Can some legal eagle answer this?
I thought the SCOTUS decision upholding the right of the federal government to control the options people had for health care was based on their power to tax - and that the penalty (the mandate) was the tax.
So if you take away that mandate - that tax - then don’t you also take away the basis for Obamacare being constitutional, under the SCOTUS decision?
That's a good point, and it's the basis of a lot of confusion about the SCOTUS decision.
People just assume that the SCOTUS declared ObamaCare constitutional in its entirety, but that's not how the court works. The court only made a decision about a specific ObamaCare provision that was subject to the particular legal challenge that brought the case into the SCOTUS in the first place. In that particular decision, it was the constitutionality of the individual mandate that was challenged.
This is where I think Chief Justice Roberts gets a bit of a bad rap here on FR. If you look at the details of that particular challenge to ObamaCare, his decision -- that the individual mandate is constitutional because it is a legitimate "tax" -- is not all that outlandish.
There are plenty of other provisions of ObamaCare that can be challenged on a constitutional basis. Some of the challenges are ongoing. The ones tied to religious exemptions, for example, have a strong chance of success. And the whole idea of government involvement in mandating coverage is unconstitutional, but it's actually not easy for an individual to challenge this core provision of ObamaCare. In a legal process, the only ones who are "victims" of these stupid mandates are the insurance carriers themselves ... and they are all big supporters of ObamaCare.
So if you take away that mandate - that tax - then don’t you also take away the basis for Obamacare being constitutional, under the SCOTUS decision?”””
I came to the same conclusion-—I think you are totally correct.