l****z
发帖数: 29846 | 1 March 28, 2012 Posted by TWB
Not because it’s unconstitutional, but because it’s not socialist enough.
According to Reid Cherlin, who was the White House spokesman on healthcare,
the easiest way to defend Obamacare would be to have passed single payer
healthcare and then simply tell the Supreme Court, and everyone else, to
just get over it.
It so happens that I’m packing up my apartment and moving out of
Washington today after eight years of residence, most of which were spent in
politics and government. One of the items I just bubble-wrapped is a framed
copy of The L.A. Times front page from March 22, 2010, in which I can be
seen, blurrily, clapping in the background as Barack Obama watches the House
pass the Affordable Care Act. In between stowing keepsakes like this, I’ve
been taking procrastination breaks to monitor news from today’s oral
arguments. The consensus seems to be that we should crap on Solicitor
General Don Verrilli for struggling to defend the individual mandate.
Don is someone I worked with and respected, so I will leave dissection
of his efforts to those who are farther removed and better schooled in
Supreme Court procedure. But I will say this: having spent a year of my life
getting paid to defend the ACA as the White House spokesman on health care,
I feel for the guy. Health care reform is very much worth defending, but
going about that defense is where things get, well, difficult.
It would have been easy for Verrilli—or any of us—to explain single-
payer health care. “Look,” we could have said, “the government is paying
for everyone to have coverage.” End of story. But single-payer is not what
our brilliant, world-leading political system gave us. What it gave us is
essentially a halfsy—an extraordinarily confusing patchwork in which some
novel legislative mechanisms are used to induce individuals, businesses,
insurance companies, and states into doing things that add up to concrete
good.
I detect a little sarcasm in Cherlin’s piece. He’s essentially saying that
the only way around the Constitution is to go all out socialized medicine.
It’s easy enough to say that the federal government is paying for everyone
to have healthcare coverage, but where does the money come from? It has to
come from somewhere, someone, or some group of citizens will pay for another
group to have socialized healthcare. Just deciding from on high that the
feds will pick up the tab doesn’t work.
Now we all know what’s happening here; Verrilli is the fall guy. He’s the
chap that will universally be blamed when Obamacare essentially goes down in
flames. But, in his defense, he was given an impossible task. Defend the
indefensible. Prove that something that is so blatantly unconstitutional is
Constitutional. Impossible to do, no matter who you are.
If you’re a full blown Socialist like Elle McPherson or Reid Cherlin,
having the geniuses who founded our country and saw these types of fights
coming, write a document that makes instituting socialist policies almost
impossible, makes for a very long day. |
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