From the Sundries Shack:
Or, as Justice Scalia asked, after the government’s lawyer finished reciting all the problems that Obamacare was created to allegedly solve, “Why aren’t those problems that the Federal Government can address directly?”
The answer is: they are.
If the Democrats in Congress had been more honest, they could have built an alternate Obamacare that wouldn’t have run afoul of the Constitution. It would likely have set up a government system similar to Medicare, but for individuals and those with pre-existing conditions. The new system would by definition be very expensive so Democrats would have had to either 1) fudge the numbers so badly that not even the friendly MSM could obscure it, or 2) build a tax structure right away to dump a trillion dollars or so into it each year. In either case, everyone would have to pay more taxes — likely on the order of several thousand dollars. But once they were done, they’d have their government-run health insurance program that covered those relatively few Americans who want health insurance but can’t get it.
Of course, they would have had to sell America on the largest tax increase in the history of the planet to get it. Lots and lots of people would have asked them if there wasn’t some less expensive way to get the job done, perhaps a state-by-state option or a shift of tax incentives from employers to individuals. The questions would have been tough, fair, and in all likelihood hostile to a huge new bureaucracy and its attendant tax scheme, but the Democrats would have had to make a real argument and we could have have an honest discussion about our health insurance problems.
Obamacare was the Democratic attempt to avoid that discussion.
Read the whole thing. Earlier at the Conservatory, the leftist shock at the possible unconstitutionality of ObamaCare, on which Ace also commented here.
To rephrase all of this, the Founders were chary of the rights of individuals qua individuals, whereas Progressives are all about the ‘rights’ of the collective. It goes without saying that the rights of individuals are to be secured from the collective in the Founders’ vision, and that in their view there is no liberty at all, if it does not reside in the individual.
The latter is a radical appeal to the validity of a singular person’s singular interiority; the former a prescription for the public individual. It does not strain the argument to state that the vision of the Founders located and secured a person’s reality in the space of his privacy, while the Progressive places and polices that reality in the public.
UPDATE: Healthcare, Y U costa so mucha?
