Robert Reich: Supreme Court Ruling on ACA Expected Soon, Possibly Tomorrow

[Bolo Boffin]

3. I'm holding out for the ACA being upheld.

I know what Toobin is saying, but I read another article about how Kennedy and Roberts were both repeating a key argument for the upholding of the individual mandate, the uniqueness of the health care market. Health care isn't like the automobile market or the broccoli market for that matter. You can legitimately avoid purchasing an automobile or broccoli with no ill effect on your fellow citizens or the market itself. But the health care market you can't avoid forever. Even if you remain healthy, you could be in an accident at any moment, necessitating hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of health care. That cost would land on someone else if you couldn't pay. Enough people like that and prices for health care AND insurance rise for everyone. That's why the individual mandate is a legitimate tool Congress could constitutionally use to regulate this market.

Of course, a public option would have been nice and single payer even better. But the mandate is constitutional, and both Kennedy and Roberts were mentioning that argument in a way that wasn't derogatory (unlike Scalia's sarcastic broccoli comments).