The Severability Doctrine

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/23/opinion/the-severability-doctrine.html


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine
Date: Fri, Mar 23, 2012 at 9:45 PM
Subject: re: The Severability Doctrine
To: letters@nytimes.com


To the Editor:
   Professors Gluck and Graetz are wrong in a narrow sense. The
individual mandate to purchase health insurance is inseverable from
the mandate that insurers must cover people with pre-existing medical
conditions. If these two were severed, insurers would rapidly be
bankrupt as the young and healthy demurred to buy insurance until they
had an expense.  In a larger sense, the individual mandate is
unnecessary. If president Obama had had enough political capital to
buck the Insurers and the politicians they had bought to give us a
SinglePayer system, we could dispense with the individual mandate--and
with the insurance companies.
Barry Haskell Levine