Posted on 06/30/2012 11:32:11 AM PDT by ColdOne
"It's a penalty because you have a choice," Carney said. "You don't have a choice to pay your taxes, right? You have a choice to buy -- if you can afford health insurance. … So if you don't buy it, and you can afford it, it is an irresponsible thing to do to ask the rest of America's taxpayers to pay for your care when you go to the emergency room. So your choice is to purchase healthcare reform or a penalty will be administered."
(Excerpt) Read more at upi.com ...
The hospital does send the bill to your neighbor. When the uninsured are unable to pay, the hospital raises rates on all the paying customers to cover the cost. Of course the same is true with medicare and medicaid patients. Medicare and medicaid do not pay enough to cover their costs, so hospitals and insurance companies raise the rates on the rest of us. Just wait til Obamacare kicks in - it will be even more fun and efficient! /s
The intent and purpose of H. R. 3590 was not to raise revenue, it was to decrease taxes and provide payola in exchange for votes.
Bottom line:
Obembacare was passed to avoid outright, civil/race war.
“SEC. 5. INCREASE IN PENALTY FOR FAILURE TO FILE A PARTNERSHIP OR S CORPORATION RETURN.
(a) In General- Sections 6698(b)(1) and 6699(b)(1) of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 are each amended by striking `$89’ and inserting `$110’.”
The above part of HR 3590 raises revenue. It is sufficient to make the bill a revenue-raising bill for the purposes of Senate procedures.
You may not like the way they did it and I may not like the way they did it, but the Rats knew what they were doing.
Keep in mind before you reply, only "the penalty" is paid directly to the government.
The insurance itself must originally be bought outside of government.
Carney needs to be punished. Maybe a couple of Hugh Hefner’s wives could give him a hand in the matter.
But the hospital will still try to collect from you. They will send the bill to the collections department to try to get you to pay. If you don’t they will send it to a collection company and you will be dinged on your credit report. Yes, hospitals will either raise rates or close as some have. But again, they will try to collect from you first.
I think the best analyis is that if the general statement of the statute is a tax merely on existing as a human being, with additional provisions exempting various categories from that general statement, then it is a direct tax.
On the other hand, if the general statement of the statute is a tax on the taking of an action, with additional provisions exempting various categories from that general statement, then it is an excise tax.
For example, a tax that applies to the purchase of gasoline is an excise tax.
On the other hand, a tax that is laid on all people, except those who purchase gasoline, is a direct tax.
In other words, as a general matter, one cannot redefine the essential nature of a tax simply by adding on exemptions.
The only exception would be a case where the exemption category itself renders the general statement of tax meaningless.
But these are not easy questions. As the dissent said, they should have given a more serious analysis to it.
Remember, the lower courts for the most part didn’t take the tax claim seriously, it seemed like a fall-back argument thrown in hoping it might stick to the wall. I’m beginning to think what happened here is that there was a 5-4 majority to strike it down under the Commerce Clause and Roberts grabbed onto the tax thing late in the process, changing his vote and then it ended up getting rushed out the door without a lot of sound analysis on that point.
Here is the link again.
@ Public Law 111–148 111th Congress
An Act Entitled The Patient Protection and Affordable Care
What do you consider "the general statement of the statute" to be?
Would you please copy and paste it for discussion?
In my post 83 in this thread I pasted the part which is the general statement of the statute with respect to the individual mandate.
Again, I do not believe the individual mandate imposes a “tax.” In this respect, I agree with Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy and Alito and I disagree with Roberts.
As the four dissenters wrote: “For all these reasons, to say that the Individual Mandate merely imposes a tax is not to interpret the statute but to rewrite it.”
To quote further from the dissent:
“Finally, we must observe that rewriting §5000A as a tax in order to sustain its constitutionality would force us to confront a difficult constitutional question: whether this is a direct tax that must be apportioned among the States according to their population. Art. I, §9, cl. 4. Perhaps it is not (we have no need to address the point); but the meaning of the Direct Tax Clause is famously unclear, and its application here is a question of first impression that deserves more thoughtful consideration than the lick-anda-promise accorded by the Government and its supporters. The Government’s opening brief did not even address the question—perhaps because, until today, no federal court has accepted the implausible argument that §5000A is an exercise of the tax power.”
So in order to see it as a tax, one has to reformulate it from the way it was in fact written. The dissent did not try to reformulate it, because they judged that it was not a tax.
Roberts in his opinion reformulated it as “a tax on not obtaining health insurance.”
I contend there is no such thing as “a tax on not doing something.”
Instead, it is in reality a tax on you UNLESS you do the thing specified.
And what that is, is a direct tax (subject to an exemption) which in this case is unconstitutional because it is not apportioned.
FMCDH(BITS)
If it is guaranteed to be a penalty and not a tax, then the Chief Justice Roberts should reopen case based on this new information.
Looks like a razor splitting a hair.
A penalty has nothing to do with ‘raising revenue’ as that term was intended by the Constitutional Convention. Fines and penalties are intended as punishments, not as revenue-raising measures. Were that not so, any law that imposes a fine (as most criminal laws do, for example,) would have to originate in the House.
He’s spliting hairs..
It doesn’t matter. Even if we throw out Section 5 of that bill, the other sections having to do with the tax credits work for the purpose of being a revenue-raising bill.
Courts have held that bills with respect to “raising revenue” can be about either increasing revenue or decreasing revenue, as long the bill is about the subject of raising revenue.
So the sections on tax credits work for purposes of having a House-originated bill for “raising revenue”.
Under established law, ObamaCare did in fact start as a revenue-raising bill in the House.
Your claim to the contrary leads nowhere.
O-tay. Thanks for sharing your opinion.
It's not even constitutional as a tax. See this excellent dissertation by Freeper John W K here:
Pam Bondi must sue again over Obamacare: SCOTUS rejected punishment tax!
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