Rural Thoughts

The pundits are saying that they aren't sure how the supreme is going to decide on the health care law, which has now been labelled "Obamacare" by about everyone, although that isn't really fair. But the arguments are about whether or not the case is "ripe" for the supreme court to hear, whether or not congress can require that someone buy a private product or be penalized, and then finally, whether or not the whole law should be thrown out if the court finds that the requirement to buy is unconstitutional.

The worst case scenario for the administration is that the court finds that it can deal with the issues, which, after the arguments today, it seems they will, and then afterward, finds that the mandate is unconstitutional, and then finds that it can be segregated and the rest of the law stays in place.

The reason that would be the worst case scenario is that this would pull the funding mechanism out from under the agreement that congress had concocted with the insurance companies. The problem with insurance companies is that they want to make a lot of profit. If you just had government handling it, in theory at least, all they would need would be to cover their expenses. Profit wouldn't be necessary in those cases.

But if you eliminate the requirement for the universal coverage, then the insurance companies might lose their profit margin, and they will revolt. They already have shown that they have congress by the balls. They will cause of problems if that happens.

What is the alternative? It's the public option. If there is a tax and then a public action, then none of the constitutionality questions would even apply. But the republicans and the wimpy conservative democrats didn't have the guts to put that in place. They have a million excuses why they won't support that, but none of them hold water. The fact is that they receive a lot of campaign contributions from the insurance industry and that influences their decisions.

But back to the supreme court...will they send Obama his worst possible outcome? I think there is a good chance that they will. I think some of them have a score to settle with Obama calling them out in his state of the union speech year before last after they made their horrible Citizen's United decision. The mainstream media won't go into those kinds of personality conflicts on that level, but I will. I think those animosities will rule the day.

How the administration deals with it is going to be interesting.