6 thoughts on “ObamaCare”

  1. You’re assuming that Roberts was trying to make some great overarcing legal point, instead of simply “growing in office” and joining the section of the court to whom the “living Constitution” exists only to give authorization to whatever harebrained statist scheme that comes in front of them.
    We’ll see what the future brings, but Occam’s Razor is cutting away from “Legal genius outthinks himself” and towards “toady self-reveals”.

    1. It’s for certain Roberts’ alleged belief that the Court’s role is to find some way if at all possible — any way, even if it contradicts the proponents’ own arguments — to declare a law constitutional, leaps with a flourish over the boundaries of judicial power and smack-dab into the legislative.

  2. We can only hope. As surely as the Sun rises, a policy which purports to save on costs while increasing demand and shrinking supply can only have one outcome: rationing. It is unfortunate that the recent healthcare initiative which paid proper homage to market forces and the law of supply and demand, and was thereby wildly successful, is disavowed by the Party which created it, and ignored by the other. I am speaking, of course, of Medicare Part D, the prescription drug benefit engineered by the Bush administration.

    And, when I say “engineered”, I mean precisely that. I have occasionally pointed out to some that this is a system, which has its own laws and dynamics, and one must work within the framework of those if one realisitically hopes to achieve one’s goal. Like in orbit mechanics where, when we want to go higher, we thrust forward. When we want to go faster, we thrust downward. Due to the interaction of gravity and angular momentum, these are the appropriate actions to take in order to achieve the goal with minimal expenditure of limited resources. Any attempt to move directly to the objective orbit requires enormous thrust, and exorbitant amounts of fuel, and we will quickly run out of the latter, and end up with a dead hunk of space junk.

    Just so, Obamacare and similar programs are attempts to take us directly to the objective, without paying proper homage to market dynamics and the law of supply and demand. It is doomed to fail, and leave our healthcare establishment moribund and gasping for life. In considering all of this, I have come to the realization that our schools of Engineering are thoroughly lacking in a particular discipline, and should have degree programs in Policy Engineering. The people in Congress who formulate national policy are rank amateurs, with no concept of the ripple effects and feedbacks excited by their policy prescriptions. The political class should set a goal, and the Policy Engineers would then formulate the system architecture and implementation to attain that goal. As things are, right now, we’ve got 635 Bubba’s hanging out in the backyard of the Beltway, fiddling with machinery and principles well beyond their ken, metaphorically telling everyone “hold my beer, and watch this.”

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