With the impending, and unprecedented, 3 days of arguments over the Affordable Care Act occurring early next week, it’s interesting to see that the test case being used to challenge the law has now become a test case demonstrating the necessity of the law.
Mary Brown, the woman who asserts no one has the authority to make her buy health care is now bankrupt, at least in part due to medical bills. From theLA Times article:
Mary Brown, a 56-year-old Florida woman who owned a small auto repair shop but had no health insurance, became the lead plaintiff challenging President Obama’s healthcare law because she was passionate about the issue.
Brown “doesn’t have insurance. She doesn’t want to pay for it. And she doesn’t want the government to tell her she has to have it,” said Karen Harned, a lawyer for the National Federation of Independent Business. Brown is a plaintiff in the federation’s case, which the Supreme Court plans to hear later this month.
But court records reveal that Brown and her husband filed for bankruptcy last fall with $4,500 in unpaid medical bills. Those bills could change Brown from a symbol of proud independence into an example of exactly the problem the healthcare law was intended to address.
I think at this point the solicitor general just has to point at the plaintiff and say “See! See!”.
People without health insurance are still covered by the ethical obligations of EMTALA. They can still see doctors and get treatment and not pay their bills. Then who pays for it? All of the rest of us.
The “individual mandate” should be called a “personal responsibility” provision, because the fact is all these rugged individualists are parasites. They are refusing to pay into the system then benefiting when they, inevitably, need to use it.
And how about the argument that the commerce clause can’t for such an individual responsibility provision?
The couple owed $2,140 to Bay Medical Center in Panama City, $610 to Bay Medical Physicians, $835 to an eye doctor in Alabama and $900 to a specialist in Mississippi.
“This is a very common problem. We cover $30 million in charity and uncompensated care every year,” said Christa Hild, a spokeswoman for the hospital center. “If it’s a bad debt, we have to absorb it.”
So, this couple has generated bills in three different states that they now will not be able to pay and the rest of us have to eat the bill for them. It’s amazing how the plaintiff’s own actions have justified nearly every argument for the bill. When healthcare now represents something like 1 in 7 dollars spent in this country, how can we argue that the commerce clause does not allow congress to regulate it?
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