Chief Justice Roberts saves Obamacare!

[kentonio]

Until they introduce a rising scale of fines for repeat offenders to balance the cost.

[Tupac Shakur]

That's probably not constitutional.

[Dinner]

Can somebody remind me what the penalty amount is for not buying insurance? To make things simple, assume there is no hardship.

NPR was saying that they could take someone's tax return but they have no powers to put a lien on someone's property or garnish their wages or seize assets. Basically, if you refuse to buy insurance you could lose your tax return money but that's hardly the end of the world especially since you could adjust your withholdings so that you pay your taxes but don't get a return.

[giblets]

So am I still off-base in assuming the sensible thing to do with this healthcare law is to just not get healthcare, pay the fines cheaper than the insurance premiums, and then take advantage of the pre-existing condition law by buying insurance after getting sick or injured? My posts to this affect were ignored but it seems logical.

I could be wrong on this, but I don't think you can wait until you're in the hospital and have hospital bills to get insurance.

[The Mad Monk]

What's stopping you at this point?

More to the point, what's keeping people from thinking that way and acting on it at this point?

[Dinner]

A desire to not make financially ruinous decisions?

[The Mad Monk]

Like you were all about that when you were young and immortal.

[Dinner]

Agreed. But it is still true. It just hit home a bit more a year or so back when I started bleeding out of my ass.

[The Mad Monk]

Unfortunately, most people need a bleeding ass to get it in gear.

[Dinner]

It is a good motivator. I was like "AHHHH, MY ******* IS BLEEDING!"

[Al B. Sure!]

I could be wrong on this, but I don't think you can wait until you're in the hospital and have hospital bills to get insurance.

What The Mad Monk said but also not every injury or illness immediately puts you in the emergency room. A lot of stuff comes on gradually and you see it coming.

[Al B. Sure!]

I could be wrong on this, but I don't think you can wait until you're in the hospital and have hospital bills to get insurance.

What The Mad Monk said but also not every injury or illness immediately puts you in the emergency room. A lot of stuff comes on gradually and you see it coming.

Like rectal bleeding. You start noticing it and can be like damn this could be something serious. Let me get my insurance now so I can go to the doctor.

Seriously though, as long as the tax is less than the premiums, what's disincentivizing such behavior?

[Hauldren Collider]

So am I still off-base in assuming the sensible thing to do with this healthcare law is to just not get healthcare, pay the fines cheaper than the insurance premiums, and then take advantage of the pre-existing condition law by buying insurance after getting sick or injured? My posts to this affect were ignored but it seems logical.

This is one of many reasons why the law is outrageously bad.

[giblets]

What The Mad Monk said but also not every injury or illness immediately puts you in the emergency room. A lot of stuff comes on gradually and you see it coming.

Well, that part is what the fine is supposed to compensate for. They obviously anticipated the possibility that people might want to wait until something comes up before buying insurance.

[Al B. Sure!]

This is one of many reasons why the law is outrageously bad.

Here's what Gary Becker has to say:

In the past I supported a health care mandate that would require everyone to have minimal insurance against catastrophic health events, such as cancers, that are very expensive to treat. Catastrophic insurance alone is pretty cheap since they are rare for younger persons, the main ones not covered either by private insurance, Medicare or Medicaid. Since the great majority of individuals and families could afford to pay for such catastrophic coverage, only the real poor need have this coverage subsidized by the federal government.

The argument I gave in support of such a mandate is that individuals without insurance who develop a catastrophic medical condition would impose significant burdens on those with insurance by raising the cost of insurance to everyone. But research (see the Urban Institute’s report in 2008 by Hadley, Holahan, Coughlin, and Miller, “Covering the Uninsured in 2008: Current Costs, Sources of Payment, and Incremental Costs”) convinced me that while in principle this is a concern, the medical care provided to the many uninsured in America has had only a small effect on the cost of private health insurance.These authors find that private insurance premiums were raised by no more than 1.7% because of the shifting of the costs of the uninsured to private insurers. Partly for this reason I have changed my position on the health care mandate, and no longer believe it is worth the cost of getting the government involved in mandating health insurance for everyone.

The form the health care mandate takes in the Affordable Care Act also influenced my change in position on these mandates. This Act does not simply mandate catastrophic insurance coverage, but mandates a far more extensive coverage that can hardly be justified by the need to protect individuals against the cost of serious illnesses. Moreover, instead of just subsidizing the poor, this Act also subsidizes individuals and families with incomes that are several times above the poverty line. As frequently happens in the political implementation of possibly good policies, the actual mandate and many other programs under this Act are likely to do more harm than good.

http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2012/07/the-health-care-mandate-if-it-seems-like-a-tax-it-is-a-tax-becker.html

Well, that part is what the fine is supposed to compensate for. They obviously anticipated the possibility that people might want to wait until something comes up before buying insurance.

Yeah but the fine is less than the cost of the premiums. Unless the tax is equal to or exceeds the premiums, it's not a disincentive.