Republican threats to defeat health care reform legislation by taking it to court as "unconstitutional" are once more in the news. This line of argument is spurious; I have no reason to revise what I said earlier about it, but I might add a couple of thoughts:
Most of the attention centers on the "mandate" - the requirement that everyone must obtain health insurance or pay a fine. When the Constitutionality issue arose earlier, most experts simply noted that it didn't seem much different from the requirement to get automobile insurance and would be justified by the "general welfare" provisions. So Republican detractors changed course a bit, and some now profess to see an issue with the government requiring people to acquire a product from a single private commercial entity. One of them has said it would be like requiring everyone to buy a Chevy every year.
This seems a strange argument for Republicans, the party that so adores private enterprise, and that has opposed a lot of the health reform efforts precisely because they threaten the profits of major companies in the health care sector. Besides, actually a person can obtain insurance from any number of companies, not just one (as is also the case with health insurance) so the whole basis for the claim disappears.
On the other hand, if we take the complaint seriously, it would seem to strengthen the case for creating the public option. Surely, if the issue is that citizens would be forced into a transaction with a private concern, the solution is to be sure that they have the option to obtain insurance from a government source, right? The public option was designed to be open only to those who couldn't obtain insurance elsewhere, so it seems like a good fit. But then, if they don't want the public to be forced to buy commercial insurance, why on earth were those Republican lawmakers so angrily opposed to the public option?
Gosh, I just can't make any sense of that! And there, of course, is the point - the argument is cramped, illogical, and circular because it's a desperate, last-minute grasp for a straw, any straw, to defeat legislation that the country needs, which the public wants, on which the health "industry" is split, but which the GOP believes must be quashed because... because...? Well, let's let them provide the answer to that one; they haven't done so yet.
My one concern is that all this desperate posturing, if successful, has a tendency to politicize the Supreme Court. Again, that's something the Republicans say they don't want, yet the Court's intervention in the 2000 election embroiled the Court in partisanship and badly damaged its reputation. We should hope the Court has enough wisdom not to accept the case, if it comes to that, for another rancorous, politically-charged case within one decade would pretty well wreck its authority, regardless of how it decided.
Comments