Best reporting I've seen on SCOTUS and ACA and an American pleads for healthcare

Mon Mar 26, 2012 at 07:43 AM PDT

by nyceveFollow

This will be a rather quick diary because both pieces I want to bring to your attention are far more eloquent than I could ever be on this, most consequential day.
I simply want to say that though I hope,pray and believe the Affordable Care Act and the individual mandate will be deemed constitutional, this is not by any stretch an acceptable solution to our national catastrophe.  Dr SteveB, a much beloved Kossack, told me at an OWS Healthcare for the 99% meeting we attended last week, that there is no way the SCOTUS will kill the mandate and leave the rest of the legislation intact.  That would be the worst possible outcome for the for-profit insurance industry--imagine they would have to insure sick people. The fix is in on that piece of it.
Single Payer healthcare will come to the United States, it will arrive state by state by state.  And I'll have a lot more to say about this in the coming weeks, months and years.
For now, please read Dahlia Lithwick in Slate, It's Not about the Law Stupid. Her analysis of what to expert vis a vis the Supreme Court, is the most spot on that I've seen to date.
Here are several excerpts from her 100% accurate take home message. Read the entire article, you won't be disappointed.

So that brings us to the really interesting question: Will the Court’s five conservatives strike it down regardless? That’s what we’re really talking about next week and that has almost nothing to do with law and everything to do with optics, politics, and public opinion.  . . .On the other hand, I’d suggest that there is an equally powerful countervailing force at work on the justices. Because, as it happens, the current court is almost fanatically worried about its legitimacy and declining public confidence in the institution.
. . .That means that the court goes into this case knowing that the public is desperately interested in the case, desperately divided about the odds, and deeply worried about the neutrality of the court. (Greenhouse points to a Bloomberg News national poll showing that 75 percent of Americans expect the decision to be influenced by the justices’ personal politics.) To hand down a 5-4, ideologically divided opinion just before the Republican and Democratic Party conventions, would—simply put—prove that 75 percent correct, and erode further the public esteem for the court. Justice Clarence Thomas doesn’t worry much about things like that. I suspect Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Kennedy worry quite a lot.

Lithwick really gets to the heart of why the SCOTUS will uphold the law toward the end and her conclusions are not going to give anyone peace of mind about what we're facing from the Roberts Court post-ACA. She says the conservative arguments to invalidate the 'mandate' are, "a constitutional Hail Mary pass".

If I am right about this, some justices may believe that this isn’t a fight worth having. Not now and not over this issue. Recall, even absent the health care case, the 2011 and 2012 terms will represent two of the most divisive and incendiary terms in recent memory. The court isn’t just hearing the health care case this year. It also heard a Texas redistricting case, and the Arizona immigration case. Next year it will hear the Texas affirmative action case, and very likely a case that will question the entire existence of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. Oh, and next term, the court may well have to contend with a gay marriage case, and at the rate state legislators are passing patently unconstitutional abortion regulations, it’s not unlikely the court will be revisiting Roe soon thereafter. Given that line up of future cases, the five conservatives may want to keep their powder dry for now. I think they will. Poll released this week by the American Bar Association agrees, saying that most courtwatchers (85 percent) believe Obamacare will survive. And why is that? Not just the fact that—as I’ve said at the outset—the law is constitutional, well within the boundaries of Congress’ Commerce Clause authority. It’s because for the court to strike it down, the justices would have to pick a fight that wasn’t theirs in the first place.
. . .It’s no accident, either, that Charles Fried, Reagan’s Solicitor General and Harvard conservative legend, said in an interview with Dan Rather Reports this week the case would be decided 8-1—in favor of the law. The conservative legal elites don’t believe in the merits of this challenge, even if the public does.

Here's where it gets very scary.  

That brings me full circle to the court’s five conservatives. Is it possible that they are sufficiently ideological and political that the grim joy of sticking it to the president and the Congress will lead them to strike down the law? Of course. But is it also possible that unlike Sandra Day O’Connor and William H. Rehnquist—who represented the high water mark of states’ rights activism at the Rehnquist court, the two new justices, Samuel Alito and John Roberts, cut their teeth on Ed Meese’s conservatism instead. They were raised on Reagan-era opposition to abortion and affirmative action, to the perceived indignities of the Voting Rights Act, and objections to the wall erected between church and state. Those are the fights to which these men dedicated themselves as young lawyers. They didn’t join the Reagan Administration to return to the glory days before the court expanded the reach of the Commerce Clause to include even wheat grown for personal consumption in the 1942 case of Wickard v. Filburn. (Wickard: “When men were men and the wheat was scared.”) Looked at on the merits, the Affordable Care Act isn’t the “case of the century.” It probably isn’t even the “Case of 2012.” Next week we will all be glued to the political spectacle. But stay tuned. The real action in Roberts’ court has yet to come.
That’s why the current fuss being made over the health care cases has offered the court a perfect cover story. They will hear six hours of argument next week. They will pretend it is a fair fight with equally compelling arguments on each side. They will even reach out and debate the merits of the Medicaid expansion, although not a single court saw fit to question it. And then the justices will vote 6-3 or 7-2 to uphold the mandate, with the chief justice joining the majority so he can write a careful opinion that cabins the authority of the Congress to do anything more than regulate the health-insurance market. No mandatory gym memberships or forced broccoli consumption. And then—having been hailed as the John Marshall of the 21st century—he will proceed to oversee two years during which the remainder of the Warren Court revolution will be sent through the wood chipper.
Looked at on the merits, the Affordable Care Act isn’t the “case of the century.” It probably isn’t even the “Case of 2012.” Next week we will all be glued to the political spectacle. But stay tuned. The real action in Roberts’ court has yet to come.

Okay, that's the SCOTUS, now lets look at what happens to Americans who cannot access healthcare.
It's unlikely anyone will be talking today about Herbert Sample. I'd like you to read about him and his quest to purchase affordable health insurance from a private insurance company in California.  They won't sell it to him. I am so ashmaed to be an American citizen, that we tolerate this.  We elect politicians who turn a blind eye to this grotesque barbarism.

Call me crazy. I'm a few months from losing my health insurance coverage – the COBRA plan you can buy after you leave a job that initially provided the benefit. So I figured I should start planning now to find an individual policy to replace my current plan before I lose it. This shouldn't be too difficult, right? After all, the federal Affordable Care Act – colloquially known as "Obamacare" – was signed into law two years ago. Its mandate that all American citizens obtain coverage of some sort, coupled with a prohibition on insurers denying applicants because of pre-existing health conditions, takes effect in less than two years, assuming the U.S. Supreme Court doesn't strike it down after hearings this week.
It couldn't be all that tough, I thought to myself, to find an affordable health plan.
I was wrong.
I am a healthy 51-year-old freelance writer. I've never had a major illness or disease (knock on wood). The only broken bone I've ever suffered was a fractured jaw, and that was almost three decades ago. I have minor, not-so-unusual conditions for an African American male of my age – borderline high cholesterol and high blood pressure, which have been controlled by one medication each for years, and a hormonal issue for which I also take medication. I'm not overweight. I don't smoke, and my drinking habits are somewhere between light and moderate.
But three insurance companies – Blue Shield of California, Kaiser Permanente and Aetna – all refused to cover me, at any price. Anthem Blue Cross said yes – but only if I accepted a plan that would cost more than three times as much as the plan for which I applied, or $1,350 a month. The justification cited by all four insurers: pre-existing conditions.
This is the state of American health insurance, California-style, circa 2012.

I urge you to read Mr. Sample's description of what he has endured at the unmerciful hands of the unregulated for-profit insurance industry in California. We must elect Democrats committed to establishing single payer healthcare.  I would like to take a leaf from Grover Norquist's playbook, and demand that any Democrat we support, must pledge to support single payer healthcare. The only solution to this barbaric system is Medicare for All.