Well... holy wow. Healthcare Bill UpheldFollow

It is really interesting that in general this is described as the individual mandate being upheld. Really the verdict as written is largely opposed to the individual mandate idea. I mean they pretty much shoot down the whole notion that the government can force you to buy health care, or really interfere in the markets in any way in this matter. So in that sense any mandate is gone, and seemingly outside of the governments granted powers (as a lot of people suspected I'm guessing). Interestingly I wonder how much this decision get interpreted in the future, there's a lot of negativity about pro-actively interfering in markets. However contrary to that:



What's interesting about this, is that if the language of the bill was written to describe this as a tax, it probably would have never gotten this far. The use of the word "penalty" instead of "tax" seems to have caused a bit of a debate, since one is deemed to be within congresses powers and the other outside of it.

The more of this I read the more interesting this decision becomes. There's really a lot of more traditional/conservative reasoning in there (I suppose this is indicative of Roberts), for justifying a very liberal idea.

An extremely loose definition of the word "entertainment," at that.

lulz

So what exactly does this mean? Are you people joining the rest of the civilised world now?

In other words, you can't explain what's funny about it. Gotcha!

You're right, I can't. Explaining a joke never works to make it funny. Either you get it or you don't.

Or there's just not anything funny about. Again, gotcha!

Linky that describes some of the changes




Edited, Jun 28th 2012 2:07pm by someproteinguy

You're right. I wrote "lulz" just for the practice.

Hopefully the ACA covers cases of chronic butthurt in Republicans.

The thing is, just because you don't see yourself leaving the company any time soon, doesn't mean your company feels the same way. When I recieved my very first pink slip back in 2005, my naive self was shocked. I had given them seven years of loyalty, working my way of from outbound shclub taking credit card applications over the phone, to lower management of a successful division. The decision to downsize had little to do with my performance; our company had lost the lease on their very cushy, giant building, and they were going to have to move within a year. They went from around 200,000 square feet in an 150 year old four story mill to about a fourth of that in an old grocery store. The rent went down, but they also had to split up the company and consolidate divisions. My division, a boutique inbound call center of relatively highly paid insurance processors, was the first to get merged in with another department. They didn't need four supervisors in the newly combined department, and the other department was a medical division that would require sending me off for two weeks training on the other side of the country. Easy decision to let me go and keep the larger department's three, already trained supervisors, and have them cross trained locally on my stuff.

I've been bitter about how corporate America works ever since. Objectively, I can see why they let me go and kept my coworkers, but on a personal level, I'm still ticked about it. I lost a salaried position with pretty damn good benefits, and I've been trying to make up lost ground ever since to some extent.

At the same time though they are expanding Medicaid to cover people up to 133% of the federal poverty line and provide subsidies for insurance via tax credits for people making up to 400% of the poverty line. That's people making around $44k for an individual or $88k for a family of four.

This will make things interesting over the next few months at work. When Doyle was still in office, our state already had a head start on an exchange that was supposed to be a model other states could follow. When Walker got in office early last year and installed Smith at DHS, the money was returned when Wisco jumped on the lawsuit bandwagon. I'm curious as to how this is going to play out now. I can see states like Florida still holding out since the deadline is basically 2014 for the mandate. Not sure how it will be handled here.