The Supreme Court Review of Obamacare

Obamacare was created by building on the existing health insurance scheme in which a majority of workers receive insurance fully or partly paid by their employers.  These benefits are tax deductible to the employer and are not taxable to the employee, a system that has existed since World War II to accompany wage control at that time.  The system is currently unfair as recently pointed out by the gay Republican group. Employees who work for small companies have to buy their health insurance with after tax income which is not fully tax deductible.  This unfairness would be rectified if the the then Democratic Congress and the president had decided to count that employer paid health insurance as taxable income to the employee. This idea was opposed by all the insurance companies, the unions, which frequently have lucrative health insurance schemes, and by most employees currently enjoying these tax free benefits. A start could have been made by partly taxing these benefits in order to provide more financing for Medicaid. However, the politicians were all too cowardly to take that initial step. As a consequence, Obamacare comprises  a 2708 page law that requires uninsured people to buy health insurance,a product from  a private company.

This insurance mandate is the issue before the Supreme Court. It is acutely disappointing to see the Court so polarized.  The liberal judges, Breyer, Kagan, Ginsburg and Sotomayor, were all to willing to accept the Solicitor General's argument that the mandate was constitutional under the commerce clause of the 16th amendment. In other words, their apparent feelings, which I share, that health coverage should be universal in the USA, appears to have overridden the question of the constitutionality of the mandate resulting from the awkwardness of Obamacare. Others have pointed out that in 1792, Congress passed a law requiring the purchase of a product from a private company--that able bodied men should buy a weapon.  That law was neither challenged or enforced. It would never pass today and thus is not a good counter example.  If the mandate is passed, it provides massive federal intrusion into the lives of individuals. Consider Justice Scalia's comment--food is a national market, broccoli is good for you, therefore the government could require you to buy broccoli. Approval of the mandate allows the federal government to require you to buy things that it alone deems as necessary, e.g. mammograms yearly for every women over 50,  the purchase of statin medications, burial insurance, perhaps even an NRA sponsored requirement to buy a gun for self defense. I sincerely hope that the court will find this mandate unconstitutional and hope that some of the liberal judges will overcome their political prejudices to concur.