The Hill’s Julian Pecquet reports that in light of Judge Henry Hudson’s ruling to invalidate the individual mandate in the Affordable Care Act, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) is passing around an old Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report touting the deficit savings of eliminating the requirement. The report estimates that the change could “bring in $202 billion from its 2014 start date to 2019,” while causing “the number of uninsured people to increase by 16 million — to 39 million — over the same time period”:

The penalty itself — $695, or 2.5 percent of income, whichever is greater, starting in 2016 — would bring in about $17 billion from 2010-2019, CBO’s scoring window. But that would be more than offset by savings from the millions of people who would choose not to take advantage of federal health programs and subsidies.

According to the CBO, repealing the mandate would reduce the number of people on Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program by 6 million to 7 million people; reduce those with individual coverage by 5 million; and reduce those who choose employer-sponsored coverage by 4 million to 5 million people.

The savings to Medicaid would amount to about $113 billion, according to CBO, while the government would save another $39 billion in uncollected subsidies and about $60 billion in increased tax revenues linked to the reduction in employer coverage.

First, it’s refreshing to see the Republicans citing the CBO again, an agency they had previously maligned as a group of hardworking geeks who simply do what they’re told and thus produce analysis that is grounded on flawed assumptions that can’t be trusted. Secondly, it’s telling that Coburn is simply dismissing the increase in the uninsured and ignoring the fact that if you eliminate the mandate and remove any incentive for young people to purchase coverage, you’re dramatically increasing the costs for those individuals who need insurance. From the CBO’s analysis:

This adverse selection would increase premiums for new non-group policies (purchased either in the exchanges or directly from insurers in the non-group market) by an estimated 15 to 20 percent relative to current law. Without the mandate, Medicaid enrollees would also have higher expected health spending, on average, than those enrolled under current law.

Coburn’s suggestion that we should lower the deficit by asking the poorest Americans to pay more for health insurance coverage is troubling, no? I would just point out that 18% of Oklahomans live in poverty and 20% rely on Medicaid for coverage. But, at least they’ll be doing their part to pay off the national debt.

Following Judge Henry Hudson’s ruling striking down the individual mandate provision in the health care law, Republicans began clamoring for an expedited review of the law before the Supreme Court. “I call on President Obama and Attorney General Holder to join Attorney General Cuccinelli in requesting that this case be sent directly to the U.S. Supreme Court,” Re. Eric Cantor (R-VA) said in a statement immediately following the release of the decision. Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli — who filed the suit — made a similar plea at his own press conference yesterday and this morning on Morning Joe, Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell announced that he had written a letter to all the governors in the country asking them to support an expedited process:

MCDONNELL: I’ve sent a letter to every governor in the country asking them — I sent it last week — asking them, regardless of what they thought about the health care law itself, to join me in asking the Supreme Court to take the case directly. In other words, have us bypass the circuit court of appeal, go directly to the Supreme Court. I hope the Justice Department will be open to doing that because we need to get certainty and finality in this suit and know exactly what the law is going to be. Don’t waste another year or two years in litigation, let’s get to the Supreme Court where everyone knows it’s going to be. So I hope we can get that done and get certainty for the businesses and the health care community.

There is nothing terribly wrong with this request, since it probably makes more sense to resolve this question sooner rather than later. Most constitutional experts believe that Hudson’s interpretation will not be upheld, but even if it is, I would argue that from an implementation perspective, it makes more sense to find that we’ll have to make the law work without a mandate now than after the provision goes into effect. And, since a favorable ruling isn’t a sure thing, Democrats that want to meet the goal of covering almost everyone by 2019 better start developing alternatives to the individual mandate today. That’s what Henry Aaron argues at the bottom of this Bloomberg article, “The only way this works is if they offer an adequate subsidy and it’s debatable whether the law currently does that,” he said. “It would be prudent for the White House to start these discussions now.”

Of course, all of this is very unlikely to happen. Politico’s Jennifer Haberkorn and Sarah Kliff point out that the Supreme Court “rarely uses the option, and the Obama administration has already indicated it would not support such a move.” “In a background briefing with reporters last week, Obama administration officials said they do not plan to support an expedited review of the case and called the move ‘premature.’” Former Reagan Solicitor General Charles Fried described the move as unusual saying, “given that the health care mandate doesn’t kick in until 2014, the argument for expediting it is not really strong. It’s quite an unusual thing to do.”

In April, Fried appeared on Fox News to condemn the lawsuits and was so certain that the Supreme Court would preserve the health law, he promised to eat an Australian leather hat on television if the decision is overturned. Now, isn’t that reason on enough to speed up the process?

In his decision striking down the individual health insurance mandate provision of the Affordable Care Act, Judge Henry Hudson rejected the government’s argument that the penalties for failing to buy insurance were a tax and ruled that they were penalties that could not be justified by Congress’s authority to raise taxes for the general welfare. This morning, the crew at Morning Joe accused the Obama administration of playing both sides of the argument: rejecting the Republican charge that the mandate constituted a new tax while it was selling the law, but embracing the claim to defend it in a court of law. Joe played this clip from Obama’s appearance on Good Morning America in September 2009:

OBAMA: Well, hold on a second, George. Here — here’s what’s happening. You and I are both paying $900 bucks on average — our families — in higher premiums because of uncompensated care. Now, what I’ve said is that, if you can’t afford health insurance, you certainly shouldn’t be punished for that. That’s just piling on. If, on the other hand, we’re giving tax credits — we’ve set up an exchange, you are now part of a big pool, we’ve driven down the costs, we’ve done everything we can, and you actually can afford health insurance, but you’ve just decided, You know what? I want to take my chances, and then you get hit by a bus, and you and I have to pay for the emergency room care, that’s…

What it’s saying is, is that we’re not going to have other people carrying your burdens for you any more than the fact that right now everybody in America, just about, has to get auto insurance. Nobody considers that a tax increase. People say to themselves, that is a fair way to make sure that, if you hit my car, that I’m not covering all the costs.

Watch it:

What Obama told George Stephanopoulos in September is still true today. The individual mandate — originally a Republican idea — is designed to get everyone to take responsibility for their own health and eliminate the cost shifts that occur when individuals receive uncompensated care. “What it’s saying is, is that we’re not going to have other people carrying your burdens for you any more than the fact that right now everybody in America, just about, has to get auto insurance,” Obama said at the time. “Nobody considers that a tax increase. People say to themselves, that is a fair way to make sure that, if you hit my car, that I’m not covering all the costs.”

The mandate is not a “tax” in the sense that its primary purpose is to raise revenue even though it meets the legal definition, which is somewhat different than the popular understanding of that term. As Ian Millhiser tells me, conservatives obviously think “that they have caught Obama in some grand contradiction because he uses one meaning of the word ‘tax’ in one context and his lawyers use another meaning of that term in a legal brief, but the word ‘tax’ has an unusually broad meaning in the constitutional context — it can include nearly any provision that adds money to the federal treasury.

Lawrence O’Donnell’s argument (in the clip above) that the mandate doesn’t exist because the federal government can’t enforce the penalties (or tax) that are associated with it, is more straightforward, but overstated. Section 1502 (pg. 170) of the law states, “In the case of any failure by a taxpayer to timely pay any penalty imposed by this section, such taxpayer shall not be subject to any criminal prosecution or penalty.” The Secretary also can’t “file notice of lien with respect to any property of a taxpayer” or “levy on any such property with respect to such failure.” However, as IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman noted back in April, the agency can still penalize individuals who don’t comply with the mandate by “reducing or confiscating their tax refunds.” “These are not the kinds of things we send agents out about,” Shulman said. “These are things where you get a letter from us. Congress was very careful to make sure there was nothing too punitive in this bill.”