If you're Kevin Drum, you can't really believe that powerful people who hold positions of great responsibility act like this. You can't believe, for instance, that they'd saddle their own political primaries with a Sheldon Adelson just because freeing people like him to give unlimited cash pisses us off. Even now, they can't believe the Supreme Court will overturn a law that reduces government spending, and that Republicans in Congress won't replace it with something that addresses the country's real health care problems in some serious way.
But that's not how it goes anymore. Right-wing decision-makers, first and foremost, want to crush liberalism. They are not acting in good faith. And everyone needs to grasp how seriously messed up a political system is when half its actors are out of control in this way.
Yes. At least four of the Justices on the Supreme Court will overturn the mandate or the entire ACA just to screw over President Obama, the Democrats, and liberals in general. Stare decicis and precedent and jurisprudence be damned, it's time to make the dirty effing hippies pay, and pay we will if we lose the ACA in the next week or two.
It's entirely the hell possible, as BooMan points out, it's very probable at this point. We need to start considering how to respond.
Speculation is running high that the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) will soon strike down the individual mandate in the president's Affordable Care Act. If they do, they will leave us no option but to create a Medicate For All plan. And this is true whether they let the rest of the Act stand or they strike the whole thing from the books.
If the SCOTUS rules that the individual mandate is unconstitutional, it will destroy the only private means anyone has come up with to make sure that everyone can has access to medical care. Even if the subsides for the poor remain in place, meaning that no will be denied care because they can't afford it, the insurance companies can't remain profitable if they are required to cover people with pre-existing conditions unless those costs are offset by tens of millions of relatively healthy customers. Ezra Klein provides proof of this here. This isn't a matter of choice on the insurance industries part. It is just the nature of underwriting.
It is not possible to have a private health insurance industry that covers people with pre-existing conditions unless there is also an individual mandate requirement. Under those circumstances, the government would be forced to do away with its insistence that people with pre-existing conditions get coverage. And if the health care reforms don't cover people with pre-existing conditions then not only will people with cancer and diabetes and other chronic diseases go bankrupt or go without treatment, but we won't see any downward trend in the cost of health care. Without the mandate, people will wait until they get sick to seek insurance (which they will be denied) and treatment (which the insured will have to pay for with higher premiums). And we'll go back to a system where getting sick while uninsured lands you in bankruptcy court.
It's a good plan. But it's going to require us to vote in unprecedented numbers. It's going to require work. It's going to require door knocking to win back the states, to win back redistricting, to win back the House and keep the Senate. It's going to require a decade of work, easily. The Republicans put 16, now going on 18 years in since 1994. They all but reversed the Clinton landslide in 2 years. They got Bush for 8, then reversed a hell of a lot of Obama's win in just 2 years again. Now they stand 3 Senate seats and an Oval Office away from total control of the country for the next generation. They took state after state out from under us because we let them.
If we don't stand up here, we're done. And I mean that.
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