Ox, meet gore.

As Justice Scalia pointed out, the real judicial activism would be having the Court wade into the 2700 pages of the law and decide which provisions should stay and which should be thrown out. The mandate is essential to the “affordable care” purpose of the law, according to its authors. No mandate means they should start over. Which provisions should be re-enacted is Congress’s job to decide, not the Court’s.

If they do throw out the law, watching Roe v. Wade supporters caterwauling about this “bad decision” would be the best entertainment we’ve had in a while. This week’s been fun, though.

“And a court that gave us Bush v. Gore and Citizens United will prove conclusively that it sees no limits on its power, no need to defer to those elected to make our laws.”

Baloney. It is the function of the Supreme Court to render a final verdict on the constitutionality of laws. ObamaCare is a vast Federal power grab that clearly is beyond the powers of Congress under the Constitution. This has nothing to do with cases like Roe where the court made up a right out of whole cloth in order to strike down all laws banning abortion throughout the country.

Liberals of course are engaging in projection here. They treat the Constitution as a genie to invoke when they are in the majority in order to enact their policy prefences that they cannot attain through legislation. They therefore assume that conservatives must be doing the same.

The idea of actually attempting to abide by the text of the Constitution is as foreign to them as the distinction of a court from a legislature. One might as well explain algebra to a dog. For liberals it is first, last and always about power.

Gotta love this comment:
The fact that it is being considered is activist. The best minds on both sides looked at the individual mandate when the law was being written and didn’t expect any serious constitutional challenge — it wasn’t until right wing think tanks with the help of Fox News started getting traction that the Republican politicians started smelling blood in the water

What bubble do these people live in? The individual mandate was a problem from day one and everyone knew that was going to the Supreme Court.

This all comes down to, “If we say it is Constitutional, it is, regardless of facts or logic.”

What the Democratic leadership really wanted to do was pass single-payer. They knew they couldn’t get that through Congress and so compromised on the mandate plus enough regulations and cost limits to slowly squeeze private insurance out of business. But they chose an unconstitutional means to get to their goal. Ironically, the single-payer scheme probably would be constitutionally acceptable, just not politically acceptable.

They don’t really take the Constitution plus legal precedents seriously. This is obvious from the fact that they had no good arguments to present this week.

Why don’t these leftist babies save the whining for if the Supreme Court overturns the Obamacare Mandate?

Just because the Justices had some fun at the Solicitor General’s expense does not mean that they are going to rule against it.

As others have pointed out, all this noise means that so-called “judicial activism” is fine as long as I agree with it. Then it is “Jurisprudence at its finest!”

aggressive economic judicial activism

The free market is a real bitch ain’t it?

The idea that there may be actual limits to the reach and scope of federal government intrusion into our lives is so foreign to these nabobs it is frightening.

The real judicial activism would be a ruling that the commerce clause justifies anything the federal government wants to make you do. Chevy Volts not selling, even with enormous subsidies on both the manufacturing and the purchasing ends? No worries. We’ll just require everyone to buy one, maybe two. I mean, what kind of commerce will there be if we don’t save the planet?

The inevitable conclusion: Get rid of the Supreme Court. If Congress passes the legislation, bugger the Constitution: It is a done deal!!!

The problem with making it compulsory for everyone to buy health insurance (apart from no government can force you to spend money) is that some people cannot afford it.

Let me give you the example of my own green little island; over the past three or four years, with the economic crisis, everything has become more expensive. The insurance companies have been hiking up their premiums by 2% here, 6% there, every six months or so and as a result, more and more people have been dropping their insurance since on top of mortgages, unemployment, etc. it’s just become a luxury, which means in turn that as there are fewer people in the pool to pay, the premiums go up even more, which leads to… yeah. Also not helped by prime government idiocy of this nature (if the government slaps an extra expense on the companies, which are businesses not charities, of course they’re going to recoup the cost by passing on to the consumer).

So if Joe has dropped his private health insurance because he can’t afford to pay that and the mortgage, but it’s law that he has to have health insurance, what next? To make it work, there has to be a punitive element, such as fines. Is the government really foreseeing the courts clogged up with people saying “I can’t pay a fine, so you’ll have to send me to prison”?

Encouraging and making it easier for people to take out health insurance by tax credits and by examining the pricing system in hospitals (is it really necessary to charge $5,000 for five days stay just for bed and board, aside from any medical treatment?) and overhauling the bureaucracy to reduce expenses is the way to go, not by passing a law that punishes people for being the working poor.

This all comes down to, “If we say it is Constitutional, it is, regardless of facts or logic.”

Legal positivism.

The left will ignore laws it doesn’t like (see: Catholics and the First Amendment, the Second Amendment) and ruthlessly enforce laws it does like, regardless of their Constitutionality.

To make it work, there has to be a punitive element, such as fines.

It was my understanding that the fines proscribed by this law were less expensive than the minimum requirement for insurance proscribed by the same law. That is, the fine might be $1,000 whereas the minimum insurance plan legally allowed is $2,500 (those aren’t real numbers, just an example). Coupled with the fact that the law also requires basically immediate insurance when you need it, you could pay the less expensive fine THEN get coverage if you, say, broke your leg and went to the ER. The medical equivalent of getting homeowners insurance after that fire breaks out in your kitchen.

The entire law was designed to be one big FUBAR. It was meant to harm people economically so that — in a few years — it could be replaced with the ultimate goal: single-payer socialized health care a la England, Canada, etc.

If you saw any of the left’s reaction to Dick Cheney’s heart transplant, you’ll see all you need to know about that system: health care would be meted out to those who deserved it (i.e. those people liberals deemed worthy).

That being said, I am not optimistic the law will be overturned, either partially or entirely. And — as I said above — if it is overturned, there is a possibility Obama will tell SCOTUS to take a long walk off a short pier.

2012 is going to be an interesting year…

Fuensoig, let me offer a quick explanation of why a hospital stay will cost $1,000 per day (or a box of tissues $50). Hospitals have huge fixed costs. Regardless of whether anyone is in a room or not, the building and staff (which in a hospital tend to be at a fixed level) have to be paid for. That means the daily cost is tied up in just maintaining the facility, maintaining equipment in each room that you may or may not use but every room needs, and paying the basic employees. It’s the nice, brutal reality of cost accounting.

They did want single payer and they could have passed it and implemented it but knew they would have had a revolt on their hands. When you spend your time saying one thing and doing another, it becomes hard to take the direct approach.

Commenter Chris hits on a big part of the issue. (FWIW hospital business is my day job.) Another big part is the discrepancy in what providers get paid based on who pays. Where I work about 55% of patients are on Medicare and/or Medicaid. We get no better than 65% of our cost on those patients. (Colorado law specifies 68% of estimated cost for Medicaid, but for a variety of reasons they don’t always live up to that standard. Medicare inpatient rates net out to over 75% of cost, but Medicare outpatient reimbursement is abysmal.) Another 10% of patients are uninsured, where we’re lucky to get 5% of cost. So for the remaining 35% of patients the uncompensated portion of other care is about as high as their own cost.

Gregg, I worked for a nursing home company in the 90′s and it was pretty similar. Cash or private insurance people were profitable, Medicare was break even maybe slightly money making, and Medicaid was a loser. Once we had too many Medicaid residents in a facility, we would try to unload it. Several competitors went under for that very reason, bad resident mix.

The idea of walking away from those who need help – these people demonstrate such an outright REVULSION against charity – government is shoved into the position of providing morality-free help, instead of charitable organizations who love and help the needy and just might suggest that making different moral choices might keep the original problem from being repeated.

These people cannot stand to be told what to do. And their pride!

Government ALWAYS crowds out any competition. It’s the 9000 lb. gorilla that it becomes impossible to do anything around. Plus it NEVER has to make money or be competitive in the marketplace. It can always just raise taxes or print money.

That’s the reason why Obama (and politicos in general) lie through their teeth. They don’t legally FORCE your employer to drop coverage, but they create a situation where it’s nearly impossible for them to afford to provide coverage for their employers via coverage mandates and onerous regulations so private employers will drop their employees into the government “exchanges” and pay the “fine” so it’s cheaper for them. My costs this past year went up by 20% and the coverage level dropped. My costs prior to the “Affordable Health Care Act” went up a steady 5-10% a year, greater than inflation to be sure, but I kept the same HMO. Since the act passed, the HMO we used to have became unaffordable to my company so we’ve switched insurance carriers TWICE and our costs went up 15% the first year and 20% last year and coverage has dropped each year.

That’s why the disapproval level for this 2700 page piece of excrement is at 60%.

The Libs will do everything they can to see Obama win the election. Obama wins, he’ll appoint more judges to SCOTUS. The more lib judges on SCOTUS, the better for the liberal playbook and their agenda.

So glad Bush got Roberts and Alito on SCOTUS.

Anybody but Obama in the 2012 elections.

I can’t see why everyone is so concerned, if healthcare is too expensive for an employer they can always lay people off.

The lefties certainly don’t care about how many unionized coalminers are laid off under the EPA’s rules for closing coal fired electric plants.

From the LibProg point of view I think the problem is that Young Tom (Daschle, that is) wasn’t in position to guide it through…so, Congress punted and a really sloppy bill was passed. The POTUS let Pelosi and Co. design the thing, and the result was…well, we all know the result. Too bad that if the thing goes down, we might not get the change we need in the White House.