ObamaCare and how we got here again: Kennedy
A federal judge in Texas ruled on Friday that Obamacare's now toothless individual mandate is unconstitutional since it no longer qualifies as a tax, and since so much of the law hinges on that portion the entire thing has to go.
It's something the Supreme Court should have rightly decided in 2012 when they deemed the mandate a "tax", and now it's probably headed right back to SCOTUS for its last rites.
Health care is the source of most of our current political drama, as politicians want to use the entitlement to be all things to all people, and both parties have failed miserably. Obamacare was too big, ambitious and complex to begin with, and it was designed to be too-big-to-fail and assumed big government would swoop in and save it. Dismantling it has been tricky, and replacing it has been ruinous as rode-hard republicans can now attest.
So what can we do now? It seems the impasse has bought us enough time for lawmakers and the blisslessly insured to decide which fork of this bifurcated road to take. If we swallow the blue pill we are on the fast track to hell on the single payer express, and though we can't afford a new entitlement and won't ever save enough to pay for it, the chaos has led to the grand rationalization that somehow one-size-fits-all health insurance is the least poisonous vial. It will force everyone to have the same crappy health insurance with the same burned out doctors as it leeches the joy and promise out of medicine.
Or we could *really* commit to the free market and swallow the red pill, block granting money to the states to sprinkle benefits as they see fit, finally implementing health savings accounts and selling insurance across state boundaries so people can customize their insurance plans in a competitive frenzy.
That would do a helluva lot more for choice & innovation which means people would live longer, better lives as the world profits from our ultimate export: great ideas that solve big problems through a proliferation of options.