and you'll be off to the court of appeals in Atlanta and in Richmond, ending up with the Supreme Court sometime in early 2012.

Our federal government is the problem, not the solution.

Our local government is the problem, not the solution.

Burchette is not yet Obama, but he's heading in that direction, but I don't think he'll involve Mike Ragsdale or Tommy Schumpert in any issues going forward.

could signify the end of medicare and mandatory auto insurance.

It's not a handout to insurance companies. Mandating participation by all is the yin to the yang of mandating affordable coverage for all. The math doesn't work if healthy people don't contribute, just as it doesn't work if sick people can't have affordable coverage. Having one mandate without the other causes the system not to function.

Without those mandates, you have the current system, the one where young and healthy people don't participate and older and sicker people can't participate, and the people in between lament that they don't feel secure enough to opt out and fear that should they get sick, they'll be dropped out.

Just another activist (and capitalist) BPublican judge.

(link...)

Without a public option people like me still have the same problem -- private insurance is unaffordable. I'm about to price myself out of Interfaith because I'm likely to make to much money with the next contract I take on. That means that my niche of the economy is good, but it means that I may be in trouble when it comes to health coverage.

I have a couple of options, and I'm going to be exploring them over the next few weeks. But it's scary because one of my medications is easily $400 a month. Another is probably close to that, I haven't priced it in a while. The rest are generic these days so I can live with them. But the last time I checked on an individual insurance policy it was in the $700 range -- with lots of deductibles.

I confess that I haven't gone to far into the details since the health care bill passed, in part because nobody seemed to know any answers and my income didn't look like it was going to rise too fast. And I felt better about my options before this court ruling came down. Now things will be a bit crazy until some kind of clarity is available, I'm afraid.

There is a need for some type of health care reform. Since companies started offering free health insurance to new employees to get around the Nixon wage/price controls, costs have skyrocketed. In essence, we created a large pool of money for health care professionals (and trial lawyers) to dip into.

And they did.

We have a moral responsibility to take care of the people around us who are less fortunate than we are. That's why we give.

But moral requirements and personal needs do not meet the standard for defining rights. In other words, just because I have a need doesn't give me the right to demand that somebody else meet that need.

That's the problem with the individual mandate. It takes a need and uses it to create a right. It goes further, and mandates that individuals must participate. While comparison's to car insurance are easy, they are also inaccurate in that I can choose not to drive and then legally not pay for the insurance. There is no opting out of the Health Care plan without penalty, and that's why the reform is unconstitutional.

If you want to make a serious attempt at dealing with the problems with health care, first you have to accurately define the problem. What percentage of the population wants insurance and can't get it? 10%? Deal with that first, then try to address some of the other issues facing health care delivery.

By the way, having spent a considerable amount of time dealing with hospitals, rehab, specialists, etc over the past year, I can tell you that while there are some areas that need improvement, our health care system is not broken. I'm still fighting with insurance companies over some of the bills, but never once was I worried that Luke wouldn't get the best care available, regardless of insurance.

If Hudson can cite Comstock for precisely the opposite of what that decision was clearly intended to do, all bets are off.

TPM sez the ruling was botched.

...first you have to accurately define the problem. What percentage of the population wants insurance and can't get it? 10%? Deal with that first, then try to address some of the other issues facing health care delivery.

That's exactly your side's strategy. Trim down the debate to a tiny sliver that represents squat and is too divisive to get beyond. And on that 10%, I think you need to multiply that by several times.

We've got the GOP's plan, dude, "personal responsibility" and all that jazz. Take credit for it!

In Tennessee it's one in three adults who don't have insurance. That's a long way from 10 percent. I think it would be fair to say that it's one in three Americans.

Once again, the individual mandate first came from Republicans.

Its earliest appearances in legislation were in the Republican alternatives to the Clinton health-care bill, where it was co-sponsored by such GOP stalwarts as Bob Dole, Orrin G. Hatch and Charles E. Grassley. Later on, it was the centerpiece of then-Gov. Mitt Romney's health-reform plan in Massachusetts, and then it was included in the Wyden-Bennett bill, which many Republicans signed on to.

because they know that

If Republicans succeed in taking it off the table, they may sign the death warrant for private insurers in America: Eventually, rising cost pressures will force more aggressive reforms than even Obama has proposed, and if conservative judges have made the private market unfixable by removing the most effective way to deal with adverse selection problems, the only alternative will be the very constitutional, but decidedly non-conservative, single-payer path.

Health care is barreling toward the day when it will eat 20% of the GDP, almost twice the next most expensive country, France, which has the best health care in the world. Ours, though the most expensive by far, is at the lowest rung in the industrialized world. Give us a plan that that gives us care on the top rung at half the cost we have now. That's all we ask. This cures the deficit problem and one of the major reasons jobs are being sent off shore.