Barack Obama News: Supreme Court Will Let HeathCare Law Stand
Barack Obama News: Supreme Court Will Let HealthCare Law Stand
Appearing in the Rose Garden, yesterday, with Prime Minister Stephen Harper of Canada and Felipe Caldoron of Mexico, the President spoke candidly about why he think The Supreme Court will keep his Affordable Health Care Act. The first reason was because he says that two very lower court conservative justices had already agreed that penalizing people who didn't purchase health insurance was within Congress' power.
He said it would be bad if they undid the Act because so many children had already been given insurance, changes had already been made to prescription Medicare, and insurance industry reforms had already been put in place.
The President said:
"This is not an abstract argument," he declared. "People's lives are affected by the lack of availability of health care, the in-affordability of health care, their inability to get health care because of pre-existing conditions … I think the American people understand and I think that the justices should understand that in the absence of the individual mandate, you cannot have a mechanism to ensure that people with preexisting conditions can actually get health care."
"So there not only is an economic element to this, and a legal element to this, there is also a human element to this," he added.
In his third and final and strongest point, he said would be the very judicial activism conservatives often exercised. He said the law went through both Congress' and was signed by the President. He said this would be a form of judicial overreach.
He said:
"Ultimately I am confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress," the president concluded. "And I just remind conservative commentators that for years what we have heard is that the biggest problem on the bench was judicial activism or a lack of judicial restraint; that an unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law. Well, this is a good example. And I'm pretty confident that this court will recognize that and not take that step."
