Maybe it's me but something is really fishy about Roberts supporting ACA

[leveymg]

92. The outcome was a foregone conclusion when the Bill was structured by Baucus rather

than being based in the Kennedy Bill, which would have produced a public option had it survived.

The ACA is similar to the 2003 Medicare Prescription Drug Improvement and Modernization Act (MPDIM). The major difference is that the 2003 Law was primarily the product of the House Bill and the Conference Committee, and its main intended beneficiary was Big Pharma rather than private insurers. No drug cost containment or importation. Another initial purpose behind the 2003 Bill was to reduce Medicare enrollment (and increase the pool of HMO patients) by offering prescription drug coverage, but only to Seniors who moved from Medicare into HMOs. The Medicare reduction part of the original MPDIM did not survive, but its purpose of increasing enrollments for private insurers did finally carry over into ACA, as modified by the Roberts decision, which killed Medicare enlargement. See, http://www.gpcal.org/documents/medicarereport.pdf, pp 22-26.

Similarly, ACA's main purpose is to increase the number of patients forced into private industry coverage and to reduce costs of uninsured to the public hospital industry. ACA was engineered to be primarily acceptable to the Financial Industry, of which Insurance is part, which is why it was primary authors was the the Baucus Committee, and this also explains why it was upheld by the Roberts' Court. Look at how it developed. from the ACA Wiki, below:

On March 5, 2009, Obama formally began the reform process and held a conference with industry leaders to discuss reform and requested reform be enacted before the Congressional summer recess; but the reform was not passed by the requested date.[125] In July 2009, a series of bills were approved by committees within the House of Representatives.[126] Beginning June 17, 2009, and extending through September 14, 2009, three Democratic and three Republican Senate Finance Committee Members met for a series of 31 meetings to discuss the development of a health care reform bill. Over the course of the next three months, this group, Senators Max Baucus (D-Montana), Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), Kent Conrad (D-North Dakota), Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), Jeff Bingaman (D-New Mexico), and Mike Enzi (R-Wyoming), met for more than 60 hours, and the principles that they discussed became the foundation of the Senate's health care reform bill.[127] The meetings were held in public and broadcast by C-SPAN and can be seen on the C-SPAN web site[128] or at the Committee's own web site.[129] During the August 2009 congressional recess, many members went back to their districts and entertained town hall meetings to solicit public opinion on the proposals. During the summer recess, the Tea Party movement organized protests and many conservative groups and individuals targeted congressional town hall meetings to voice their opposition to the proposed reform bills.[125][130]

Away from the televised meetings, the legislation became a "bonanza" for lobbyists,[131][132] including secret deals that were initially denied but subsequently confirmed.[133][134] The Sunlight Foundation documented many of the reported ties between "the healthcare lobbyist complex" and politicians in both major parties.[135]

President Obama delivered a speech to a joint session of Congress supporting reform and again outlining his proposals.[136][137] On November 7, the House of Representatives passed the Affordable Health Care for America Act on a 220–215 vote and forwarded it to the Senate for passage.[125][138]

The Senate bill, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, bore similarities to prior healthcare reform proposals introduced by Republicans. In 1993 Senator John Chafee introduced the Health Equity and Access Reform Today Act which contained a "Universal Coverage" requirement with a tax penalty for non-compliance.[139][140] In 1994 Senator Don Nickles introduced the Consumer Choice Health Security Act which also contained an individual mandate with a penalty provision.[141] However, Nickles removed the mandate from the act shortly after introduction, stating that they had decided "that government should not compel people to buy health insurance."[142]