Both hands clapping – Trump administration won’t defend Obamacare in key case | Power Line

The constitutionality of Obamacare is under challenge once again. Six years ago, the Supreme Court held that the federal government does not have the power to order people to buy health insurance, but does have the power to impose a tax on those without health insurance. The ruling saved Obamacare.

However, the tax bill Congress passed last year eliminates the tax penalty contained in Obamacare. Thus, Texas now argues that the individual mandate to buy health insurance lacks a constitutional basis.

I can only comment on experiences in Colorado. The implementation in Colorado is an object lesson in government inefficiency. If you want a tax credit, you have to apply for Medicaid. Maybe you get the correct determination, maybe you don’t. I have a client’s family with an income of $150,000 that was on Medicaid. For another household, I have a determination document in front of me that  in one paragraph it states that the family is on Medicaid and the next it states they don’t qualify due to income.

I had another recent experience where a lady made too much for Medicaid but supposedly didn’t qualify for a tax credit (and not because she made too much for a tax credit). She was also in the midst of treatment and apparently had no health insurance. Hours of my time to get it fixed.

It’s a Rube Goldberg machine. Some of it’s the law, other parts of it is bureaucratic inefficiency and some of it is due to inter-agency power struggles.

All that said, one thing is for sure, it’s pretty much destroyed my faith that the government should be running healthcare, with the caveat that Medicare seems to work fairly well. Oh, except that it’s going to run out of money in 2026!

Now my client base, with some exceptions, disagrees with me. Their faith in government surpasses anything that I can imagine.

What we have now is a mess, of that there is little doubt.