Obama Warns Supreme Court

Coming from the President who signed the NDAA, I find it laughable that he assumes to tell someone else what constitutes an overreach of authority.

That being said, his health care reform is an utter failure in my opinion. For-profit medicine in the U.S can be so sick (pun unintended) at times that the lack of a public option is criminal.

 

Yes - it's called judicial review.

The thing that I don't understand is the people who are saying that the only thing the Court is locating at is the Constitutionality of the personal mandate. While that's technically true, without the mandate the entire law falls apart. It is absurd to require insurance companies to accept people with pre-existing conditions if you don't also require everyone to purchase some type of insurance. Otherwise people who aren't sick will simply wait until they need some type of medical insurance prior to signing up.

One thing that I've been very skeptical of regarding the Affordable Care Act is how affordable it will actually be. I've worked at my current job for about 11 years now. When I started, the family health plan (medical and dental) was $71 per paycheck. It's now up to $286 per paycheck, and has an annual $2,000 family deductible before it pays for squat. Now granted, over the course of 11 years you'd expect the price to increase, but I doubt most general items have increased in cost by a factor of 4 in the last 11 years. (Hell - not even gas has done that - it's about tripled in the last 11 years.)

I'm not here to cry poor mouth about my predicament - I have a pretty good job, and can provide for my family. I'm just pointing out that the average household with a median income of $54K probably can't afford that much money for insurance (once you add in the deductible it's about 17% of their pre-tax income).

I think this is an not-so-shining example of American exceptionalism. I want to know what we think we know about providing medical care for our citizens that is different (and presumably better) than just about every other country in the world that you would ever consider visiting (and quite a few that you wouldn't).

Here's the final thing I don't understand - it would seem to me we already have a single payer system (in the form of Medicare and Medicaid) that already pays for the majority of healthcare costs in our nation. I saw a program a few nights ago on TV that asserted (I have no means of verifying their calculation) that the sickest 10% of people in the nation account for about 2/3 of the total money spent on medical costs. These "sickest 10%" are people who are suffering from long-term chronic illnesses - things like heart disease, cancer, and diabetes.

While it's possible to have problems like that when you're young, the vast majority of people who do are elderly. Those people are on Medicare, and are typically retired, and are thus contributing minimally to the costs. Now I'm not saying that we should dump them off the system and let them die, but I am saying that it seems like we should be able to make up the shortfalls in Medicare (and we definitely need to), and cover everyone on a similar system for not a whole lot more money that what we're currently spending. Hell, even if we more than tripled everyone's requirement for Medicare to 5% of their income (it's currently 1.45%) it should be possible.

 

It is called "Chicago politics"

 

One of the under-reported things about SC is how big of an impact Obama may have in shaping the future of it. He has already appointed two members: Sotomoyer (sp?) and Kagan. But it is not just possible, but likely if he wins another term that he'll have more. Look at the ages of some of the current members:

Ginsberg - 79
Scalia - 76
Kennedy - 76
Breyer - 74

They are all in relatively good health, but geez, if Obama wins another term 3 of them will be at least 80. And when you're 80... stuff happens.

 

In other words, America is one flu away from a thorough reshuffling of the Supreme court, and it's three liberals and one conservative that are most vulnerable as a result of their advanced age.

If conservatives win the next election and stuff happens, it will be a conservative court for the next decade at least.

 

I don't think there are three liberals on that list. Kennedy is considered a "swing" justice, and he is, at best, considered a moderate. Breyer and Ginsberg are certainly two of the liberal justices. That said, there's really two sets of justices on the court. There are the four older ones listed here, and the rest are relatively young, as far as SC justices go:

Thomas - 64 (unbelievable he's only 64 - he's been on the SC for over 20 years)
Alito - 62
Sotomayor - 58
Roberts - 57
Kagan - 52

I think it is likely that the top list of justices are all gone within the next 10 years (yeah, I know that seems like a long time, but it is not uncommon to have an octogenarian on the Supreme Court). John Paul Stevens retired a little over a year ago, and later that same year he turned 90. Certainly they won't all stay there for 10 years, and some will time their exits.

Despite the supposed neutrality of justices, they do have political leanings, and prefer to be replaced by someone who has a similar ideologue. Many believe that David Souter was ready to retire before 2009, but he waited until there was a Democrat in the White House so he would be replaced by someone more like him.

This a long way of saying that since things look pretty good for Obama's re-election right now, I don't see any of them leaving - or rather that there is little incentive for anyone to leave, because it looks like the state of the White House will likely remain as it is now. But I would expect both Ginsberg and Breyer to step down prior to 2016. OTOH, so long as he remains in good health, Scalia almost certainly will not retire prior to 2016.

Finally, I do want to say that 3 of the last 4 SC appointments have been good picks. Roberts, Sotomayor, and Kagan are all moderates. Alito is the only one I'd consider highly conservative. One of the bonuses of having so much partisanship in Congress is that it forces the president to pick a moderate, as you need 60 senators to agree during the confirmation hearings. And quite honestly, I WANT a moderate SC.