Barrack Obama has done what no other President has. He has actually benefitted the American people. Not with vague promises and less than obvious laws that are predicted to do some good down the road but with dollars and cents value; today and Health Care of all things.
Whoever really thought that we would see a day when nobody has to say; “I can’t afford to go to the doctor; even though I am sick or in pain or having a hard time breathing? We are after-all, one of the last nations to address this problem and even after the SCOTUS decision to uphold, we still lag far behind those nations which provide Universal Health Care. Read more
It’s good news that the Supreme Court split 5-4 with Roberts (and not Kennedy?!?) as the deciding vote, to uphold the affordable care act. It’s interesting that this was controversial, and certainly Roberts led the court to a very safe middle ground making the issue about taxation and saying the commerce clause could not apply. If anything, I wonder if this weakens the previous commerce powers of Congress as defined by Wickard v. Filburn, I’d love to hear what a lawyer thinks.
What does this mean? Read more
The U.S. is widely known to have the highest health care expenditures per capita in the world, and not just by a little, but by a lot. I'm not going to go into the reasons for this so much, other than to point out that how to rein in these costs has long been the proverbial political hot potato. Any attempt to limit spending or apply evidence-based guidelines to care runs into a buzz saw of criticism. Read more
The NYTimes reporting suggests a 5-4 split against ACA is likely:
Justice Kennedy, along with Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Antonin Scalia and Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. all asked questions suggesting that they had a problem with the constitutionality of the mandate requiring most Americans to buy insurance. Justice Clarence Thomas, as usual, did not ask any questions, but he is widely expected to vote to overturn the mandate.
As does CNN's Toobin's analysis: Read more
Universal health care
