It’s difficult for Europeans to understand: Why do Americans oppose universal healthcare? The Supreme Court decision concerning healthcare reform will go directly to America’s core.
Nine honorable people wearing black robes and sober facial expressions will render an opinion many are calling the legal decision of the century. U.S. Supreme Court justices will decide whether President Obama’s healthcare reform is partially or wholly unconstitutional.
At question is a 2,400 page monstrosity with the unwieldy name “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” as well as a number of complicated issues like the “individual mandate” and “health insurance exchanges.” But the justices will be dealing with considerably more than that. They will namely deal with a symbol that shows the deep rift in America as hardly any other issue can.
“Obamacare,” as its opponents have dubbed it, runs precisely along the same deep fault line that divides the nation. On the one side are Democrats and the president who, with an expensive reform package, intend to remedy the injustice of 32 million Americans without health insurance. On the other side are Republicans allergic to any increase of government involvement in private lives, against too much power over the individual states in the hands of the federal government, and against the accumulation of any additional debt by an already deeply indebted federal government. The people are roughly evenly divided on both sides.
Europeans, long since accustomed to government healthcare systems, may find that hard to understand: What could anyone possibly have against health care for all? This question, on the other hand, touches on a cultural core value: individual freedom.
So a quasi-religious war rages around the question of whether the government can force its citizens to buy a product — namely, private health insurance policies. That’s the decisive part of the law, the so-called individual mandate. That assures that young and healthy Americans also have to participate in caring for the elderly and the infirm. Couldn’t Washington then mandate that everyone buy healthy things like broccoli as conservative justice Antonin Scalia scornfully asked in dissent? Or is it more a matter of solidarity, even if done with governmental pressure?
It’s a question of differing systems. It has to be discussed, but attempts at serious discussion failed right from the beginning. “Obamacare” was the spark that ignited the tea party movement that ended up poisoning the entire debate atmosphere with its radicalism. Pictures taken during demonstrations showing Obama with a Hitler mustache or wearing a Stalin-style hat circulated around the world. For radicals, healthcare reform is an actual part of the evil that engulfed the nation since Obama’s election: A liberalized immigration policy, looser anti-abortion laws, same-sex marriage and supposedly tougher anti-gun laws. And all that hatched by a colored president who, in the opinion of many, has no right to be in the White House because he wasn’t born in the United States.
Radicals can be found in every country but in the United States the tea party movement has succeeded in gaining control over the entire Republican Party with the result that it has run politics so deeply into a ditch that virtually nothing works in Washington any longer. Obama, who sought to be a conciliatory figure, now lashes out at Republicans wherever he can and many Republicans now consider “compromise” to be a dirty word. The primary elections produced a bizarre contest to see which Republican was the most conservative and most unwilling to compromise with Democrats.
The normally pragmatic Mitt Romney was forced to drift to the extreme right in order to gain conservative support. As governor of Massachusetts, he put through his own universal healthcare bill that included an individual mandate; now he vows the first thing he will do if elected is to overturn the hated “Obamacare” law as quickly as possible.
The justices on the Supreme Court may do that for him because the divide runs through the courtroom as well: Five conservative justices appointed by Republican presidents against four liberals appointed by Democratic presidents.
Experience has shown that they normally vote along party lines, with a swing vote making the final decision. How they will decide is an open question. The only certainty is that regardless of their decision, there will be no reconciliation.
I am an American citizen. The writer of this article called the Tea Party “radicals”. To the contrary, the Tea Party is closest to the founding principles of the United States. We don’t like government interference in our lives. Washington was meant to have limited powers while individual states held more autonomy. The truth is that the majority of Americans see Obama as a communist, divisive, liberal dictator who uses race (backed by liberal radicals) as a platform for endearing the world to him. I view this article as a biased piece of foreign propaganda.