GOP Justices Clown over Health Care- by Robert Parry

[kpete]

GOP Justices Clown over Health Care
The questions asked by the Republican partisans on the U.S. Supreme Court suggest they will overturn the Affordable Care Act. Instead of a serious debate about health care and the Constitution, they clowned around with silly what-ifs about mandating broccoli-eating and requiring burial insurance

by Robert Parry

The Republican justices on the U.S. Supreme Court behaved more like Fox News pundits than serious jurists weighing the constitutionality of an important law addressing the health of the American people. On Tuesday, they posed silly hypothetical questions of the sort that might boost TV ratings among Tea Party viewers but had little to do with the Constitution.
Broccoli, a vegetable known for its nutritional properties

Based on their goofy and hostile questions, the Republican majority seems poised to strike down the core of the Affordable Care Act, the so-called individual mandate, an idea that ironically originated with the right-wing Heritage Foundation, was enacted by Republican Gov. Mitt Romney in Massachusetts, and only became a bête noire when President Barack Obama embraced it.

Now, despite the Constitution’s grant of broad powers to Congress to regulate interstate commerce, the five Republican partisans on the Supreme Court appear ready to kill the health reform law in the midst of a presidential election and deliver a body blow to Obama’s reelection hopes.

The core of their objections to the law was that if Congress can mandate Americans buy health insurance, it can do all sorts of other crazy things, like make people buy cell phones, broccoli, automobiles and burial insurance. (Or maybe make them wear funny hats and clown noses.)

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http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/03/27-12

[XanaDUer]

1. I agree and this is the bad joke our entire

Country and its processes have become.

[Bill USA]

2. given that they really don't have a basis for ruling on the law yet as the mandate hasn't gone into

effect, I suspect they are out to kill the law somehow. This is particularly important to the Corporate Lobbyist judges to do BEFORE the election.

But that's okay by me. If they kill the law by ruling against the mandate, in probably no more than ten years there will be enough people who can't afford health insurance that people will demand something be done and this time more directly and simply. In other words expand Medicare to include people of any age.

Then we will have a single payer system which makes a whole lot more sense than this elaborate effort to have universal health care and also keep the now unnecessary for-profit medical insurer middle-men in business.

Once you decide that everybody has a right to adequate health care, there really is no need to have medical insurance companies. The entire population becomes one group purchaser of medical care. You can deal directly with the providers - doctors, hospitals and pharmaceutical companies.