by: Deborah Nelson, Chair, Santa Rosa Democratic Executive Committee—
When the Pensacola News Journal contacted me last week to get my reaction to the Supreme Court’s Obamacare ruling, I gave them my honest opinion. I told them I thought it was a dark day in America; that SCOTUS had abjured public liberty to private profit; and that We the People could now officially consider ourselves serfs in the new corporate order.
Evidently that didn’t mesh with the story PNJ wanted to tell.
PNJ posted my comments in their initial story.
They then rewrote the story, dropped my comments completely, and ran the Escambia Democrats’ positive reaction under the heading ‘Democrats were happy.’ Evidently, PNJ knows better than individual Democrats about what individual Democrats actually think.
I would like to clarify to PNJ’s crack editorial staff that “Democrats†encompass a wide swath of people, some of whom are, in fact, very unhappy with this ruling.
What we have is a frightening Supreme Court precedent that stretches the definition of a public ‘tax’ to allow government to penalize the individual choice not to engage in private commercial activity.
The potential for abuse is eye-watering. Just wait until telecoms decide everybody should buy a cell phone contract in order to access 911 service. All in the interest of public safety, of course.
The ruling, like the legislation, is Orwellian in its scope. It advances the strange, seemingly contradictory argument that Federal government can penalize private consumers for choosing not to buy a private product; but cannot penalize State governments for choosing not to buy into the Federal government’s own program: Medicaid.
Like Obamacare’s Byzantine regulations and intrusive individual mandate, the ruling’s convoluted, inefficient path is necessary to ensure that healthcare’s central problem – the private, for-profit health insurance industry – can continue its stranglehold on increasingly expensive medical care.
If a certain commercial activity is so important that it requires a government penalty for noncompliance, then that activity, by definition, begs a pooling of public dollars and organization as a transparent, accountable public service.
i.e., single payer Medicare for all.
We appear to have developed a lemming problem within the corporatized wing of the liberal establishment. This isn’t an issue of ‘not perfect’ but ‘better than nothing’ legislation as the current media bandwagon suggests, it’s an issue of industry overreach and government collusion with private health insurance industry donors.
I’m not happy about that at all.
