Slashdot Mirror
Healthcare Reform Act Prediction Market
An anonymous reader writes "The Wisconsin School of Business is running a prediction market study on the U.S. Supreme Court's decision on the Healthcare Reform Act. By participating you will not only be helping university students, you will also get to express your opinion and compete with others to show that you have the most accurate prediction."
many of the companies that have maybe up to 100 people all of a sudden lose half of their employees so not to go over 50 employee maximum
At most, companies with 60 people might, MIGHT be willing to cut 10 people.
For the most part, I doubt it. It's a severe pain in the ass to do work while understaffed, and if you were already able to do work with less than 50 people, you would've had less than 50 people.
Most places when they do a "count the number of pennies in the jar" game, offer to give the jar to the person with the closest answer. So... where's the jar?
Um... the Supreme Court? Guess correctly and you can take home your very own Justice!
The enemies of Democracy are
Market forces won't work if there's no incentive to be right. It's tempting for ideologues to sign up and just vote the way they want it to go, instead of the way they think it will go.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
My prediction is that companies up to 100 people (and some even bigger) will absolutely lose people until they are under 50 limit.
My prediction is that any company which lays off half or more of its employees at one go, for any reason, is not long for the world, and is probably not a place where people want to keep working if they have any reasonable alternative. I also predict that any company which would lay off any significant portion of its employees for the reason you give is and will continue to be a hellish place to work regardless of what the Supreme Court decides.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
There is no such thing.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
InTrade already has a market running on this issue, where you can bet real money: https://www.intrade.com/v4/markets/contract/?contractId=745353
Of course there is: An activist judge is a judge that makes a ruling which creates a precedent I don't like.
It was "Judicial Activism" when the court ruled that the 14th Amendment applied to Teh Gays, and it'll be the same if they rule that the Commerce Clause can't be used to justify literally anything.
The enemies of Democracy are
if a company can't afford to take this kind of blow, then they are over extending themselves in the first place.
Ever hear of the cure of Home Depot install contracts? a small 5 man operation signs up with HD for install contracts thinking it will make a nice easy income stream... then HD starts sending you more work than you can handle so you grow fast....but your growth is not organic and your costs start going crasy and your QA sucks because you have to sub out so much work that you cannot vet everyone.... then HD drops you for customer complaints...then you go out of business.
When someone cries judicial activism about the court ruling with the constitution it's whining.
When a judge writes laws from the bench it's judicial activism.
You will usually hear cries of judicial activism when the supCt rules against someones sacred cow. The 14th is a good example. It freed everyone from some state tyranny not just them Negroes and boy does it still burn some.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Scotus will most likely delay the decision, it's election year, and Obama has ways to pressure them
Really? What ways in particular? How is the president able to force the scotus not to act? Are you aware of how the three branches of government work in the US? Do you have any idea what you're talking about in general?
Republicans will have to show their base they are not signing under the mandate
Which they came up with...
being constitutional (and it's not), so it's most likely to be delayed.
Newsflash, dippy. The scotus exists for the very purpose of deciding the constitutionality of laws (as well as some other key functions). Thankfully you are not on the court.
But a more important prediction: if/when this act goes into effect expect many of the companies that have maybe up to 100 people all of a sudden lose half of their employees so not to go over 50 employee maximum after which they have to comply with various provisions.
Thank you for demonstrating so clearly that you have no idea what you are talking about. You might as well predict an invading herd of chupacabra to lay siege to Washington DC.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Of course there is: An activist judge is a judge that makes a ruling which creates a precedent I don't like.
Funny, but no. An activist judge is one that makes a ruling which creates a precedent which conflicts with prior rulings regarding the same laws at the same or higher level within the judiciary. In other words, one who rewrites well-established precedents.
Sometimes activism is a good thing; the older precedent may well be flawed. However, it is not something to be undertaken lightly. It creates uncertainty and undermines the accumulated legitimacy of the court, as the conflict implies that at least one of the rulings—and any others based on it—was in error.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
They rolled back the commerce clause when they nullified the Gun Ban in "school zones" by telling Congress they stretched the definition of commerce too far. They also rolled it back some when they said Congress can not force states to create storage facilities to dispose of nuclear fuel.
And then they went and blew whatever gains they had made by declaring that pot grown in your own backyard for your own personal use is interstate commerce.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
The French do not use the Common Law system. They use the Civil Law system, which is derived from the Napoleonic Code, which is derived from the Code of Justinian, which actually dates from well before the fall of the Roman Empire.
The United Kingdom uses the Common Law system.
The United States uses both. The federal system uses Common Law, as do most of the states: but Louisiana in particular uses a Civil Law-based system, in keeping with its heavily French heritage.
I don't see that either one is clearly superior. If you take a look at what comes out of Louisiana state courts, you'll see they're just as crazy as any other system. It's just crazy of a slightly different flavor. You might think that flavor tastes better, but I don't.
When someone cries judicial activism about the court ruling with the constitution it's whining.
What I predict is that the SCOTUS will ignore the fact that the question before them is "is mandating that people buy a product constitutional?" and void the entire act, despite the fact that several parts of it have already gone into effect without the mandate and those parts are doing just fine and would continue to do fine with or without the mandate.
Republicans will cheer for this, despite the fact that they looked the other way every other time the SCOTUS has used some weaselly "jurisprudence" excuse like whining about standing (because destroying the Constitution doesn't injure me one bit) or declaring an issue moot to avoid making a hard decision like "what to do about an american citizen held by the Bush administration without charge for two years" or "what to do when the Bush administration steals the evidence of warrantless wiretapping of American citizens after it has been presented to the court".
The saddest thing is that the entire law was the wrong answer to the wrong problem. The right answer to the wrong problem would have been repealing that law that says the ERs have to treat all comers regardless of ability to pay, then everyone will be lining up for insurance or dying in a ditch. The right problem is why the fuck I need insurance to not go bankrupt if I break my arm. And no, the answer to that one isn't tort reform (seriously, read the article if you think it is.) I don't know what it is, but nobody on either side of the aisle is even bothering to look.
Taxes are taxes, and I doubt the Court is going to challenge that.
They may, however, decided that since the mandate isn't a tax, and it's only justified under the Commerce Clause, that we've been misinterpreting the Commerce Clause for a few decades. THAT would enable them to chuck... well, practically every piece of legislation for the last 50 years, including the Civil Rights Act.
What I predict is that the SCOTUS will ignore the fact that the question before them is "is mandating that people buy a product constitutional?" and void the entire act
Huh? You do realize that SCOTUS isn't just ruling on the mandate, but on several issues concerning the whole legislation, right? While the mandate is being considered on it's own, they reason they might toss the whole act is because of something called "severability". In English, Congress wrote the bill explicitly so that it's not severable, i.e. if you void one part you have to void the whole thing. The bills authors did this for a reason; they gambled that if the bill was written this way, future Congresses wouldn't have the balls to repeal it. It apparently never, ever occurred to them that the act could wind up at SCOTUS, and if the mandate was overturned, it would logically follow that the whole bill would be. SCOTUS is voting on whether the severability language in the bill is indeed binding. Even people that support the mandate think it is. Thus, if the mandate goes, the whole bill goes. But that's up to SCOTUS. As for the Constitutional argument, did you read or listen to any of the oral arguments? Constitutionality is the question on the mandate issue.
despite the fact that several parts of it have already gone into effect without the mandate and those parts are doing just fine and would continue to do fine with or without the mandate.
That's simply not true. Very little of the bill has gone into effect, and the meat of it depends on the mandate to produce the necessary funds via forced participation in the program. If people don't have to participate, poof, the whole funding mechanism falls apart like a house of cards. In short, no mandate, no money.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
killing the mandating part may lead stuff out side health care being challenged in the courts. Like maybe like SOME to ALL taxes, homeowners and auto insurance.
City water and sewer fees (why can't I do it on my own and not be forced to pay)
workers comp, unemployment.
and other stuff
No, this is a pretty empty argument. Congress clearly has taxing power, and that power is itself limited clearly in the Constitution (in short... Congress just can't lay taxes for anything they please). Nowhere in the Constitution, however, is there the power for Congress to make you buy goods or services from third parties. To glean this power from the commerce clause would be to make the commerce clause supreme over the rest of the Constitution as a whole . What's funny is that If Congress had simply passed a new tax to pay for universal coverage, they'd have been fully in their authority to do so (provided they taxed related services, like your Blue Cross plan). But that's not what this bill did. It assessed a penalty for non-particiapation, regardless of the choice of individuals.
And the homeowners/auto insurance argument really doesn't fly either. The government can't penalize you for not buying a house or a car by hitting you with a fine for refusing to buy. "Obamacare" did precisely that with medical insurance. It was effectively a tax on being alive. You don't have to buy a car.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
It's called Fantasy Scotus:
http://www.fantasyscotus.net/healthcare-case-predictions/
These guys have been doing this for years, and it's meant for lawyers and other legal eagles to participate. They have a very good success rate and have markets for all the cases that are being heard. The participants are people in the know, which makes their predictions more reliable than a typical political prediction site.
Say what? The POTUS yesterday went on a rant that accused the Supremes of being activist is they shot down Obamacare. The dittohead/fox news crowd does NOT think this. What I find amazing is the fact that the president is a)so immature as to be upset that someone may strike down a law he really likes, b)does not seem to understand the system of checks and balances we have in the USA.