It’s just too tempting to say something optimistic when
conventional opinion can’t find anything positive to say. The prospect of the
US Supreme Court—nine lawyers—determining the fate of the biggest health care
reform in US history, and quite possibly the fate of the incumbent president,
is irresistible.
Two positive propositions have emerged: the political center
will get more concerned about the extraordinary powers of the court, and
Democrats will again get more radical about fundamental health care reform.
On judicial reform, Ross Douthat well expresses the vision
of a possible consensus in his column “The Liberal Embrace of Judicial
Restraint.”
“But one can disagree with the
specifics of the liberal brief against the Roberts Court and still welcome
liberalism’s conversion to the cause of judicial restraint. It should be a
point of bipartisan consensus that the judiciary is a political body rather
than a panel of Platonic Guardians, and it’s a healthy thing for our democracy
to have the other branches of government ready to push back when the high court
seems to overreach. This pushback can and should include the possibility of
reforming the way the court does business: Term limits and supermajority requirements,
for instance, are both plausible responses to the weirdness of having our great
controversies settled by the timing of an aging justice’s final illness, or the
idiosyncrasies of Anthony Kennedy.”
Click on: http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/26/the-liberal-embrace-of-judicial-restraint/?hp
On health care reform, former Chair of
the National Democratic Party Howard Dean sees the possible elimination of
“individual mandates”—the centerpiece of Obama’s universal private insurance
model—as the last best chance to get the single-payer model back into the
Democrat’s platform.
Both propositions rely on a more
sympathetic political climate in the country and, in particular, in the US
congress. The former, however, does have potential appeal to Republicans,
independents, and Democrats. The later has no prospect of success without a decisive
take-over of the Democratic Party and, then, the US Congress by old-style
New-Deal liberals.
Howard Dean may not “give a damn” about
Obama’s liberal-conservative health insurance compromise. However, he doesn’t
offer any credible way to get a better reform out of a disaster for Obama in
the court.
To replace Obama-Romneycare with a
nationalized single-payer insurance scheme would require the financial
surpluses of Bill Clinton, the left illusions of the 30s, and Lyndon
Johnson’s 1964 electoral sweep—with conservatism in disrepute and without such
“distractions” as the civil rights movement and the War in Vietnam.
There have been 15 presidential
elections and 30 congressional elections since Harry Truman first proposed
universal health insurance.
Only Obama’s plan—with its universal consumer
mandate—has made it into law. It is the product of trial and error, liberal and
conservative economic, health and management ideas. The mandate isn’t
“arbitrary.” Broccoli won’t be next. It’s the only instrument 60 years of
discussion and votes have found to realize a massively popular idea—assured and
reasonably equal access to the full range of essential health services.
The Canadian federation to the north
doesn’t have a national single-payer system. Mr. Dean’s federation is 10 times
bigger and its national government is extremely unlikely to create one either.
If the Supreme Court throws out the
mandate tomorrow, the only alternative for reformers is to propose a
significant, broad-based health insurance tax. That will not be realized in the
next four years, whoever wins in November.
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