Targetted Screwing

Since we'll almost certainly know on Thursday what the Fates have decreed [1] for the Affordable Care Act, I suppose I should make a prediction as to what will happen.  Will the Supreme Court allow the individual mandate to stand, on the flimsy pretext that it was designed specifically to fit within the Constitution using language universally believed to fit within the constitution, and which would its critics agree would lie within the constitution if the name given to the penalty for non-compliance was different?  Will they tear down the mandate because nothing seems more sensible in the 21st Century than tearing down landmark legislation based on existing precedent the Court is pretending doesn't exist anymore?  Or will they go one step further and kick the entire Act out on the street, because you can't make it work without the mandate in any case?

Let's remember what the individual mandate does: it forces all citizens to purchase health insurance, to make sure no-one waits until they fall sick before doing so.  Remove the mandate, and insurance companies still have to cover anyone who asks them to (one of the major plus points of the law), even if the person asking has just suffered a heart attack and finds themselves needing a triple coronary bypass.  Needless to say, this is not the preferred option of the aforementioned companies.

With that in mind, let's review the options:

1. The notoriously business-friendly partisans who declared the 2000 election for the Republican candidate can keep insurance companies and Democrats happy;
2. The notoriously business-friendly partisans who declared the 2000 election for the Republican candidate can simultaneously fuck over insurance companies and Democrats;
3. The notoriously business-friendly partisans who declared the 2000 election for the Republican candidate can keep insurance companies happy whilst fucking over Democrats.

This does not strike me as difficult to call.

[1] My apologies to the Fates for the comparison; they might be uncaring, distant beings with no interest or investment in the consequences of their actions, but at least none of them are joyously ignorant fuckers like Antonin Scalia who, it's been well noted, has recently released a book calling his fellow SC judges hacks for not interpreting the constitution the exact way he thinks it should, and in the same book announces he's changed his mind entirely on an interpretation he's insisted was correct right up until it would force him to accept the ACA. Also, he thinks state law should always trump federal law, so long as he thinks the federal law in question is rubbish.

Like I said; joyously ignorant fucker.