“Because the individual mandate is unconstitutional and not severable, the entire act must be declared void. This has been a difficult decision to reach, and I am aware that it will have indeterminable implications. Regardless of how laudable its attempts may have been to accomplish these goals in passing the Act, Congress must operate within the bounds established by the Constitution,” the judge ruled.
Ironically, Judge Vinson used Obama’s own position from the 2008 campaign against him, when he argued that there are other ways to tackle health care short of requiring every American to purchase insurance.
“I note that in 2008, then-Senator Obama supported a health care reform proposal that did not include an individual mandate because he was at that time strongly opposed to the idea, stating that ‘if a mandate was the solution, we can try that to solve homelessness by mandating everybody to buy a house,” Judge Vinson wrote in a footnote toward the end of the ruling.
Now the question is do states continue to plan for the pending 2014 startup of Obamacare, or set to work on a REAL solution to the increasing cost of healthcare and making affordable coverage available to every American?
