I HOPE the Supreme Court overturns the individual mandate

Pick your teeth up off the floor and read on.

According to the all knowing, Talking TeeVee Pundit Heads, The Supreme Court will overturn the individual mandate portion of the Affordable Health Care Act on Thursday.

Sometimes a loss is a victory, we now have the opportunity to put the health back into health care reform.

Ever since health reformers opted to put lobbyists before people, partisan brawls over "Obamacare" and "Hillarycare" have dominated public debates. In dragging federal health reform before the Supreme Court, however, conservatives not only succeeded in shining a critical spotlight on this flawed law. Inadvertently, they have also given us another chance for envisioning a health care system that actually meets our health needs.

This is an opportunity to give the people what we want; Real Universal Health Care 

As the nation awaits a Supreme Court ruling on the constitutionality of the Obama health care approach, a new Associated Press-GfK poll suggests that the vast majority of Americans want Congress to come up with a better plan. They know that the current system is unsustainable. Only a third of those polled favored the law President Barack Obama signed, but according to the AP, “... Whatever people think of the law, they don’t want a Supreme Court ruling against it to be the last word on health care reform.” The article continued, “More than three-fourths of Americans want their political leaders to undertake a new effort, rather than leave the health care system alone if the court rules against the law, according to the poll.”

Americans need and want real health care reform.

Republicans say that Americans don't want top-down government control of their health care. But what we have now is top-down corporate control of health care. Insurers, drugmakers, sellers of expensive equipment, hospital executives, labs, home-health-care services and others unnamed prosper by exploiting the chaos in our health care system.

 NO COMPROMISE this time.

This opens the way to a political bargain. Insurers might be let off the hook, for example, only if they support allowing every American, including those with pre-existing conditions, to choose Medicare, or something very much like Medicare. In effect, what was known during the debate over the bill as the “public option.”
So in striking down the least popular part of Obamacare - the individual mandate - the Court will inevitably bring into question one of its most popular parts - coverage of pre-existing conditions. And in so doing, open alternative ways to maintain that coverage - including ideas, like the public option, that were rejected in favor of the mandate.

We want Medicare for All!