Shock and sadness.
Those are the raw emotions that have been cycling through my body for the past several minutes after learning of the Supreme Court’s (SCOTUS) ruling over ObamaCare (or the Affordable Care Act, ACA). I did not see this coming. I fully expected, naively so it would seem, for this law to be overturned, and ruled unconstitutional.
I was wrong.
More surprisingly, conservative Justice Roberts, of all Justices, weighed in as the swing vote. BAM! Knockout punch. Down for the count.
For me, this decision was never (mostly) about Americans’ rights to medical care. Healthcare and access to insurance are complex issues in my mind, and I’m not completely sure where I fall on the morality side of all points of the issue. I have been a major flip-flopper over the past decade. I’ll save that discussion for another time perhaps.
The ObamaCare ruling has always been about the amount of power We The People want our federal (and really any level of) government to hold over us.
Without having yet had the chance to read the full opinion (so I reserve the right to modify this position later), it is my understanding that the primary basis SCOTUS used in upholding the “individual mandate” portion of the law, which essentially requires everyone to purchase health insurance, is that they deemed it a “tax” as opposed to a fee. This effectively removed the Commerce Clause from the equation, in their minds. Once that was done, SCOTUS ruled that since Congress has the constitutional power to implement taxes on the people, it has the power to implement the individual mandate portion of the law. The individual mandate portion of the law was the glue holding everything together. If they’d struck it down, the entire law likely would have been thrown out. They kept it in, so the law stays too. Justice Roberts did make the point to say that the decision does not comment on the wisdom of the law, but rather on its constitutionality.
Fine. Done. Not good.
I feel SCOTUS took the easy off-ramp on this one. Once they removed the Commerce Clause from the argument, this was an easy victory for the President. Of course Congress has the power to tax (how much or whether or not they should, is a completely different discussion also for another time), but I will concede, this is one of its powers.
In my opinion, the individual mandate is not a tax. It is an automatic “opt-in” program (unless my state opts-out??? but we’ll put a pin in that for now), with a penalty assessed to “opt-out.” Either way, I pay. Just for having been born in this country, I must pay for something that the government has no business in controlling in the first place. I pay either for myself, or for others, or both of us. I pay for something that should be left up to the marketplace.
Oops. I said I wasn’t going to get into the broader healthcare vs. government discussion, but here I am. It’s all so intertwined. While I would love to live in a world where money is never a consideration to whether or not someone receives the best medical care, I don’t. We don’t. We never will. It is a utopian dream that is impossible to realize. Everything has a price. Everything is paid for in some way. Socialism in its various forms never works because it denies the basic laws of economics. It is what we (some of us) want the world to be, not what it is. When I was seven, I wished endlessly for the Millennium Falcon to appear on my front lawn, but it never did. No matter how much I wanted it to be true, it just wasn’t possible.
The next best thing we have in Human society to an impossible Utopia is the Free Market system of Capitalism, and the presumption that “all men are created equal… endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights… that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” It’s not perfect. It’s sometimes not pretty. But by using the power of the markets, and the rule of law to protect individual liberty, we allow individuals to decide what is best for themselves, provided they do not infringe on the rights of others to do the same.
Today, President Obama said this in his victory response: “I did it because I believed it was good for the American people.” Thank you Mr. President, but I do not need you to decide what is good for me. I need you to execute the laws of the land, and uphold the ideals for which this country was founded through centuries of blood, sweat and tears, and framed so perfectly the beautiful sentence I cited above from the Declaration of Independence. That is what I want from you. I want nothing else.
Unfortunately, now that ObamaCare has been vindicated by the highest court in the land – a decision I respectfully, but strongly disagree with – I fear that this president, those who follow, and Congress will feel emboldened to even more vigorously impose their wills upon us, strip us of more freedoms, all in the name of doing me “good” as if I were a child – or a small dog. This is a path I’m terrified of traversing. Government, and government power grows ever larger. It seems to be a one way directional machine. The more we allow this to happen, the more complicity we are in our eventual total loss of freedom. It’s not without precedent. After all, that is how this nation came to exist in the first place. Power corrupts; Absolute power corrupts absolutely. We’re not quite there, but it’s only a matter of time before history repeats itself.
Cheers,
PersephoneK
