The Supreme Court’s decision on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act won’t be announced publicly until the last week of June. In the disquieting interim, that’s a lot of hand-wringing and tea-leaf reading for the Obama Administration.
There might also be more than a measure of second guessing.
You don’t have to be a partisan, “Obamacare” opponent to note that the Administration’s case was not impressively made by Solicitor General Donald Verrilli. You don’t have to be a gloating GOPster to traffic in “train wreck” metaphors.
Leading questions too often resulted in unimpressively unsteady responses. Verrilli was treated dismissively and interrupted enough to throw him off whatever game he brought to the media-frenzy fray. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg made a better case for the health care mandate than Verrilli did. Embarrassing.
It’s enough to conjecture if President Obama is the Second Guesser-in-Chief right now. Had he not elevated Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court last year, she would still be at the Justice Department as the well-regarded solicitor general. And Obama could still have had her seat on the Court filled by somebody likely to vote as Kagan. Among others, the president passed over Appeals Court Judges Diane Wood, a liberal stalwart, and the more moderate Merrick Garland.
Arguably, we wouldn’t be talking about rhetorical and legal train wreckage after a Solicitor General Kagan presentation. Maybe a loss, but not a lost cause.
And maybe we wouldn’t be pondering an improbably inappropriate broccoli analogy anymore. Hunch here is that Kagan might have found an acceptably respectful way to point out supreme sophistry in the name of devil’s advocacy.
In effect, we already have national health care. That’s the reality of indirectly paying for the uninsured at emergency rooms (to the tune of more than $100 billion annually). Emergency rooms can’t turn away the indigent ill–and costs are passed along to the rest of us. Supermarkets, in contrast, are under no legal obligation to give away broccoli. Of course, they’re not.
If everybody doesn’t buy health insurance (meaning the healthy-but-mortal opt out), the price of health care continues its obscene upward spiral. If everybody doesn’t buy broccoli, market forces kick in, and the price goes down precipitously–or it’s given away to woo back broccoli buyers.
The market for diversionary analogies, however, remains viable.