Healthcare, Supreme Court and Broccoli

When it comes to demolishing Obama’s healthcare reform plan, the Conservatives fear nothing: “Could you define the market — everybody has to buy food sooner or later, so you define the market as food, therefore, everybody is in the market; therefore, you can make people buy broccoli,” rages Justice Antonin Scalia, one of the nine judges of the Supreme Court of the United States.

This very imaginative Republican is one of the nine “wise men” (five Conservatives and four Democrats appointed for life) who spent three days examining the Obama reform plan to decide whether or not imposing on all Americans to have subscribed to health insurance by 2014 constitutes a violation of the Constitution. Three days during which the Conservatives have again denounced this tyrannical intrusion of the federal government into citizens’ lives, and what they deem to be an unbearable infringement on individual liberties.

An Ambitious Project Branded Abuse of Power

Democrats have tried to argue that you are, after all, obliged to insure your car… Yes, but you have a choice whether or not to buy a car, retorted the Republicans… Oh of course! Because if the government starts wanting to protect the life of its citizens, where will it stop? Will we be forced, tomorrow, to buy funeral insurance? To exercise twice a day in government-run (meaning socialist) health care facilities? Why not, while we’re at it, make us wear a helmet on motorcycles (which is not mandatory in the United States). Or even, then, eat broccoli.

Obama’s plan is to allow the 32 million Americans who are not poor enough to receive public insurance (Medicaid), but not rich enough to buy private insurance, to enjoy normal healthcare. To ensure that the chronically ill can no longer be rejected by insurers. That a serious illness no longer risks reducing your whole family to poverty. That the most destitute are protected in case of a life accident.

He also offered to extend medical cover of the poorest (Medicaid) to 16 million Americans. More than half of the States have regarded this, again, as the federal government abusing its power.

The Current System Bursting at the Seams

Of course, in case of emergency, you can always go to the hospital, which cannot refuse a patient, even if they have no money nor medical insurance. Since the crisis, there are actually more and more Americans doing this. They will later receive astronomical bills: $4,000 for three stitches, $10,000 for a night in the ER, $100,000 for a difficult childbirth… Those who cannot afford them will throw these bills in the trash, digging a deficit hole that hospitals attempt to fill with those who can pay. This results in an explosion of private insurance premiums, and of the whole system along with it. Employers are insuring fewer employees, and providing less. Young people do not buy insurance. Neither do the self-employed. The elderly and the sick do not have a choice: No insurer wants them.

Last Wednesday, while several hundred people were demonstrating in favor of maintaining the reform, judges announced they would deliver their verdict in June. Should they decide that obligatory health insurance for everyone is indeed contrary to the Constitution, Obama’s reform plan, the main reform of his mandate, the most symbolic, the strongest, will be buried. And for a very long time.