"Because the Affordable Care Act does not include a severability clause, if the
individual mandate is found unconstitutional, then the whole Act must be struck
down as unconstitutional." WASHINGTON, Jan. 4, 2012 /Christian Newswire/ -- The American Civil Rights Union filed
its sixth brief today challenging the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable
Care Act, otherwise known as ObamaCare.
Today's brief to the U.S. Supreme Court, authored by ACRU General Counsel Peter
Ferrara, argues that lack of a mandate forcing individuals to purchase health
insurance through government-approved exchanges would doom the entire system.
At least one lower federal court has ruled that the individual mandate exceeds the
constitutionally-enumerated powers of the federal government. And the health care
law itself declares that it cannot work without the mandate. Since the law has no
severability clause that ensures that striking down a portion would not invalidate
the whole law, any ruling to that effect would disqualify the entire 2,700-page legislation.
Here's why the mandate is key: Young, healthy people would not bother to buy
insurance until they were ill, thus depriving the premium pool of revenue, which
would drive up costs and eventually bankrupt the system, the brief argues.
"If regulation required fire insurers to issue policies to people whose houses
were already on fire at standard rates, the fire insurance pool would include
only all burned down houses, which would obviously be dysfunctional," the
brief says. "The resulting financial death spiral would cause the costs of other
provisions of the ACA to soar."
Christian Newswire |
