Josh Marshall’s tweet summed it all up: “GM (check), OBL (check), ACA (check).”
Obama bet his Presidency on health care reform, and won – but only today did the check clear. The other big winner today was Chief Justice John Roberts, who successfully averted a decision that would almost certainly have destroyed the credibility of the Supreme Court as anything other than a partisan entity. The fact that so many Constitutional scholars considered that the law WAS constitutional but expected it to be found otherwise is telling – and quite frankly, after Bush v Gore and Citizens United, the Court was staring at an 0-2 count. Maybe this is a hit, maybe not, but they fouled one off for sure.
Again, a summation of the mandate: the whole point of ACA is to make health care more affordable. The easiest way to do this is by economy of scale – if everyone buys into the insurance system, the risk of payout is spread around a lot more evenly and premiums don’t have to go as high. In addition, now we’re saying that you can’t deny coverage to people for pre-existing conditions, you have to cover a person’s offspring to age 26, and there’s no maximum cap to how much a person can get, lifetime, in insurance payout. But if you have those rules, everybody has to be in the system. If they aren’t, people can skip out on buying insurance until they need it – which means that the cost of that insurance will skyrocket because fewer people have bought into it.
For all the ranting and raving about “socialism” and “communism” by Medicare-scooter-riding old rednecks who aren’t capable of passing PSCI 238 Intro to Comparative Politics with a C+, this is actually as minimal an intervention as you could have and still have a shot at expanding coverage. No single payer, not even a public option. Hell, this whole concept bubbled up from the Heritage Foundation in the late 1980s and was the bulk of the GOP’s alternative to Hillarycare in the grunge era. The fact that it took a beating from the GOP for these last three-plus years is entirely down to the oft-stated Limbaugh-DeMint objective of making sure everything Obama did would come to failure. Which in and of itself is tied to the GOP’s decision over the last quarter-century that no Democrat could ever legitimately be President…but that’s another post altogether.
The whole point of getting elected isn’t to get re-elected, contrary to what most politicians seem to believe. The point of getting elected is to change things. On balance, one has to think Obama has a pretty solid resume to hand in to his next employer if he’s looking for work on January 20, 2013: General Motors alive, Osama bin Laden dead, and an expansion of health care that Roosevelt, Truman, Nixon (!) and Clinton could never successfully get passed.
Well done, young man. Now maybe the Professional Indignant Left will suck it up and get behind the guy. One thing’s for sure, though – anybody who still says there’s no difference between the parties needs to be shot dead on account of rabid dumb…