Tag Archives: Health Insurance

Politics, the Kennedy Court and Health Care 2

by • Politics • Tags: , , , , , , , ,

If I were a member of the Supreme Court I’d be a bit embarrassed at how easy it is to predict Supreme Court rulings knowing only a few elementary political facts.
I expect a 5-4 ruling and i expect it to break down along political lines. It shows me this, the Supreme Court is only there to support certain ideology, making this less about the Constitution and more about what it is to hold power for more than 30 years.  This, whether the members of the court care or not this is the problem. They’ve become, based on Bush v Gore merely an arbiter that always errs on the side of promoting the political ideology of one side or another. Imagine if  Brown v. Board of Education, Bolling v. Sharpe, Cooper v. Aaron, Gomillion v. Lightfoot, Griffin v. County School Board, Green v. School Board of New Kent County, Lucy v. Adams, Loving v. Virginia had been left for this court to decide, shit, we be where South Africa was in the 1980’s in terms of civil rights. We’d be the largest segregated nation  on earth!

Well let’s get past the rant, let’s talk about Anthony Kennedy.

I’ve heard all the popular analysis about Kennedy, he is the swing vote, etc and so on. Well yesterday in a little noted exchange he seemed to be telling the government lawyer the route he sh0uld take to defend the Constitutionality of the law.

In an exchange with Paul Clement, (he is representing those 25 states) this went down:

Kennedy asked Clement this: Is the government’s argument this–and maybe I won’t state it accurately. It is true that the noninsured young adult is, in fact, an actuarial reality insofar as our allocation of health services, insofar as the way health insurance companies figure risks. That person who is sitting at home in his or her living room doing nothing is an actuarial reality that can and must be measured for health service purposes; is that their argument?

And just a short while later:

MR. CLEMENT: And with respect to the health insurance market that’s designed to have payment in the health care market, everybody is not in the market. And that’s the premise of the statute, and that’s the problem Congress is trying to solve.

And if it tried to solve it through incentives, we wouldn’t be here; but, it’s trying to solve it in a way that nobody has ever tried to solve an economic problem before, which is saying, you know, it would be so much more efficient if you were just in this market–

JUSTICE KENNEDY: But they are in the market in the sense that they are creating a risk that the market must account for. 

MR. CLEMENT: Well, Justice Kennedy, I don’t think that’s right, certainly in any way that distinguishes this from any other context.

What does this mean? It almost seems like Justice Kennedy is signalling the defense the government should be making, (and why aren’t they anyway??? WTF, seriously).

And a little later this:

MR. CARVIN: It is clear that the failure to buy health insurance doesn’t affect anyone. Defaulting on your payments to your health care provider does. Congress chose, for whatever reason, not to regulate the harmful activity of defaulting on your health care provider. They used the 20 percent or whoever among the uninsured as a leverage to regulate the 100 percent of the uninsured.

JUSTICE KENNEDY: I agree–I agree that that’s what’s happening here.

MR. CARVIN: Okay.

JUSTICE KENNEDY: And the government tells us that’s because the insurance market is unique. And in the next case, it’ll say the next market is unique. But I think it is true that if most questions in life are matters of degree, in the insurance and health care world, both markets–stipulate two markets–the young person who is uninsured is uniquely proximately very close to affecting the rates of insurance and the costs of providing medical care in a way that is not true in other industries.

That’s my concern in the case.

I fully expect this to be a 5:4 decision based on the politics of the court. I have no faith that what-so-ever in the non-partisanship of the court. Sorry Bush V Gore cured me of believing in the non-partisanship of the court. And I know that 75% of the country is with me on that, this is something that the Court itself should be ashamed of and it is telling that they are not.

Oh well, we tried. Get ready for your health insurance costs to skyrocket.

CrossPosted @DAGBlog

Democrat Like Me 1

by • Humor, Life, Politics • Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

For years the idea haunted me, if a Republican became a Democrat in the deep North what adjustments would she have to make?

And that is how it began, that fateful day in 1984 was the day I decided to infiltrate the Democratic party and turn them all into Liberal Republicans! I knew I could do it if I could just find a way to fit in first, to blend in, so I went to the doctor’s office for some help.

“Hey Doc”, I said to him after he forced me on that scale again, why do they always want to know how much I weigh? “Hey T”, he replied, we were old friends since the heady days of Watergate. “Doc, I want to attempt to infiltrate the Democratic Party and turn them into a corporatist Republican lite party. I think I can do it, if I try very, very hard. How can I do this?”

He laughed and then smirked at me, he said, “Well first of all you need to quit shopping at Brooks Brothers, cause that totally doesn’t fit for a Democrat, I think you need to shop at vintage stores from now on, and find some bell bottom jeans with embroidery on them, preferably flowers and sunshine and stuff, it will make you seem whimsical and egalitarian.”

I was kind of happy that I had to shop for my newest endeavor, although I wasn’t totally into this Vintage Store BS but if I had to buy some crappy hippy clothes then I would, it is easier to punch them if you look like them.

So I thought I should find out about the party I was infiltrating so I decided I would study hard at the virtual knee of one James “Corporal Cueball” Carville. I saw him one night on CNN, and thought he would be the perfect teacher for me.   So I studied Carville, and knew I was about to become a superstar in the Democratic Party, superstardom leads to apparatchikdom too and that was my ultimate goal, become an apparatchik, it would make me feel like I had more control over all things Democratic and I could lead them myself to Republicanism, which ultimately was my goal, to make sure Democrats were just Republicans without the backbone.

My first effort was to make them, the Democrats, think that I took my new party seriously, when really I was just a shill for my corporate, tribal overlords. This fact was discovered by the arch nemesis to all corporate shills like myself, one Glenn Greenwald. He is a superstar this Greenwald guy, he has absolutely no connection to corporate overlords. His CATO membership is just a ruse, and his white papers for them, just a job, but he isn’t affected at all by these things, as he isn’t a sell out in anyway shape or form, and he never ever lets the corporate will beat him down, he fights it all the time.  He has no professional connection to corporate overlords and he is merely out for America the Beautiful. Greenwald is awesome in his ability ferret out those of us who have sold out America to the highest bidder. Working with the Koch is like waving an American flag, working with the Democrats is like working for Satan.

So my plan has worked, the health care bill we have currently, was my plan from the beginning, to sell out America by forcing them to have access to health insurance.  It will evolve into nothing that can benefit anyone really. States will not take the matter into their own hands to search for the best answer for their citizens either.  Certainly places like Minnesota (status of the Act), California, ( LWV, support of California OneCare), Illinois, Pennsylvania, Montana, (more Montana analysis) Massachusetts and Vermont have not taken the new law and tried to make it beneficial for their own citizens. They have succumbed to the dead-end health reform, the one that only supports insurance companies and is terrible for the people!

My mission is complete and soon I am sure I will be promoted head apparatchik, instead of just being referred to as the Greatest Living Democrat.

Hey Democrats consider yourselves Pwned.

Crossposted at DAGblog