Did Justice Kennedy Wink at the End?

Part of the MSNBC reporting of today's session noted that at the end of the day Justice Kennedy remarked that, 'when a citizen chooses not to purchase Health Insurance and then incurs healthcare expenses they cannot pay, the costs are then transferred on to the purchasers of Health Insurance and the public'. This could be the seed for building a foundation of defense of the mandate as being, in fact, a 'special circumstance' as Kennedy earlier inferred might be necessary to defend the mandate.

This nuance by Kennedy is noted below in an excerpt of the transcript from Politico.

I'm calling this a wink.
----------------------------------------------------

20 MR. CARVIN: It is clear that the failure to

21 buy health insurance doesn't affect anyone. Defaulting

22 on your payments to your health care provider does.

23 Congress chose for whatever reason not to regulate the

24 harmful activity of defaulting on your health care

25 provider. They used the 20 percent or whoever among the

102

1 uninsured as a leverage to regulate the 100 percent of

2 the uninsured.

3 JUSTICE KENNEDY: I agree — I agree that

4 that's what's happening here.

5 MR. CARVIN: Okay.

6 JUSTICE KENNEDY: And the government tells

7 us that's because the insurance market is unique. And

8 in the next case, it'll say the next market is unique.

9 But I think it is true that if most questions in life

10 are matters of degree, in the insurance and health care

11 world, both markets — stipulate two markets — the

12 young person who is uninsured is uniquely proximately

13 very close to affecting the rates of insurance and the

14 costs of providing medical care in a way that is not

15 true in other industries.

16 That's my concern in the case.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0312/74543.html#ixzz1qMwf9A7n