The Supreme Court has agreed to determine the constitutionality of ObamaCare after 26 states have appealed for it to do so. As explicitly stated in the 10th Amendment, the powers not specifically vested in the federal government by the Constitution are reserved to the states and the people, which ObamaCare supersedes by requiring nearly every American to purchase health insurance.
As Yuval Levin explains at National Review, though, opponents should not be so quick to lose focus of the future of our healthcare system. Do you think ObamaCare will be struck down? Read Levin's views after the break, and let us know your thoughts in the comments.
Levin believes the the federal mandate will be overturned, but that it is still not the most serious problem with ObamaCare:
The key problem is the overall concept—which begins from the premise that our system of health-care financing will only keep costs under control if the government becomes an even greater force in the health sector than it is now and proceeds to create a system that will cause premiums to rise rapidly in the individual market and create major dislocation in the employer market, driving people into vastly overregulated exchanges that would push premiums higher still, and then initiate a program of subsidies whose only real answer to the mounting costs of coverage will be to pay them with public dollars and so inflate them further. It aims to spend a trillion dollars on subsidies to large insurance companies and the expansion of an unreformed Medicaid system, to micromanage the insurance industry in ways likely to make it even less efficient, to cut Medicare benefits without using the money to shore up the program or reduce the deficit, and to raise taxes on employment, investment, and medical research. CBO does not expect it to make a real dent in the inflation of health-care costs or to avert the fiscal implosion of Medicare. Instead, it will double down on price controls and centralized administration and make a real reform of our system much more difficult.
Lawyers David B. Rivkin and Lee A. Casey further explained the Medicaid problem at the Wall Street Journal:
...For more than 40 years, Medicaid has been a cooperative federal/state program to fund medical care for the poor. The states also contribute funds and have enjoyed wide discretion in designing and implementing their own programs. Now, as a means of ensuring the universal coverage ObamaCare set out to achieve, Medicaid has been transformed into a massive new health-insurance program for many in the middle class. The states must accept new, detailed federal requirements or lose all federal Medicaid funding—leaving their neediest citizens without any safety net.
Perhaps even more important than what the court decides next summer will be how the public votes in the fall. Do you think the Supreme Court will overturn ObamaCare?
