What if Health Care Wins by Losing

As the Supreme Court Justices questioned the two sides as the debated the Constitutionality of the President's healthcare reform one questions seemed to be coming up over and over.

Namely if the mandate part of this act is removed as unconstitutional can the rest of the healthcare act stand. Now one should remember that Candidate Obama was not an advocate of a mandate. That position was held by Hillary Clinton. Once he became President however Obama dealt with the reality that if the law was to force insurance companies to actually cover sick people, i.e those with pre existing conditions, bad family histories and the like than their costs would go up. To make this palatable it was necessary to increase the customer base. That would be the young and healthy who often do not get coverage even when they could. Human nature also requires that we must understand that if one can get insurance coverage even with a pre existing condition there will not be a strong impetus to get health care coverage until one is sick.

So if the mandate is thrown out the Justices rightly are concerned can the law itself stand without it. Without the mandate the insurance companies will have an explosion in costs. Naturally their own answer will be to increase premiums. So, can it stand, yes it can, will it be a good outcome, it would not.

Myself personally I think if all the insurance companies go broke that would not be a bad thing. Of course my second part of that equation is we go to a government run single payer but one can be assured that we would bail out the insurance companies and their shareholders instead.

What will happen. I think the chance of the whole law being taken down is strong, though it is said Roberts would prefer not to do so on a 5 to 4 vote. I am not a fan of the plan, still I do not want to see it go down in flames over the mandate. It would be, see previous post, another victory for hypocrisy as throughout the late eighties and nineties it was always our Republican friends who felt a mandate was the answer. That idea became a bad one to those on the right approximately 30 seconds after it was accepted by the President as part of his plan.