Reason has some links.
It seems the individual mandate will now be a tax, while the law will mostly stand as it was passed and signed for now.
I still don’t see how we afford another unfunded liability, and how we insure 30 million with a good budget in mind. People who work for bureaucracies often have incentives to avoid innovation, avoid hard decisions, protect their own, and always meet the budget regardless of performance (among other things). We will be placing serious restrictions (through the tax) on many people’s freedom, in order to redistribute their tax money to others, while this tax money is funneled through a few (of course what goes on in health insurance companies isn’t lovely, and similar in many ways, but this the ACA is likely a worse evil because there are fewer alternatives, if any). This will likely increase the size and scope of government a good deal in America, and dramatically change the nature of the social contract. I’d like to think I’m consistently worried about to whom we’re giving power, why, and how such ideas will end up working in practice.
There will obviously be some winners though, and some benefits. The “ideal” and more fair, just society however, will remain forever out of view on the horizon…a promise on the lips of those with skin in the game.
My two cents, as it remains to be seen how this will all play out.
Update: The Roberts long-view theory, more here from Paul Rahe, or just the Supreme Court staying out of politics.
Related On This Site: From The New England Journal Of Medicine Via CATO: ‘The Constitutionality of the Individual Mandate’From If-Then Knots: Health Care Is Not A Right…But Then Neither Is Property?… From The New Yorker: Atul Gawande On Health Care-”The Cost Conundrum”…Sally Pipes At Forbes: ‘A Plan That Leads Health Care To Nowhere’…From AEI: ‘Study: ‘Obama Healthcare Reform Raising Costs, Forcing Workers Out Of Existing Plans’
They are dancing in The White House tonight but it could be a brief doh-see-doh. By making the ‘individual mandate a tax’ Chief Justice Roberts may be saying to the American public (who is on whole opposed to Obamacare) if you want to repeal Obamacare vote the president out of office in November!
Bernie, thanks for reading and commenting.
Well, I don’t support the law, and I think it will do more harm than good. I think Roberts’ reasoning is pretty sound, and it may not be the business of the Court to do more than say:
‘If the people want it, and the Congress passes it, and the President signs it, then well, let the people, through their elected officials do as they see fit.”
It’s the freedoms lost that concern me as much as anything else.