4-7-12 Hodgepodge

Three Four Roads to Perdition

Writing for The American Prospect, Paul Starr writes of three ways the left will try to enslave physicians anyway, even if the Supreme Court fully or partially strikes down ObamaCare due to the individual mandate. After reading the following, though, I am not sure that will be necessary, given the amount of time the Justices will have to contort their minds around an excuse to let it stand:

... Even the attorneys opposing the law acknowledged that Congress could impose an insurance mandate when an individual first consults a health-care provider and thereby enters the health-care market. Their objection is that by requiring healthy people to insure, the law creates commerce so as to regulate it. So the constitutional issue seems to hinge on timing. The primary basis for hope that Kennedy will vote to uphold the mandate was his acknowledgment that the healthy are "proximate" to the market since they may get sick or injured at any time. In his summation, Verrilli insisted that it would be infeasible to impose a mandate on first entry into the market because the rates at that point would be exorbitant.

This is particularly troubling to contemplate in light of Richard Salsman's piece (linked below), which says, among other things:

How brazen are these statist lawyers, these alleged defenders of "justice" who unabashedly cite existing injustices in current medical legislation as a valid pretext for intensifying and spreading still further instances of injustice. The Supreme Court, instead of interpreting existing medical mandates (injustices) as a legal "justification" for condoning still more mandates (injustices), should be asking the defenders of ObamaCare for a detailed list of those mandates currently embedded in scores of existing U.S. laws, and then strike them all down at once, as a violation of the 13th Amendment's prohibition against slavery and involuntary servitude. But don't hold your breath. This Court, like all those before it over the past century or so, will likely condone the violations of property rights and contract freedom that are rife throughout ObamaCare.

Whatever value lip-service to the Constitution and legal precedent have had as accidental protections of individual rights is eroding the farther in time we get from America's founding, when people generally had a better grasp on why we have a government and what that properly entails.

Weekend Reading

"[O]nly the scope and degree of the slavery is being 'debated' before America's highest court, as if it's a civilized question to begin with." -- Richard Salsman, in "Memo to the Supreme Court: Health Care Is Not a Right" at Forbes

"[E]verything that makes the stop-loss order so useful also holds true for its mirror image, the buy-stop order, which ironically most investors never consider using at all." -- Jonathan Hoenig, in "Use a 'Buy Stop' to Avoid Missing the Bus" at SmartMoney

"The notion that you should ignore flaws in your friends implies that you should ignore reality; that you should pretend, not only to your friend but to yourself as well." --Michael Hurd , in "Spend your Time Wisely" at DrHurd.com

From the Vault

Writing about a particularly amusing example of short-range, second-handedness a few years ago, I came up with a line that made me chuckle this morning: "[Malcolm] Kysor's all-out war against reality will continue soon in a prison near you."

Snopes Flow Chart

I'll be tempted to hit "Reply All" and attach this graphic the next time I receive unsolicited medical advice that can kill me -- or similar Internet wisdom. (That said, lest the image give the wrong impression, my mother has never been guilty of anything like this.)

Oddly enough, people at whom I throw the Snopes-flag never find it in their hearts to thank me...

-- CAV