My Facebook friend was recently diagnosed with cancer on August 13, 2012. She was poor, over fifty and had been living in her car off and on since March of this year. Occasionally someone would have mercy upon her and would allow her to stay with them for approximately 3 weeks at a time. You can imagine her stress level was extremely high due to the uncertainty.
On August 12, she called me to say that she had a doctor’s appointment. After sitting in the waiting room for six hours, she was finally seen for approximately 10 minutes and was told to go to the hospital the following morning where she was diagnosed with cancer and three weeks later she was dead.
Did she die due to a lack of access to healthcare? No. The few doctors and nurses available bent over backwards to help her and to make her as comfortable as humanly possible.
The problem was the shortage of doctors and nurses available for the number of patients needing care. The fact of the matter is, physicians foresee in their future a decrease in income coupled with an increased work load, a toxic combination of new regulations and taxes plus millions of newly insured individuals swelling their patient rosters.
The Association of American Medical Colleges estimates that in
2015 the country will have 62,900 fewer doctors than needed. And that number
will more than double by 2025, as the expansion of insurance coverage and the
aging of baby boomers drive up demand for care. Even without the health care law,
the shortfall of doctors in 2025 would still exceed 100,000. Health experts,
including many who support the law, say there is little that the government or
the medical profession will be able to do to close the gap by 2014, when the
law begins extending coverage to about 30 million Americans. It typically takes
a decade to train a doctor.
For the next generation of senior citizens, finding a doctor will
be more difficult and waiting times for doctor appointments are likely to be
longer. The American Association of Medical Colleges projects a shortage of
124,000 doctors by 2025.” Obamacare does
nothing to reverse this worrisome trend, instead making it worse.
The Patient Protection Affordable Care Act (PPACA)!
On June 28, 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court rendered its
decision. Call it Hillarycare or Obamacare, either way; it is the law of the land and many portions of the PPACA have already been quietly enacted. Could that account for the longer than normal waits to see a doctor?
In a move that stunned the nation, the vote was 5-4 to uphold
the insurance mandate and the rest of the Affordable Care Act. The vote
had come down to a 4-4 vote, giving Chief Justice John Roberts the
deciding vote. Although known as a conservative, Roberts voted that the
insurance mandate was illegal ONLY because it was tied to a tax. He ruled
that since the penalty for not being insured was to be collected by the I.R.S.,
that it amounted to a tax and that Congress has the legal right to levy taxes.
In his ruling, Robert’s also stated that the requirement to force
someone to purchase a product or pay a penalty does violate the Commerce Clause
of the U.S. Constitution. Because he also ruled that the insurance
mandate was a tax and not a penalty, that it no longer violated the Commerce
Clause and as such was legal.
However, by Roberts’ very ruling, he actually made the insurance
mandate illegal and subject to further litigation and possibly still being
thrown out.
According to the
Origination Clause of the U.S. Constitution, all tax or revenue generating
legislation must begin in the U.S. House of Representatives. The
Affordable Care Act was first introduced by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid
in the U.S. Senate and not the House. Therefore, the insurance mandate
tax violates the Origination Clause of the U.S. Constitution and must be struck
down.
The second issue is that since the U.S. Senate cannot initiate any
tax or revenue generating legislation, the penalty for not purchasing health
insurance cannot be a tax according to the Origination Clause. If it
cannot be a tax, then it has to be a penalty and thus we go back to a violation
of the Commerce Clause which Chief Justice Roberts said the insurance mandate
would be.
It Ain't over, yet!
