Two Years On: Obamacare

[The Big Ragu]

That was definitely nonsensical enough to be worthy of you.

Ragu - you would pick **** off fly paper. You did not trust my summary and asked for report. I cited the article that provided the detail. A well written and well thought article by a New Yorker writer who also happens to be a surgeon and teaching professor at Harvard Medical School.

You are right.

Even though you quoted the whole exchange, I honestly didn't connect your linking to that article to the earlier the post. It wasn't entirely clear from what you wrote that that was your reason. I didn't make the connection. I apologize for that.

I thought you were posting that link to just keep the conversation going in another direction and I didn't reread that whole New Yorker article -- I was working at the time and posting quickly. So I just posted about what I remembered about that article, not realizing you were posting it as the place you got your studies about Medicare costs / quality of health care.

My memory of that article wasn't about studies cited in it. It was his prescription and the whole "general contractor" when you build a house model for managing health care -- which really was the purpose.

In any case, I apologize. I didn't connect the posts, even if I should have.

 

[Boom_70]

Interesting reading back through this thread. Kudos to Ragu.

If the Supreme Court wasn't a de facto legislature, no way this thing passes the muster of our Constitution. The individual mandate is not among Congress' enumerated powers; no matter how much you want to twist yourself into a pretzel, we have always had the economic liberty to to decide which products we want to buy for ourselves and which we don't.

That said, I can see one of two things, given the fact that it is a politicized institution, and the Supreme Court has wandered away from its mandate over the last 80 years. I think it will probably pass 5-4. They will just punt the thing down the road--they may go with the narrow grounds that there is no actual court case yet. Not until 2015 when the first person suffers harm from the tax penalty. See you then.

Alternately, something I read reminded me of Obama's State of the Union address, with the justices sitting right in front of him, when he mischaracterized their Citizens United ruling, dressed them down, and played it for applause from his party members. If they have long memories, maybe this is the way to get their revenge and reassert their power over him, for lack of a better way of putting it.

Either way, the one thing I am sure about is that no ruling like this will be rooted in the actual Constitution. They decide which way they want to steer social policy in this country and then create whatever bull**** seems the most plausible to make themselves seem legit.

 

[Football_Bat]

Someone could try to re-litigate it via the tax route, but it'll be 2017 at the earliest before SCOTUS gets the case, even if it's fast-tracked. Roberts' opinion pretty much nips this in the bud anyway.