How John Roberts re-elected Barack Obama

Twenty-seven months ago, almost to the day, I wrote about how I believed that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act would be upheld by the Supreme Court. And lookie, it just was this morning. Most everyone thought I was a fucking nut for saying this in public, and I do hope that it'll get everybody off of my dick for predicting that Rob Ford would lose.

I think it's time for everybody to admit that I have a more supple mind than you do, both legally and politically. As Robert Plant declared from a balcony at the International Hyatt House in 1975, "I am a Golden God!"

But this isn't entirely about me gloating, just mostly.

Before I go further, I should re-iterate what I said nearly two and half years ago: I don't like the individual mandate. But for everything else that the Congress and the Courts - conservatives and liberals alike - have done over the last century, it would be unconstitutional. The idea that the government can compel an individual to buy a product from private industry - particularly an industry so unashamedly fucking sleazy as the medical insurance business - is repugnant to everything I believe. But that decidedly doesn't make it unconstitutional.

And you know what? This is where shit gets really interesting. Well, it doesn't just get interesting. It gets downright hilarious, too.

The conventional wisdom has been that upholding the PPACA would be the best thing that could have happened to the Republican Party generally and Mitt Romney specifically in this campaign year. Conventional wisdom is wrong.

If the GOP just stuck to "repeal" on ObamaCare, they'd be on safe ground. But because they're dishonest whores, idiots, or both; they decided to go further. They've seen the same polling that I have, and they know that large swaths of the PPACA - such as banning the disqualification of coverage because of a pre-existing condition, barring companies from withdrawing coverage from sick people, and keeping the kids under Mommy and Daddy's plans until they're 26 - are incredibly popular.

So they stupidly decided to double-down. They said that they would "repeal and replace" ObamaCare. They're just going to do it without the much-loathed individual mandate. And that's where they're going to get fucked out until nobody recognizes them anymore.

Republicans invented the individual mandate for reason, folks. It's pretty much the only way you can achieve anything even close to universal coverage, short of single-payer. Without dramatically expanding the risk pool to cover everyone that Democrats, Republicans and the American people say they want covered, the HMOs will go bankrupt in about thirty-five seconds. Because the parts of ObamaCare that everyone has fallen in love with are monumentally pricey!

The Republican proposals are adorable - and I even agree with some of them, in theory and outside of the current debate - but they're either incredibly impractical, illegal, or the math doesn't work.

Let's start with tort reform.

Firstly, just as Mitt Romney likes to be able to fire people who provide him services, I like being able to sue the tits off of people who suck at their jobs to my physical detriment.

Secondly, if you get as loose with reform as Republicans seem to desire, there's a really good chance that Dr. Conrad Murray would be treating you with propofol and lorazepam every time you stub your toe. There used to be a time when conservatives believed that unless you made people pay for their fuck-ups, there would be no incentive for them not to fuck up.

Thirdly, the most optimistic estimates that I've seen show tort reform saving only about $300 million a year. Heath care consumes about 18% of GDP, which translates into trillions of dollars.

Finally, tort reform assumes that Democrats will no longer exist. But they will, and in sufficient numbers to filibuster the tits off of any bill in the Senate. Period.

Then there's the idea of letting people buy insurance across state lines, which might be the dumbest goddamned thing I've ever heard.

Insurance companies enjoy an exemption to the federal government's anti-trust laws. I have no idea how you maintain that exemption when said companies are forced to compete with one another nationally. And if you think that they're going to just surrender that exemption, you're hallucinating.

The godless insurance industry has armies of shitstain, scumbag lobbyist assholes, each one of whom owns three or four individual members of Congress and at least one potential presidential candidate. The only reason that said shitstain, scumbag lobbyist assholes didn't destroy the individual mandate the way they did the public option is that the mandate was good for business. Getting rid of the anti-trust exemption would be very, very bad for business. Think that's going to happen any time soon? If so, I have cock ring that'll give you super powers that I'm dying to sell you!

Because anti-trust exemptions by their very nature destroy market competition, Americans would have to take it on faith that prices would go down. You would actually have a faith-based health care economy because there's absolutely no evidence that what Mitt Romney and John McCain say would happen actually would.

More importantly, interstate commerce in health insurance would destroy politics as Americans currently know it.

Since no Republican is daring to propose actually federalizing the regulation of interstate insurance policies, it's only natural that the companies would all headquarter themselves in the state with the weakest (if not actually non-existent) regulations. Nobody wants their medical care controlled by "unelected bureaucrats", but I can't see the good folks of Alaska, California, Michigan and Maine enjoying having te terms and conditions said care dictated to them by Mississippi's insurance commissioner, either.

Such an arrangement would, given the percentage of GDP eaten up by health care, give one guy in Jackson more practical political power than all but a very few members members of Congress. I figure that it wouldn't take Congress more than a few months to figure that out and, out of the blue, you'd suddenly see national insurance regulations to rectify the situation. The only thing that would cost is the federalism that GOP politicians are making this awkwardly dumb proposal to protect.

Proposing tax credits as a way of paying for coverage is insulting to the intelligence of even  pituitary retards. Even the lowliest of do-nothing, "Let's treat cancer with leeches" insurance plans cost anywhere from seven to thirteen grand a year. A tax credit assumes that you have that coin up front, to be redeemed the following April. And most middle-class families don't, to say nothing of the working poor.

Block grants to the states are even worse. The states, as you may have noticed by now, are even more broke than the federal government is, which is saying a lot. Blocks grants don't tend to rise with regular old inflation, let alone the atmospheric inflation of the health insurance sector.

Sooner than almost anyone realizes, the states will put that money to other shit, like tax cuts and new sports stadiums, and find reasons to deny people care.  They'll be doing precisely what the insurance companies are doing now.

How do I know that? Because that's exactly what happened after Bill Clinton's welfare reform plan passed and AFDC was abolished. Looking after the sick and the poor is the least effective vote-getter there is. If you're wondering why federal unemployment insurance benefits have had to be extended so often, look no further than the block-granting of welfare.

More importantly, block grants will induce employers to do exactly the same thing that ObamaCare does; dump their private coverage and force employees into the state program, which won't cover them, either.


So what does that leave you with? Not much. 

1. An employer mandate: This was Richard Nixon's idea back in 1974. Unfortunately, this was well before Frank Luntz (who invented "The Death Tax" out of an innocuous estate tax that almost no one paid) re branded "rich motherfuckers"  as "job creators." More importantly, an employer mandate assumes the existence of a manufacturing sector that the United States no longer has. If you insure the manager at McDonald's, you'll very quickly find that your Quarter Pounder costs forty seven fucking dollars. 
2.  Deficit financing: This is something that Republicans are exceptionally good at, as evidenced by the years 2001-06 and the Ryan plan, which is so front-loaded with tax cuts that it explodes the deficit in the short and medium terms. The only problem here is that the United States is no longer in a position where it can finance giant programs by borrowing. The international bond markets will call bullshit the second it tries, and Americans will be scrambling to pay the pizza guy with a more stable currency, like the peso. 
3. Single payer: If Romney and the congressional GOP gets their way, this will be the only option left to them because private insurers will no longer exist. If we know anything about Mitt Romney, it's that he's good at putting things out of business. The only difference is that he won't make money out of it. He'll just be doing it for fun and out of his base animal instinct. 

Not only do I know that Mitt Romney is lying when he says that he'll "repeal and replace" the PPACA with all of the goodies intact and the odious individual mandate gone, Mitt Romney knows that he's lying. He spent a couple of years studying the issue up in Massachusetts and the only thing he could come up with was the individual mandate. Romney and Barack Obama are the only guys in America with any hands-on experience in this field and they came to exactly the same conclusion. 

If you think that the President isn't going to point that out in public, you're even dumber than you look. Not only is Obama smart, he's a mean little bastard, too. Not only will he pulverize Romney with this in the debate, he'll almost certainly steal this essay and run it under his name in the following day's New York Times. I'm betting that he'll change my title to something snappy, like  "Mitt Romney is a Lying Cunt." 

Everybody expected that if there was going to be a flip vote in the Supreme Court this morning, it would be Anthony Kennedy. And almost no one thought that there was a flip vote to be had. 

Instead it was Chief Justice Roberts who voted with the liberals on the Court and almost single-handedly guaranteed that  Barack Obama is re-elected in November. But why?

Weapons-grade shitheads like Erick Erickson are running around making excuses for the Chief that only make sense if you drop acid for breakfast and bathe in them new-fangled bath salts that all the kids are talking about. Moreover, he suggests that this is somehow good for the GOP, which it clearly isn't.  

I'd like to think that the Chief Justice essentially re-elected the President this morning because he felt that he had to to uphold the law. But there might be another reason. It could be that he wants a Mulligan on administering the oath of office to him.