While Jeffrey Toobin may be proclaiming the death of the individual mandate after today’s Supreme Court arguments, I’m not going to start drinking (in misery or celebration) until the actual decision has been published. As I’ve said repeatedly over the last few months, the outcome hinges on Kennedy and today’s events only reinforce that notion. As Jonathan Bernstein points out, trying to predict Supreme Court rulings is a fool’s game and I refuse to play. June will be here soon enough.
Meanwhile, a new Times poll shows that a majority of respondents want to overturn the mandate or the entire Affordable Care Act. But they absolutely love the law’s provision that requires insurers to make coverage available to everyone regardless of whether they have a pre-existing condition. I don’t expect most Americans to have a deep understanding of health care policy, but I still wonder if Obama and the Democrats could have done a better job of explaining how the mandate is the scaffolding that supports the rest of the law. Then again, perhaps Paul Waldman from The American Prospect is on to something when he writes:
I know this is going to sound elitist, but there are times when a country’s leaders need to accept that the public is never going to fully understand the critical details of a policy debate, and it’s up to them to just figure out what the right thing to do is, and do it. The people who have done such extraordinary journalism over the last few years on health care can keep pumping out those articles, but the impact is going to be marginal at best, while Sean Hannity can go on the radio and shout “death panels!” to his millions of listeners (which he still does regularly, by the way), and they’ll nod their heads and grumble about big government. If you believe that the policy is a necessary one, you have to just forge ahead, even if it means a majority of the public won’t come around to support it for a long time.
