Obamacare Mandate argument review

The government argues that the Affordable Health Care Act _____ a fundamental and _____ problem in our health care system and our economy. Insurance has become the predominant _____ of paying for health care. People not covered by employer-provided insurance must _____to the individual market, and that market does not operate under ERISA and HIPAA regulations that _____ discrimination against people based on their medical history. That is an economic problem that _____ another economic problem.

preclude     addresses    begets  enduring    resort     means

Congress is addressing the problem directly through this Act by _____ the means by which health care is _____. The minimum _____ provision is necessary to _____ into execution those insurance reforms. What is being regulated is the method of _____ health -- the purchase of health care. That itself is economic activity with _____ effects on interstate commerce. The health care market is _____ by the fact that virtually everybody is either in that market or will be in that market, and the distinguishing _____ of that is that they cannot -- people cannot generally control when they _____ that market or what they need when they do.

coverage     substantial     regulating    carry     financing     feature     enter     characterized     purchased

It isn't _____ to say that somebody who is doing absolutely nothing about health care is _____ health care services. The respondents _____ that it is _____ the authority of Congress under Article I, under the commerce power, to _____ guaranteed-issue and community-rating reforms, to _____ a minimum coverage provision. One big difference, with respect to other markets, is that you don't have the cost shifting to other market _____. In the health care market, many billions of dollars of _____ costs are transferred directly to other market _____.

impose(2)     acknowledge     artificial     financing     participants(2)     within      uncompensated

“If congress is imposing on individuals the _____ duty to act, to go into commerce, do you not have a heavy _____ of justification?” the court asks.  The US responds that all this minimum coverage provision does is say that, instead of requiring insurance at the _____, that Congress has the authority under the commerce power and the necessary and _____ power to _____ that people have insurance in advance of the _____ because of the _____ nature of this market.

point of sale(2)     ensure     unique     affirmative    proper     burden

The food market, while it shares that _____ that everybody's in it, is not a market in which your participation is often _____ and often _____. That is a _____ basis for distinguishing this from other situations, a basis which shows that this is not going _____ what the system of _____ powers allows the government to do.  Here Congress is regulating _____ commerce, economic activity that is already going on, people's participation in the health care market, and is regulating to deal with _____ effects of _____ commerce.

involuntary     principled     beyond     trait    enumerated     existing(3)     unpredictable

The principle that the US is _____ here under the Commerce Clause does not take the _____ of justifying the _____ of commerce. This is not a _____ mandate. This is a law that _____ the method of paying for a service that the _____ of people to whom it _____ are consuming.

purchase    class     advocating    step    applies     regulates     creation

The _____ here that Congress has chosen, the minimum coverage provision, is one that regulates economic activity, _____ your _____ in the health care market, with _____ effects on interstate commerce. To the _____ that we are looking at the _____ scheme, it is regulating commerce that already exists out there. And the _____ in which that regulation is made effective here, the minimum coverage provision, is a regulation of the way in which people _____, the method of their payment in the health care market.

transaction     means(2)    substantial     participate     comprehensive     namely    extent

 

The states argue that the mandate represents an _____ effort by Congress to _____ individuals to _____ commerce in order to better regulate commerce, a far _____ power than _____ allowed under the Commerce Clause.

unprecedented    that    enter     compel   greater

When Congress passed the _____, it did make _____ about why it thought it could regulate the commerce here, and it _____ the mandate as a regulation of the economic decision to _____ the purchase of health insurance. That is a theory without any _____ principle. If you regulate the _____, you regulate commerce, that's _____ Congress's commerce power.

forgo     findings    statute    justified    point of sale    within     limiting

Most of the discussion so far has _____ on the _____ that the only thing that's at issue here is emergency room visits, and the only thing that's being _____ is catastrophic care _____. But, as the Chief Justice _____ earlier, a lot of the insurance that's being covered is for ordinary _____ care, ordinary office visits, and those are the kinds of things that _____ can predict.

imposed     proceeded    one     coverage     preventive     assumption    indicated

If Congress tried to _____ at the point of sale, the one group that it wouldn't _____ at all are the people who don't want to _____ health insurance and also have no plans of using health care services in the _____. And Congress very much wanted to ­­­­­_____ those people. Those people are _____ the golden geese that pay for the entire _____ of the premium.

near term     essentially     regulate    purchase     lowering     capture(2)

Somebody who is not in the insurance market is sort of _____ as an _____ risk. I mean, we could look at the people not in the insurance market, and what we'd find is that they're relatively young, relatively healthy, and they would have a certain _____ of _____ risks that would _____ lead to lower premiums. One of the things, Congress _____ to accomplish here was to force individuals into the insurance market to _____ those that are already in it to lower the _____.

pool     rates    irrelevant     actually     sought     actuarial(2)    subsidize

The court commented that, if Congress could see this as a problem, when we need to have a group that will _____ the ones who are going to get the _____, it seems to me you're saying the only way that could be done is if the government does it itself; it can't _____ the private market, it can't _____ the private insurers. The states replied that the most _____ way to regulate would be to figure out what amount of _____ to the insurance industry is necessary to pay for guaranteed issue and community rating. And once we calculate the amount of that _____, we could have a tax that's spread generally through everybody to raise the _____ to pay for that _____.

benefits     subsidize   revenue     straightforward      subsidy(3)     involve(2)

 

Lots of people in Manhattan, for example, don't have car insurance because they don't have cars. And so they have the option of _____ from that market. It's not a _____ imposition from the government, where there is no way to get _____ of the regulatory _____. The question that's a _____ question for this Court, though, is _____ or not, for the first time ever in our history, Congress also has the power to _____ people into commerce, because that would be a very efficient way of doing things for purposes of Congress's _____ regulation of that market.

web     withdrawing      proper     compel      optimal     outside     direct    whether

And with _____to the health insurance market that's designed to have payment in the health care market, everybody is not in the market. And that's the _____ of the _____, and that's the problem Congress is trying to solve. And if it tried to solve it through _____, we wouldn't be here; but, it's trying to solve it in a way that nobody has ever tried to solve an economic problem before, which is saying, you know, it would be so much more efficient if you were just _____ this market.

JUSTICE KENNEDY: But they are in the market in the sense that they are _____ a risk that the market must _____ for.

MR. CLEMENT: Well, Justice Kennedy, I don't think that's right, certainly in any way that distinguishes this from any other context. When I'm sitting in my house deciding I'm not going to buy a car, I am causing the labor market in Detroit to go south.

in      respect    account      premise    incentives     creating     statute