Prediction: Supreme Court Will Overturn Healthcare Law

Here is my prediction on the Supreme Court review of the national health care reform law...

They will overturn it. Or, more specifically, they will overturn portions of it...like the mandate that every individual has to buy insurance...such that the law is effectively negated. And thus will end, before it actually even was enacted (virtually none of the law's provisions have been enacted yet), the nation's most significant attempt at modernizing its health care system and making it more equitable and beneficial for more people. The infant law will be snuffed out in its cradle.

And if that happens? Well, we're back to where we were before the law was passed - a system predicated on earning maximum profit rather than one attempting to use the free market system to provide quality care for the maximum number of people.

Regardless of the outcome, I'll leave the bickering, taughting, celebrating and commiserating to others.

However, I will also point out something very ironic that I read today in an article about the healthcare law debate...

If the Supreme Court rules that the individual legal mandate in the health care law is not consitutional because Congress cannot compel an individual to buy private health insurance products (the law mandates you buy private insurance, not government run insurance), it will be simultaneously negating one of the primary pillars of conservative reform proposals for Social Security - namely, mandating that everyone buy commercial (private) pension funds.

Ooops.

As the article also points out, this does not mean it's likely that the conservative majority on the Supreme Court will suddenly support the health care reform act now because they want to preserve the chances for Social Security privatization in the future. No, it likely just means that those conservative judges will find a way to both call the health care mandate unconstitutional and any future Social Security privatization mandate OK. With a heavy sigh, I have to agree with that assessment.

Oh, and one more irony pointed out...if if Obama and the Democratically led House and Senate had simply enacted a single payer program back in 2009-2010, it would have been beyond constitutional challenge -- because government has an unambiguous power to tax and to use the revenues for public purposes.