The Supreme Nine

Now that the three days of oral arguments before the Supreme Court re whether or not ObamaCare is constitutional are over all we can do is wait for the decision that will determine which path the country proceeds on.

Carol & I made time to listen to the audios of the arguments broadcast on C-SPAN about 1 PM on all three days – this way we didn't need talking heads later to tell us what happened because we knew first hand.

The first day was bland enough with the Justices pretty much telegraphing that they were not going to go for the provisions of the Anti-Injunction Act of 1867 that requires taxpayers to actually pay their assessments before they can challenge a tax's legality.  Since tax payments for ObamaCare do not begin for two years this proposal by BO's lawyers would have delayed the Supreme Court's decision to well after the November election & to their credit the Justices would have none of it, or so it seemed.

The second day concentrated on whether or not the ObamaCare individual mandate requirement for people to buy healthcare insurance or pay a penalty is constitutional & the third day concentrated on whether or not the entire law should be scrapped if the individual mandate is found unconstitutional.  There were also arguments re the expansion of Medicaid under ObamaCare.

Now the biggest problem comes with a mix of the Supreme Court finding the individual mandate unconstitutional but leaving the rest of the 2,700 page ObamaCare law in place.  This would in essence produce a law that is unworkable from an insurance industry standpoint.  Without the individual mandate in the law people would not need to secure insurance while they were healthy but rather could wait until they were sick enough to need it under the "guaranteed issue" clauses of the law.  The "community rating" clauses of the law would ensure such sick people would pay no more than perfectly healthy people who chose to buy insurance for their own reasons while they were healthy.  You can see that insurance companies would quickly go out of business setting up & really accelerating exactly what BO has wanted all along – single payer universal healthcare.

America could be on this accelerated path to socialism this summer if the majority of the nine Supreme Court Justices rule (vote) as indicated above.  Nine people who the great majority of Americans could not name or identify if their lives depended on it – which in this case it just might.