Quote from piezoe:
Many are hoping the court will strike down the individual mandate. I am one of them. We wouldn't be in this spot if our capitalist way of providing medical care hadn't utterly failed. The reasons for the failure can be debated endlessly, but I believe it is because capitalism only works well when there is free competition, i.e., what Ya'll call "free enterprise." Unfortunately, there is no free enterprise, i.e., competitive markets, when it comes to U.S. healthcare.
My preference is for the government to use its power of coercion to force those in the health care delivery business to compete, by deregulating, plus many other aggressive measures. But that's unlikely, even though it was the thrust of Obamacare as originally proposed. First the insurance companies were going to be forced to compete with the public option. Once that was in place, follow-on measures would have forced other non-competitive parts of our dysfunctional, inefficient, disastrous healthcare "system" to compete or leave the market to the government.
Those who fought tooth and nail to kill the public option and thus, foolishly believed they could indirectly kill Obamacare, may have, let's hope, played right into the hands of those who want a single payer, medicare-like system for everyone. Something unlikely to be struck down by the Court. Not my preferred solution, but far, far better then what our present day non-competitive, government protected, Medical Cartel has offered the millions who do not have reasonable access to a reasonable level of medical care at a price below that of bankruptcy.
I am hoping the court will strike down the individual mandate. Even if they don't, this is only round one.