Supreme Court will argue Obama Care

PBS NewsHour talked about the case coming up in the Supreme Court where Obama Care will be argued.

 

JUDY WOODRUFF: ... Summarize the basics for us of what this law is. How is it intended when it's all said and done, if it becomes law, to change the way Americans interact with the health care system?

SUSAN DENTZER (health analyst for the NewsHour): Well, Judy, of course, it's a big law.

But the most relevant provisions are these. Fifty million people in the country don't have health insurance. And the insurance market is fraying as the costs of health insurance gets so high, so expensive. So what the law does is essentially says for about half of those without health insurance who we're going to tack on -- actually, I should say that this law only solves about two-thirds of the problem of uninsured.

But for half of that two-thirds, we're going to take the Medicaid program and expand it for those people. So, Medicaid, which traditionally was our program for low-income people, we will make that bigger. We will write some new rules. About 10 to 20 million people will go into that.

Then, for higher-income people, not really-high-income people, but higher-income people, who are buying insurance on their own or who work for small businesses, we are going to create new markets in every state called health insurance exchanges. We are going to let people buy coverage through those new markets. We're going to give them federal subsidies to help pay for it.

And we are going to do something else. We are going to change the health insurance market, because right now for a lot of people, the health insurance market operates by leaving out people who are sick and just trying to insure the people who are healthy. It doesn't work very well.

We're going to change the rules. We're going to turn it around. We're going to get everybody in the pool. So in a sense, the government is saying -- it's like a lifeguard -- everybody get into the insurance pool. And that is the piece that is the individual mandate that says everybody's got to get covered.

 

 

SUSAN DENTZER: Well, there are four major complaints.

One of the primary ones, though, is that individual mandate, the government saying everybody get into the pool, is unconstitutional. And, in effect, if we think about most Americans, most Americans have health insurance. Most Americans work for large employers, have coverage. They don't need to worry about this. They're really not affected by it.

The mandate is really is there so that people who would otherwise stay out of coverage for whatever reason will get into the pool, because this whole system only works if everybody, healthy and sick, is in the pool and then we spread the cost of insurance across the whole population.

So that's the argument. Is the mandate constitutional, is it okay for the government to say everybody get into the pool, or not?

 

 

You can read the transcript or watch the video for the whole conversation about what is scheduled to be talked about during the days of arguments, on both sides of it:

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/law/jan-june12/healthreform_03-22.html