Obamacare upheld by radical right wing justice, nation's media misses the connection
I’m not sure how today’s Supreme Court decision can be interpreted as a good day for liberal democracy. It’s a great verdict for President Obama politically, this is true, but if the last three and a half years have taught us anything, it’s that these two outcomes are not always the same.A lot of liberals are treating this verdict as if it was affirmation for Single Payer because it affirms a "mandate" for coverage. It’s not. The court wasn’t being asked to uphold that ideal with this challenge. There should be made a key distinction here, constitutionally, between a mandate towards public health care coverage and a mandate towards private insurance. The Supremes were essentially weighing the validity of Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts health care initiative of a decade ago, the plan Romney championed back in the days before he started courting Republican voters outside his home state and pandered himself steadily to a full 180 degrees.
The Romney/Obama health care plan is one that effectively enforces a tax on me if I refuse to buy a product from corporate America. It's forcing me into commerce, to put it more in the court's terms. How in the world could such a mandate be seriously ruled constitutional? What does buying an insurance product from a private company have at all to do with Congress' power "to lay and collect taxes"? In effect, today's judgment links the mandatory purchase to that of car insurance, backing the basic premise that health care is, like driving a car on a public road, a privilege, not a human right. This idea is so radically right-wing that even an ultraconservative like Chief Justice John Roberts just voted for it. Of course fellow right-wing loonies Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas opposed him, but then that pair's primary agenda on the bench is always to serve the political angle foremost, and so they naturally chose the judgment that would most adversely effect Obama in November.
The proposal and defense of this health care legislation is typical of how the Democratic Party approaches issues today as a quasi-conservative party in the United States. Throughout this entire debate, over almost four years, nobody in leadership in Washington-- in either party-- ever advocated for health care as a human right. Even after Obamacare's legislative passing, and now after legal affirmation by the highest court, Americans not eligible for Medicare will still count on their employer, and their employment, for health coverage. Obamacare leaves 27 million Americans uninsured. Instead of universal protection provided by our government for and by the people, we are mandated to purchase the private health insurance products that Americans find so repugnant that reforming health care grew to become the predominant political issue of the age. Obama's solution to our crisis, from the very beginning of his time in office, was not to get every American insured, but to put forth a plan that lined the pockets of some of the nation's largest corporations. We despise it. Now we're forced to buy it.
On immigration, the Democratic president has staked out a similarly center-right position. He adopted Romney's position on health care, and he went straight to the Republican Messiah on immigration. Despite gaining headlines designed to appeal to progressives, he remains to the right of Ronald Reagan on matters of immigration. Reagan provided general amnesty to undocumented immigrants in 1986. Obama, in a well-publicized move earlier this month, only went so far as to provide amnesty to undocumented children. His significant pandering to the left during election season isn't enough for some of us to forget that Obama has had more undocumented workers deported than his Republican predecessor. On both immigration and health care, the Democrats' strategy is to stake out a center-right position, endure scathing personal attacks from the right, while the nation's left wing mostly sits quietly in the boat, going along, staying seated, claiming a victory on behalf of their counterfeit standard-bearer in the White House, probably due to matters of morale, while surrendering ever more ground on the landscape of the larger political war.
My hope always lies with the long-term future of the republic. I was rooting for an overturn of Obamacare today so that this dismally insufficient solution to our national health care clusterfuck could be removed from its position blocking the road to reform. A group of progressive legislators in Washington had been preparing in recent weeks a formal re-introduction of Single Payer as the true viable solution to our health care woes. The Single Payer plan would get every American covered-- Medicaid for all, without exception or caveat-- from birth/citizenship until death, and would, additionally, cover every American less expensively and less wastefully than any other known and experimented alternative on Earth. As Senator Bernie Sanders pointed out today, the United States remains the only major nation that does not provide health care for every man, woman, and child as a right of citizenship. After today’s ruling, we will likely not see that particular piece of Single Payer legislation introduced, or any similar piece, for years and maybe decades to come. Sleep well tonight, Americans, and as always, try not to get sick.
The proposal and defense of this health care legislation is typical of how the Democratic Party approaches issues today as a quasi-conservative party in the United States. Throughout this entire debate, over almost four years, nobody in leadership in Washington-- in either party-- ever advocated for health care as a human right. Even after Obamacare's legislative passing, and now after legal affirmation by the highest court, Americans not eligible for Medicare will still count on their employer, and their employment, for health coverage. Obamacare leaves 27 million Americans uninsured. Instead of universal protection provided by our government for and by the people, we are mandated to purchase the private health insurance products that Americans find so repugnant that reforming health care grew to become the predominant political issue of the age. Obama's solution to our crisis, from the very beginning of his time in office, was not to get every American insured, but to put forth a plan that lined the pockets of some of the nation's largest corporations. We despise it. Now we're forced to buy it.
On immigration, the Democratic president has staked out a similarly center-right position. He adopted Romney's position on health care, and he went straight to the Republican Messiah on immigration. Despite gaining headlines designed to appeal to progressives, he remains to the right of Ronald Reagan on matters of immigration. Reagan provided general amnesty to undocumented immigrants in 1986. Obama, in a well-publicized move earlier this month, only went so far as to provide amnesty to undocumented children. His significant pandering to the left during election season isn't enough for some of us to forget that Obama has had more undocumented workers deported than his Republican predecessor. On both immigration and health care, the Democrats' strategy is to stake out a center-right position, endure scathing personal attacks from the right, while the nation's left wing mostly sits quietly in the boat, going along, staying seated, claiming a victory on behalf of their counterfeit standard-bearer in the White House, probably due to matters of morale, while surrendering ever more ground on the landscape of the larger political war.
My hope always lies with the long-term future of the republic. I was rooting for an overturn of Obamacare today so that this dismally insufficient solution to our national health care clusterfuck could be removed from its position blocking the road to reform. A group of progressive legislators in Washington had been preparing in recent weeks a formal re-introduction of Single Payer as the true viable solution to our health care woes. The Single Payer plan would get every American covered-- Medicaid for all, without exception or caveat-- from birth/citizenship until death, and would, additionally, cover every American less expensively and less wastefully than any other known and experimented alternative on Earth. As Senator Bernie Sanders pointed out today, the United States remains the only major nation that does not provide health care for every man, woman, and child as a right of citizenship. After today’s ruling, we will likely not see that particular piece of Single Payer legislation introduced, or any similar piece, for years and maybe decades to come. Sleep well tonight, Americans, and as always, try not to get sick.
posted by CM @ 5:36 PM
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