Repeal

The Washington Post reports on a new study by Bloomberg Government, which shows that the repeal of Obamacare would cost health insurance companies more than $1 trillion — yes, that’s trillion — over the remainder of this decade alone.  Why?  Because Obamacare would transfer colossal sums of money from American taxpayers, through the federal government, to private insurers — and repeal would keep that transfer from occurring.

Republican House candidate Tom Cotton has signed a pledge to repeal Obamacare--but his primary opponent, Beth Anne Rankin, has not.

The latest Rasmussen poll of likely voters shows that 26 percent of Democrats support the repeal of President Obama’s centerpiece legislation — which, of course, was a purely Democratic endeavor that passed without a single Republican vote. Moreover, the poll shows that most of these repeal-supporting Democrats are “strongly” supportive of repeal.

Last week, President Obama clumsily announced that it would be "unprecedented" for the Supreme Court to strike down "a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress." This week, his words are already having an effect in the courts—but not the effect he hoped for.

Americans don’t look to be inclined to rely on the Supreme Court to determine the future of Obamacare. For the 30th consecutive time, Rasmussen’s polling of likely voters shows that Americans not only support the repeal of President Obama’s centerpiece legislation but support it by double-digits.

During yesterday’s arguments on the constitutionality of Obamacare’s individual mandate, Justice Stephen Breyer took exception to the states’ argument that the mandate imposes, for the first time in American history, a congressional obligation that private citizens must purchase a product of the government’s choosing.

Yesterday, we endured an esoteric debate over a jurisdictional statute that practically no one expects to actually affect the Supreme Court's review of Obamacare. Today, by contrast, was the argument we've all been waiting for: the challenge to the constitutional merits of Obamacare's individual mandate.

The Washington Post editorial board essentially writes that, because Obamacare is good policy (in the editors’ estimation), and because it would involve the economy, it must also be constitutional.  Here is the Post’s argument, in its entirety:

Politico reports: 

CNN's legal correspondent Jeffrey Toobin reports that the court's conservative wing appeared skeptical of the Obama administration's arguments in favor of the individual mandate provision of the Affordable Care Act.

What do you do when the defining event of your presidency is the passage of a massive health care overhaul that bears your name, is wildly unpopular, and was passed into law without receiving a single vote from the opposing party? If you’re President Obama, you don’t abandon your well-worn strategy of trying to shift the blame. You merely focus on someone who’s more vulnerable to your efforts. 

At the time when President Obama signed Obamacare into law — two years ago today — the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected that Obamacare would cost 3 million people their employer-sponsored health insurance by the end of this decade.

In USA Today, Mitt Romney argues that we need “to abolish” Obamacare, “root and branch,” and replace it with “a free market, federalist approach to making quality, affordable health insurance available to every American.”  He writes, “Each state should be allowed to pursue its own solution in this regard, instead of being dictated to by Washington.”