The Supremes did a two-step of interesting decisions the last couple of days. First, the minor one that says way more than the Supremes intended it to say: The U.S. Supreme Court protects lying as free speech.
That one is about the so-called “Stolen Valor” law, which prohibits someone from lying about serving in the military or about the details of their military service. Ostensibly it’s about people who were caught pretending to be veterans in order to seem more manly or whatever, not about folks who defrauded the government (or others) by pretending to be veterans when they aren’t — fraud of that sort, where you’re receiving money under false pretenses, has always been illegal unless you’re a Congressman. Seems pretty straightforward. The 1st Amendment was created to protect political speech, not to protect lying, after all — that’s why we have libel laws that allow you to sue people who lie about you, duh.
But in this case, one of the people who lied about his military service was a politician. And then we come to the issue of, if you outlaw lying, 90% of the U.S. Congress and the vast majority of the U.S. Supreme Court are now criminals. So clearly the Supremes had to dance the way they did, or be the biggest dress-wearin’ hypocrites to blovinate since the last time the Pope issued a papal statement.
Now on to the Affordable Care Act. Gawker got to do a Dewey Wins pose with Obama, heh. But in the end this boiled down to Roberts, and Roberts ruled the way his corporate masters wanted him to rule. See, politically, 75% of Americans want universal health care. And the only way to *not* have universal health care is to impose a non-universal system at gunpoint. Furthermore, an even larger percentage of Americans approve of Medicare and want it to continue. There was no conceivable ruling that the Supremes could have made outlawing the Affordable Care Act that would not have similarly outlawed Medicare, and there are already past rulings about the Medicare that the Supremes would have had to conveniently ignore to do that. Furthermore, both the ACA and Medicare as currently comprised are *very* profitable for Roberts’ corporate masters, as the example of McAllen, TX should remind us. Providers and drug companies and insurance companies oh my, all make nice profits courtesy of Medicare and having that honey pot dry up is hardly what they would want to happen. If the ACA was overturned, the pressure on Congress to go to a true single-payer system with monopsony power would have been huge, and such a system would be bad for all of the healthcare business interests that invested so heavily in making Roberts the head of the Supreme Court.
So in the end Roberts *mostly* said the ACA was legal, but he did throw in an additional bone to his corporates by ruling that one small and almost trivial part of the law was unconstitutional — the part that said that states had to extend Medicaid to people between 100% and 133% of the poverty line and open up Medicaid to single males if they wanted to continue participating in Medicaid. See, if that part is made illegal, those people are then required to buy health insurance, and are eligible for subsidies for buying health insurance. And this is profit for health insurers.
So in the end, Roberts ruled in the way that was most profitable for his corporate masters. And is that surprising, in the end?
– Badtux the “Yes, he’s bought” Penguin
Good, short and to the point. Money usually wins and Roberts is their errand boy. A clever one at that.
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And is that surprising, in the end?
Ahhhhh — no.
JzB
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[…] is talking about it, Badtux has his opinion, Hugh at Corrente has a different view, but the only one I can wholeheartedly endorse is Charlie […]
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