The main plaintiff in the lawsuit against the Department of Health and Human Services regarding the new health care act has filed for bankruptcy protection in Florida…. because she can’t pay her medical bills!
Mary Brown and her husband own an auto repair business that allegedly failed. Thus, they are filing for bankruptcy protection to discharge $60,000 in consumer debts. This is what many of our clients are forced to do in Massachusetts bankruptcies. Ms. Brown’s debts include about $4,485 hospital and doctor bills, which is not uncommon in personal bankruptcy.
While the bankruptcy law will help the Brown family discharge their debts, they allege that the ACA law hurts them. Of course they are right; the ACA would require them to buy medical insurance. On the other hand, folks that can’t afford their medical bills, including the Browns, put $60 billion worth of medical expenses on the rest of us.
The Patent Protection and Affordable Care Act, reincarnated as “Obamacare” in the current political campaign, requires that everyone purchase health insurance. Actually, like the Massachusetts health care law, it doesn’t really require anything; it simply penalizes folks who won’t buy medical insurance. Politics aside, the economics of that part of the law are simple: the folks that don’t buy health insurance externalize their health care costs, the $60 billion, onto the rest of us. Or, to put it differently, if you don’t buy insurance, you put the costs of your health care on me, and the “government” ends up paying the bill.
So it’s the government requiring you to do something, which seems unfair, but it is in order to pay your eventual bill, which seems fair to the rest of us. According to the brief filed by the respondents, absent the ACA insurance requirement, Congress found that people would simply wait until they had a medical condition before they started paying for insurance.
Ms. Brown and many others don’t like the law and want the federal government out of their business. In the New York Times this morning, Court of Appeals Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson, III, put it this way: “It is tempting to shout states’ rights when deeply flawed federal legislation is enacted, but the momentary satisfactions of that exercise carry long-term constitutional costs.” Judge Wilkinson points out that we need the federal government to regulate commerce and national economic policy.
In any event, various people like Ms. Brown have sued the government, claiming that this part of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is unconstitutional, and that it can’t be separated from the rest of the law. The various Appeals Courts are split on whether the insurance requirement can be separated from the other parts of the law. Thus, the US Supreme Court has agreed to hear the cases to determine if the whole law has to be changed, if the requirement to purchase insurance is constitutional, or if the law is sufficient.
The ACA has many other facets, including removing the preexisting condition exclusions, making medical insurance tax deductions fairer, and incentives to reduce medical costs, with changes to Medicare. Wherefore, the Department of Health and Human Services calls the petitioners’ demand that the whole ACA be declared unconditional “extraordinary” because it attempts to invalidate an entire, complex, law, based on one small part of it.
A significant point in the case against Ms. Brown is that, as one of the Appeals Courts pointed out “the lion’s share of the Act has nothing to do with private insurance, much less the mandate that individuals buy insurance.” However, the media is picking up the politically sensitive part of the ACA, which simply penalizes folks who don’t buy insurance.
In a Massachusetts bankruptcy, you can discharge any medical or hospital bills. Contact our office for a free consultation.