly 20% today and beyond into the future.

Well, now the scheme is about to blow up in everyone's face.  As of January 1st those who are healthy do not need to participate and most will not.  I won't.  The "donut hole" where $25,000 - $50,000 in income has an effective tax rate of more than 80% everywhere (and close to 100% in high-tax states) is gone if you simply stick up the middle finger.

But without some means of forcing transfer payments from "someone" (the taxpayer across the entire population) to fork up $900 a month for someone like me, who needs zero routine and chronic medical care so that someone else can run up $5,000 a month prescription drug bills the latter's bill becomes unfundable.

Mr. Roberts will burn in Hell for this, as had he not tortured the Constitution in 2012 Congress would have been forced to deal with the medical monopolists and so would have Obama's administration, saving the US Government and taxpayer several trillion dollars.  You'd also be able to pay cash for virtually any medical situation, save an immediate crisis for which (if you chose to do so) reasonably-priced insurance would be available.  We're talking $100 a month or less here folks, because even the "really awful" stuff would cost one fifth of what it does now.

But all that money has now been stolen and it's gone, while the nuclear fiscal bomb left behind by Robert's outrageous twisting of reality on the back of Obama and Pelosi's intentional set of actions is now about to detonate in his, and everyone else's, face.

smiley

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