Obama touted the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold his signature healthcare reform legislation to cheers from a crowd of his supporters.
“The law I passed is here to stay,” he told an audience composed largely of Ohio automobile manufacturing workers.
Obama’s comments are the closest he’s come to “spiking the football” on the Supreme Court’s decision, which surprised many observers. Chief Justice John Roberts joined the court’s liberal justices in ruling the healthcare mandate is constitutional because it is a tax. It’s the first time Obama has mentioned the ruling on the campaign trail.
This is obviously an overstatement. If Republicans win in November, Obamacare is finished. Surely, our sophist in chief knows that.
But even if President Obama manages to squeak out a victory in four months, the debate over Obamacare will not be over. In fact, I believe that Obamacare in its current form is doomed, regardless of who emerges victorious on November 6.
I have two reasons for this conclusion.
First, the bill is built on far too many questionable assumptions. If any one of them fails to hold, the entire thing could fall apart.
For instance, the Congressional Budget Office gave the authors of the bill a pretty good score on the efficacy of the individual mandate, declaring that only a small portion of the public would choose to go without health insurance. This is very important: If the mandate is too weak, too many people will forgo coverage until they get sick, insurance premiums will rise, more people will forgo coverage, and so on. It’s known as a “death spiral.”
CBO says it will not happen. But that is an assumption – one that not everybody agrees with. The insurance industry, for one. Though Democrats brutally demagogued insurers during the 2009-2010 drama to pass the bill, behind the scenes they worked assiduously to win their endorsement. They failed, but only because the mandate the Senate endorsed was so weak the insurers feared a death spiral. (There is also a chance that the mandate will lose some of its psychological teeth if people come to view it as a mere tax, which could increase the likelihood of a death spiral. Economics mingled with the realities of social psychology can produce some strange effects.)
There are plenty of other questionable assumptions like this scattered all throughout the bill. Consider:
Excellent article.
I would have missed it without your link.