I think nothing better illustrates how poorly the oral arguments went for the Obama administration today than this exchange where Solicitor General Donald Verrilli Jr. tried to claim the individual mandate to buy insurance is not actually a government “purchase mandate.” From the transcripts: JUSTICE SCALIA: General Verrilli, you -you could say that about buying [...]

With the Supreme Court hearing argument on the constitutionality of the individual mandate, some of its defenders are claiming it must exist to stop the so called “death spiral” in health insurance.  In reality only the premium subsidies, not the mandate per se, can actually stop such a theoretical event. The idea behind the death [...]

The Urban Institute is out with a new policy brief claiming the individual mandate will only affect 2-5% of the population, and it has managed to get some media traction. The problem is that the whole brief has a huge logical problem by looking at only a tiny window of time. From Urban Institute: What [...]

One of the most important questions the Justices will likely bring up tomorrow in the deliberation about the individual mandate will be: Is health care — or health insurance — actually unique? This raises the important issue sometimes called the “broccoli question.” The general idea behind it is that if the federal government has the [...]

In there questions during oral arguments, today, Supreme Court Justices strongly suggested that the 1876 Tax Anti-Injunction Act will not prevent them from ruling on the individual mandate this year.   David Dayen quotes some of the Justices’ questions that indicate they were not persuaded by the tax argument.  That also  appears to be the near [...]

It is day one in the almost unprecedented three days of Supreme Court oral arguments regarding the Affordable Care Act.  The first thing on the Court’s agenda is whether or not they can even rule on the case yet. The Court decided to devote 90 minutes of oral arguments today to deal only with that [...]

Today is the two year anniversary of the adoption of the Affordable Care Act, President Obama’s signature legislative achievement. Despite the widely promoted insane belief the that law would magically get more popular after it was passed, two years later the law has only gotten less popular. Research indicates that the intense unpopularity of the [...]

The Democrats’ decision to include an individual mandate to buy private insurance in the Affordable Care Act continues to seriously hurt overall support for the law. The incredible damage to popular support caused by just this one provision is perfectly indicated by these two question in the recent Washington Post ABC News poll. 15. The [...]

The American people continue to strongly dislike the individual mandate in the Affordable Care Act, and the intensity of this opposition has only increased. According to Kaiser Family Foundation tracking poll only 32 percent of the country has a favorable opinion of the mandate, while 64 view it unfavorably. Impressively a 54% majority of the [...]

A new study by the RAND Corporation found that while simply removing the individual mandate from the Affordable Care Act would result in fewer individuals choosing to buy insurance, it would not produce the so-called premium death spiral predicted by some of the mandate’s strongest supporters. From RAND: According to estimates created using a microsimulation [...]