The wrong law at the wrong time

[illusionofjoy]

Over the next three days The Supreme Court is deliberating on the Constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act. The main theme being driven home by news outlets was the mass of activists which had congealed outside of the Supreme Court building. Religious groups are protesting the law under the claim that it infringes on their freedom of religion to infringe on people's freedom of self-determination. Meanwhile so-called "liberals" are out en masse to show their support for the law.

All of these people need a good, hard smack upside the head.

I can't speak for the Constitutionality of the law overall; the portions regulating the health insurance industry are well within the limits of the framing document. However, the provision of the law requiring everyone to purchase health insurance - the "individual mandate" - is the sticky portion which oversteps the bounds of what should be required of a law. Using flawed reasoning similar right-wingers' defense of requiring photo identification at the polls, proponents of the individual mandate say that anyone driving a car is required to purchase auto insurance so why should it be that someone alive shouldn't be required to purchase health insurance? Simple: just as voting is a fundamental right which one should be able to exercise with undue burden, no one chooses to be born. People can opt not to purchase a motor vehicle - driving a privilege, not a right. However, there is not one human being on the face of the planet who chose to be conceived - and once alive people have few options outside of remaining so until their natural expiration date (suicide, while an option, is still technically illegal).

Nowhere in the first ten amendments to the Constitution does it state that people have the right to be fiscally enslaved by the health insurance industry. Nor does such a statement exist in any of the subsequent amendments (though if 2/3^rds of the states voted "yay" to such a thing it could come to be). The Obama administration, in bringing Romneycare to a national level has presented us with that stark reality come 2014 when the "individual mandate" kicks in. If you don't have insurance via your employer or you've neglected to purchase it individually, then you will be breaking the law. As it stands now, the only penalty for doing so is to have your tax refund confiscated, however I'm certain congress will find other ways to punish those who do not render unto the health insurance industry.

That is the main problem with the Affordable Care Act: in spite of all the needed regulation it applies to the health insurance industry, at it's core it is a huge giveaway to that industry. Millions of Americans will get coverage at the expense of losing their ability to be free of the shackles of yet another corporation. If there is one lesson which Americans never seem to learn it is that corporations do not exist for the public good; they exist only to increase profit margins. When it comes to benefiting the public, a corporation will always fail.

The Affordable Care Act, now so reviled by Republicans and so-called "conservatives" is actually the free-market compromise to socialized health care. This was the main reason that Mitt Romney, as governor of Massachusetts was willing to sign off on it at the state level: what came to be sneered at as Obamacare in it's infancy as Romneycare was an obvious boon to the big business of health insurance. What Republican wouldn't salivate at the opportunity to enrich an already bloated industry under the guise of helping Joe Lunchbox? For getting passed on a national level what Mitt Romney merely managed on a state level, Barack Obama ought to be considered the greatest Republican President to ever occupy the White House. Since he is registered as a Democrat, however, the Republican Party is in full tribal warfare mode.

It all comes down to the fact that healthcare reform was a massively missed opportunity. If Obama were the socialist his detractors accuse him of being - and I really wish he were - then he would have used his bully pulpit to push for Medicare for All (HR676; also known by the technical name "single payer"). As it stands, it took a "democrat" to pass Republican legislation on a national level. Any real hope of saving millions of dollars, cutting out masses of bureaucracy and making sure that every single American's health care is paid for without worry has been thrown out of the window.

And now the Affordable Care Act is being judged before the Supreme Court, an institution whose greatest hits include appointing George W. Bush as President and giving corporations the right to spend indefinite amounts of money politicking. I can see no good coming from whatever decision the Supreme Court reaches: either the entire law will be thrown out, lifting the good portions which actually regulate an industry which would just as soon have those who can't pay dead or the entire law will be kept, leaving the American people to be fiscal slaves - legally to boot - in service to yet another corporation.

Comments

[mokie]

This is the best argument against the act that I've read. I don't want to be beholden to an insurance industry that can choose whether or not they're going to honor an agreement to cover my health care after I've paid in for years; I want simple socialized medicine, something every other first world nation seems to have figured out at this point.

As much as I like parts of the act (that they can't cut you off for pre-existing conditions, for instance), it does need to be taken back to the drawing board.

(And then I made myself sad, wondering why Republicans don't focus on the points you've made--ah, because they might hurt a corporation's feelings...)