The 11th Circuit Board of Appeals ruled that the Individual Mandate, a crucial part of the Affordable Care Act, was unconstitutional.
http://swampland.time.com/2011/08/12/11t...This is the part of the health Care law that most of the people objected to. The rationale behind requiring everyone to buy health care, is that if the insurance companies just had to insure those who were old and sick, the premiums would be very costly. By forcing everyone, even the young and healthy to get into the insurance pool, the cost would be spread out, bringing everyone's costs down.
Of course a prior ruling from the 6th court ruled that the law was constitutional, so now the issue will go to the Supreme Court. Given the makeup of the Supreme court, I don't hold out much hope for upholding that portion of the law. That is unfortunate because it means that everyone's health care costs will go up a lot, just when the economy is getting worse, and with the austerity measures, we have less money to spend.
There is one ray of hope however. Individual States have the ability to determine the best way to fund their citizen's health care. One State, Vermont has passed and the governor has signed into law, a Single Payer health Care law that promises to be much cheaper than any of the private insurance plans the other states are working on.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/26...Single payer health care is cheaper than private insurers for two main reasons. The first is profit. The private insurance companies are motivated by profit, and currently the insurance companies have 30% profit rates. Of course states are free to select the cheapest health care providers, and non profit providers could provide quality health care for a third less than for profit ones.
The other reason that a single payer health care provider would be cheaper is the administrative costs. The private insurers have administrative costs of 30%, mainly because they spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to avoid paying for health care. They can only make a profit by denying service. Half of the people in the country have pre-existing conditions that would allow insurance companies to deny payment of services, unless they were forced to accept them. The Affordable Care Act will force them to accept everyone in 2014.
http://www.healthcare.gov/center/reports...A single payer system like Vermont's would help everyone that was in need. There would be no complicated forms and no denial of service for trivial reasons. For these reasons Vermont will provide health care for much less than what other States can afford. Vermont doesn't need a 30% profit margin and they will have very small administrative fees. When other states see that a single payer system is much cheaper, they will also adopt similar systems.
That is what happened in Canada. One province started with single payer and the other provinces saw that it was cheaper and more efficient, so soon the entire nation had single payer.
That is what the rest of the developed world knows, and that is why they can provide health care for half the cost of ours. That is what liberals tried to get Obama to pass, but Congress insisted on a complicated system that relied on expensive middlemen, the private insurance companies. They designed a complicated mess and a huge new bureaucracy to appease the Republicans, and the only way such a private insurance program would be economically feasible was to use an idea the Republicans came up with, that is used in Massachusetts. This complicated law relied on the individual mandate to bring costs down as they have in Massachusetts.
Of course we don't really need a huge new bureaucracy. We already have an existing non profit health care structure that everyone loves, that is very efficient and which only has 3% administrative costs. We should just expand Medicare for everyone. This would also solve the solvency problems of Medicare because it would no longer just be caring for the old and infirm, the costs would be shared by the healthy, and there is no doubt about Medicare being constitutional.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/08...