Healthcare Reform: Fighting the Rear Guard Battle

So U.S. District Judge Roy Vinson up and decided the new healthcare reform law is unconstitutional.  This surprised absolutely nobody, given that the Ronald Reagan appointee had telegraphed his decision as obviously as a bad Jay Cutler pass when hearing arguments in the case last year.

And it surprises nobody that a Republican party that has absolutely no interest in doing anything but pay lip-service to reforming our nation’s appalling healthcare situation while lining their campaign chests with insurance industry cash, loudly cheered Judge Vinson’s ruling.  Democrats, meanwhile, who have been trying for nearly 100 years to fix the mess, largely passed it off as the latest partisan development in what has been a hyper-partisan process.

This makes two Republican judges, including U.S. District Court Judge Henry Hudson just last month, who have ruled in assorted lawsuits filed by at least 26 states led by Republican governors, attorneys general, or both, that all or significant portions of the Affordable Care Act are unconstitutional.

Meanwhile, largely forgotten in all the recent hullabaloo, is that two other federal judges, both Clinton appointees, have ruled that the individual mandate to buy insurance, the crux of the dispute, IS perfectly within Congress’ authority to order.  Approximately two dozen other challenges have been unceremoniously dismissed as frivolous.

So for those of you scoring at home, the series record between the two sides currently stands at 2 wins and 2 losses apiece, with about 25 ties.  (Come to think of it, Healthcare Reform is not unlike a chess tournament between Grand Masters.)

This follows the law’s original passage in the last Congress with the help of exactly 1 Republican vote out of 177 Congressional Republicans and 41 Republican senators.  Just last week, every single Republican House member in the new Congress voted to repeal the new law.

What a shame, considering that this law will help the people who need it the most.  I’m speaking from experience here, as up until this past year, I’ve been unable to marry the woman I’ve been with for 10 years.  She is on the Texas High Risk Pool, a state-run pool that provides rudimentary insurance at god-awful rates to people who, like her, are unable to get insurance anywhere else because of their pre-existing conditions.

I work at a small business that miraculously offered group coverage…BUT if my fiancée forever and I ever got married, the rules stipulate that my employer would have had to offer her coverage as well, and she would have had to go on that coverage.  As this would have raised rates on everybody at the company, we made the painful decision to forgo marriage.

Now we can get married after all, however, because the rates under the current PRE-reform rules have skyrocketed so much that my coverage has been dropped anyway.

The Republicans are content with this status quo.  And people wonder why I so-loathe the do-nothing Party of No.

So, yes what a shame.  And what a sham, considering that the individual mandate was originally a Republican idea, urged for consideration by Sen. Orrin Hatch, former Sen. Robert Dole, (his party’s 1996 presidential nominee), and others, back in the days when Republicans were actually interested in trying to help govern instead of simply tearing down the government.

It was not too long afterwards that then-Governor Mitt Romney incorporated the individual mandate into his Massachusetts healthcare reform efforts.  If Romney, who some polls show is the GOP front-runner in the 2012 presidential horse race, happens to win the Republican nomination, he’ll have done so despite having what the goofball tea-sip wing of his party considers to be the healthcare albatross hanging around his neck.

But then, that’s the way Republicans operate nowadays.  Cap and Trade was a solid, free-market Republican-offered solution to pollution and global warming problems…until the Democrats became interested.  Then it became “government overreach and excessive regulation.”  Comprehensive immigration reform seemed doable with border state bigwigs George W. Bush and the “good” John McCain onboard, but when the Dems came to power, immigration reform degenerated into a thinly veiled racist buzzword for “amnesty.”  Nothing said “National Security” like arms control treaties…until it came time for this Democratic president to sign one.

On issue after issue on which they used to offer constructive ideas, Republicans have morphed into bitter, twisted, petty little prunes, interested more in coming up with good bumper sticker slogans than in governing.  “Obamacare” and “Death Panels” might scare the feeble-minded, but such coarse and overly simplest rhetoric does nothing to advance the discussion…which, of course, is exactly the idea.

So it’s no surprise that Republicans are cheering this setback to healthcare reform.  Never mind that it means next-to-nothing, given that it will most assuredly be up to the Supreme Court to decide the case, (which might make Democrats a little nervous, given the Roberts Court’s narrow proclivity to rule in favor of Big Business.)

In the meantime, let the Teapublicans have their moment of false hope.  I doubt very seriously that the President and the Congressional Democrats would work so hard, invest so much political capital, and endure such vitriol and abuse if they didn’t believe their law would help people AND pass constitutional muster.

But more to the point, this is an issue where something clearly had to get done and I, for one, am confident that this President and his party are on the right side of history, regardless of what a couple of Republican judges predictably think of the whole thing.