Obamacare Is On Trial. So Is the Supreme Court.

(Excerpted from an article by Jonathan Cohn, published 3/29/12 in The Huffington Post.)
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But in this case, nobody has said they want to stop government from providing universal access to health care. On the contrary, the plaintiffs have stated that a program like Medicare, in which the government provides citizens with insurance directly, would be clearly constitutional. They’ve also stated that a scheme of compulsory private insurance would be constitutional if somehow the government could make people buy it when they show up at the hospital -- suggesting, as Elena Kagan stated, that the only problem with the Affordable Care Act is temporal.

Most amazing of all: The plaintiffs have conceded that a universal health insurance program would be constitutional if, instead of penalizing people who decline to get insurance, the government enacted a tax and refunded the money to people who had insurance. As Sonia Sotomayor noted, functionally such a scheme would be exactly the same as the Affordable Care Act. Both the plaintiffs and some of the skeptical justices have also indicated that the Affordable Care Act would be constitutional if the law's architects had simply used the word "tax" to describe the penalty.

Think about that for a second: If the justices strike down the Affordable Care Act, they would be stopping the federal government from pursuing a perfectly constitutional goal via a perfectly constitutional scheme just because Congress and the President didn’t use perfectly constitutional language to describe it. Maybe labels matter, although case law suggests otherwise. But do they matter enough for the Court to throw out a law that will provide insurance to 30 million people, shore up insurance for many more, and help to manage one-sixth of the American economy? It wouldn’t seem so.
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(Buster's comment: This is the court that gave us the awful "corporations are people" decision in the Citizens United v. FEC case. This is the court where Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia attend secret, right-wing events sponsored by the Koch brothers and think nothing of it. This is the court where Silent Clarence's wife is a lobbyist working to overturn the Affordable Care Act. Too many on this court are bought and paid for. They're going to screw us.)