jhay78;608363 wrote:
Maybe it's not a strict takeover, but more like a prequel to a takeover, where private insurers get weighed down with all the crap and then when they go belly-up, the public option kicks in, and then the real takeover happens to save us all.
You could say this in regards to any increase in regulation by the People in any sector. In reality, it's just more fear mongering. The fact is, in 2014, barring Antonin Scalia retreating from his position in Gonzales v. Raich in regards to his view of the Commerce Clause (something tells me the honorable judge would be much more comfortable regulating drugs than mandating people be responsible for their own health care and could find a way to distinguish but I digress) then the personal responsibility requirement will be upheld. And, as an aside, the SCOTUS has upheld the regulation of inactivity before in another Commerce Clause case; Wickard v. Filburn. In the case Mr. Filburn was growing excess wheat instead of purchasing it in the market and the Congress was allowed to regulate this type of activity because it substantially affected interstate commerce. But again, you'll never hear that as the talking points never die. They are like the infectious diseases of the internet age.
If it is upheld and enforced, the millions of healthy people skirting their responsibility and passing their costs on to others will be required to purchase private health care plans and pay premiums to these companies and will likely not be using their health care just like they aren't now and beyond that time frame premiums will begin to drop as they did in Massachusetts after their health care reform law was amended to include personal responsibility provision.
In the end, if the conservatives get their way and get the mandate knocked down, and the whole bill doesn't get knocked down, that is when the demise of private health insurance will really come and conservatives will have brought the demise of their own worldview and make all of their worst nightmares a reality. If they had any of the sense they had in the 90's they would be praising this free market solution to universal health care and saluting the congress for using its adequate powers to require american's just adhere to the chief virtue of modern conservatism, personal responsibility. If the mandate gets knocked down and healthy persons continue to pass the buck onto others; these macabre predictions will come true and private insurance will likely come to an end. If the whole bill gets knocked down and nothing is done and the train wreck pace of health care costs continues on its current trend with all of the problems of the current bill and republicans magically think that the federal overreach (which they should decry if they cared anything about internal coherency) into our sovereign state's tort regimes by capping damages and allowing Aetna to cherry pick the healthiest persons from other states in a non-regulated market place is the answer well then again they will write the prescription for single-payer exponentially faster than this moderate, reasonable bill does.
It is like watching the twilight zone; we have a mass movement of people claiming to value personal responsibility moving to challenge a bill in federal court as Unconstitutional that would require people to be personally responsible under the claim that it is "socialism" who did nothing of the sort with regards to bills such as the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement and Modernization Act of 2003 or the No Child Left Behind Act which both gave the federal government much more control over the means of production and were much more in line with the ideals of socialism. These people can say they didn't support those massive government programs either but the proof is in the pudding that there was no major movement to attack these bills in the courts despite exacerbating the move towards federal socialism incredibly more than the much maligned patient protection and affordable care act.
But again this is nothing new. As evidenced by the political bickering over the START treaty, something which everybody, even the fickle American public wants passed, will barely, if at all, achieve ratification. Because one thing has mattered more than reasonable debate, thoughtful compromise or good will toward men, it is that the democratic party and President Obama must fail at any cost.
That guy with the neo-colonialist father who listened to a racist, anti-american, black liberation theologian jeremiah wright for however long, who claimed to find solace hanging out with marxists in undergrad, who's last name is really Saetoro and wasn't born in America, who's never had a real job and got into Harvard law with an affirmative action bump, who's wife secretly wants to spray paint kill whitey on the White House lawn and wasn't proud to be an American until recently; the nerd who tells bad jokes, who hates Jews, wears mom jeans and is actually a muslim and a marxist and wants to bring down American Capitalism and prosperity from the inside
cannot succeed.
But, here is what I think is a fair article in the New York Slimes about how the rancor of the health care debate over this moderate bill is steeped in history. I recommend giving it a shot even if you're a tea partier. Perhaps in return I will check out infowars or worldnetdaily.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/15/business/economy/15leonhardt.html?ref=healthcarereform
