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Interesting article by Frum.

Hard to say how this will play out politically. Obama avoids a huge embarassment of having his signature legislative achievement tossed out, so that helps him. Also, nothing succeeds like success, so he now carries the aura of a Winner - and people tend to like winners.

And Romney has made some awful missteps on playing this issue - shooting his mouth off that he'd "repeal it from day one" - this is the wrong time to play to the Repub base, this is the time to be nuanced. That line will come back to haunt him, as yes, it now gives O the ammo to pick out the popular aspects of ACA and say "Romney will take this away". Romney would have been much smarter to have kept his mouth shut until after the decision, let others be bellicose, and then do what all politicians do - lie, saying he's in favor of whatever aspects of ACA that poll well, and against whatever aspects don't. But he painted himself into a corner, and now O can can use that line to distort Romney's actual position (assuming he has one), and rest assured, O will demagogue this.

BUT, on the other hand, remember that THE biggest issue of the 2010 elections was - the passage of ACA - and the Democrats got "shellacked" on that referendum (Obama's word). That issue had gone away. Now it is front and center once again - and polls have shown that it's gotten more unpopular since 2010.

Frum makes the excellent point that now that ACA has been upheld, there's really no way to overturn it legislatively - it's just too hard politically to take away a new entitlement. But (call me cynical) politicians tend to care less about "policy" than they do about "power". So I think the Repubs don't so much care about repealing the ACA as they do using it to demagogue against - and they can do that effectively.

Justice Roberts' interpretation was a little ju-jitsu ish, but it makes sense - ruling that the individual mandate IS unconstitutional under the Commerce Clause - but he interprets the mandate not as a mandate, but as a new tax (I made this same point in the Fast and Furious thread - that it really WAS a new tax, but the Dem's went out of their way to avoid calling it a new tax). Obama insisted over and over again that "this is not a new tax" Roberts just ruled that that's exactly what it is - if he hadn't, he'd have cast the 5th vote to rule the mandate unconstitutional.

So while Frum is right that Obama can say "Romney will take away this and that" (because Romney stupidly failed to take a "nuanced" stance), Romney can also say that Obama passed a big tax increase - across the board.

I dunno - my takeaway politically is that Obama gets a boost from the ruling, but maybe not as big a boost as Frum thinks. This may have just teed the election up as 2010 redux - and that wasn't so good for Obama.

Obama's biggest political gain in this seems to be that Romney has played it like a fool.

firebat wrote:

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If, as a result of the exchanges, premiums continue to spiral out of control to the point where people are more and more not able to afford them, then maybe the legislation will be augmented to include a public option - which should have been in there in the first place to force the competition - but was "negotiated out" of the bill due to pressure from special interests.

Kinda true - but one thing you might be missing - that's not actually "competition".  That's like, everyone who wants to can set up a lemonade stand, and the best ones will get the most business - but then one entity can which has the legal ability to take money from the Treasury (which means the collective "us") and use that money to subsidize their lemonade stand - and offer better lemonade at a lower price. 

Give me access to the Treasury, and I promise you I can blow away the competition in any industry - but there's a price to the Commonwealth for that - and you have to factor that price into the overall equation.

It's probably not going to be until the bill has been in effect for years before that determination can be made.

Maybe.  Maybe not.  I'm shopping for new health insurance right now.  I'm in a closed plan right now (which has quadrupled its rates in the last few years).  I need to find a new one.  I didn't want to make an irreversible switch until the law settled down - because as I talked to agents selling the open enrollment plans, they all said the same thing - "Don't give up your old one yet - the open enrollment plans look cheaper right now, but if the ACA is upheld, they'll all be required to accept every applicant, regardless of their health - the best analyses we've seen say that once this happens, the rates on those plans will roughly triple"  These are agents who are giving up a commission on me, telling me not to buy from them, for my own good.  If they were pitching me out of their own self-interest, they wouldn't say that - so I tend to give them some credence.  They're losing a sale by telling me this.