Monthly Archives: June 2012

Obamacare will lead inevitably to single-payor

Speaking of Obamacare, not enough commentators are picking up on what seems to us as clear logic:  Obamacare will eventually lead to a so-called single-payor system, i.e., government provision of all health care.  Call it an intended consequence and probably a shrewd strategy for the socialists who know that single-payor is not politically viable yet.

The chain of events will go something like this:  Mandates on insurance companies to cover anyone at prices that the insurers don’t control will turn health insurers essentially into public utilities—with all of the responsiveness and innovation that we have come to expect from such enterprises.  Meanwhile, increasing costs, the “Cadillac tax,” and other burdens will cause more and more employers to drop their health insurance coverage.  A few years after the law is fully implemented, and most Americans despise the system, politicians will do what they do best:  throw more money at the beast.  When that doesn’t work, politicians will adopt another of their favorite tactics:  blame evil corporations.  The big health insurers and big employers have heartlessly failed to take care of their customers and employees, the argument will go, so only benevolent government can step in and provide for the hapless citizenry.  Americans, as we will have done for nearly a century by then, will accept this logic as the only solution.

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No silver lining in Roberts’s Obamacare decision

Many conservatives are saying (e.g., the Washington Examiner’s Mark Tapscott) that at least the Supreme Court’s horrific decision to uphold Obamacare has a silver lining:  the Court held that Obamacare would not withstand Constitutional scrutiny as an exercise in regulation of interstate commerce.  (Instead, the Court upheld it as within Congress’s right to tax.)  This ruling, in Tapscott’s view, will “fundamentally shift the constitutional debate away from the liberal assumption since the Woodrow Wilson era that an Imperial Presidency and supine Congress can pretty much do as they please so long as it’s covered by at least one of those fig leaves known as the General Welfare, Necessary and Proper or Commerce clauses of the Constitution.”

We don’t believe this for a second.  Does anyone really think that a future Court comprised of a liberal majority would treat this case as precedent to strike down a law for overstepping the Commerce Clause?  No chance.

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Regulatory reductio ad absurdum

Classic from James Taranto today:  “The benefits of aviation rules are calculated primarily on how many deaths they may prevent, so the safest decade in modern airline history is making it harder to justify the cost of new requirements.”

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Jonathan Turley: Pack the Court. . . with me!

So, it’s fair to suppose that Jonathan Turley is implying that the Supreme Court should include “clear intellectual leaders in courts, the bar and academia” like, ahem, Jonathan Turley?

H/T: Instapundit

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Holbrooke: Spinning from the grave

This Washington Post excerpt of a book manages to advance a false left-wing narrative and do the late Richard Holbrooke’s bidding.  To hear Rajiv Chandrasekaran tell it, the stalwart, heroic Richard Holbrooke would have achieved peace in Afghanistan and reconciliation with the Taliban if only the petulant bullies and war-mongers (some of them holdovers from the Bush Administration) would have let him.

Except for one tiny detail, buried in the middle of the story:  “There was no clear path for Holbrooke to achieve peace talks. The Taliban had no office, mailing address, or formal structure. It was not clear that its leader, the reclusive Mullah Mohammed Omar, wanted to talk—in 2009, the Taliban appeared to be winning—or whether he and his fellow mullahs would accept the United States’ conditions for negotiations: that they renounce violence, break with al-Qaeda and embrace the Afghan constitution.”

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