Ezra Klein: Ruling Against Obamacare May Insure Socialism

December 15th, 2010 11:56 AM

Not every liberal media pundit was distraught over a federal judge finding that ObamaCare's imposition of a mandate to buy insurance was unconstitutional. Some attempted an extreme case of happy talk. At The Washington Post, Ezra Klein wrote that Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli and other conservatives may have just signed "the death warrant for private insurers" and cleared a path for a "very constitutional" socialist single-payer system:

The individual mandate was created by conservatives who realized that it was the only way to get universal coverage into the private market. Otherwise, insurers turn away the sick, public anger rises, and, eventually, you get some kind of government-run, single-payer system, much as they did in Europe, and much as we have with Medicare.

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 m/ost effective way to deal with adverse selection problems, the only alternative will be the very constitutional, but decidedly non-conservative, single-payer path.

This delighted the single-payer socialists at Physicians for a National Health Program.