Trump has waged war against the decade-old Affordable Care Act aka Obamacare. Part of it is because he wants to overturn every aspect of Obama’s legacy. But another is that Republicans have long fought bitterly against the law because it helps poor people and is thus, by definition, ‘socialism’. Trump promised to overturn the law but failed repeatedly so naturally, since he can never see himself as a loser, he claimed that he actually won because he got rid of that part of the law known as the individual mandate.
Insurance works by spreading the risks and the larger the pool of insured people, the better the system works. The mandate was the fine that was imposed on people who did not sign up for insurance. Trump did not actually get rid of the individual mandate. What happened was that an earlier Supreme Court decision said that while such a mandate exceeded congress’s power and was unconstitutional, in a narrow 5-4 ruling by chief justice John Roberts, they also said that it could be considered a tax and thus was within congressional taxing powers.
[Read more…]