Power to the Robe: Justices who Become Pundits over Healthcare Mandates

Listening to the arguments from Supreme Court Justices this week, regarding the States’ contention over a Healthcare Mandate, I find myself biting my tongue and fighting the urge to shout at the television screen or the article on the monitor of my computer. Why are Americans so limited in their memory of facts when it comes to politics?  Ugh!

I will state it again, I’m a moderate, but I find myself so angry about the loss of facts versus rhetoric when it comes to the conservative agenda. Shouldn’t we expect a shred of decorum as we listen to Senator Ron Johnson’s, pleas for a shred of freedom? All this pomp and circumstance over a mandate for Americans to purchase healthcare. Am I fooled by this attempt at righteous indignation? Not in the least.

Remember in my previous post, in some states members of the conservative party want to force women to have transvaginal ultrasounds before they are able to have an abortion, regardless of whether she wants one or her doctor feels it is medically necessary?  Is that not the government trying to take away not only every shred of freedom from a woman but also every shred of decency?  The laws springing up across our country in attempt to shame women into not requesting contraception from her employer’s healthcare provider are merely a sequel to the vaginal probing promised by republican governors in various red states. Arizona not only wants women to submit personal medical information to their employers about their non-contraceptive use of birth control but they also want women to pay a ‘processing fee’ in order to do so.  Where is the indignation there, Senator Johnson?

As Rachel Maddow so astutely reported on her April 26^th show, video evidence remains of members of the republican party touting the virtues of an individual mandate requiring ‘individuals’ instead of ‘corporations’ to provide their own health insurance. These conversations occurred in the early to mid 90s and Senator Chuck Grassley sponsored a health-care bill in 1993 and continued to extol the virtues of a mandate as late as 2009. Even Rick Santorum supported the mandate in 1994. And, not only was Mitt Romney the first American politician to frame a Universal Healthcare plan, he stated on more than one occasion that it was one that would work for the whole country. So is a universal healthcare plan good or bad for the country?

I’m one of those who doesn’t like anything being forced on me. Vaginal probing or healthcare. At one time I worked for a company that required a large monthly payment, high deductibles and copays while covering very little of the services an everyday person would use such as well-baby checkups, immunizations, women’s healthcare, etc… I found it cheaper to go it alone. In the cost/benefit analysis I realized that paying directly to my doctor would cost me less immediately and in the long run, barring any tragic medical events. Under the current healthcare law there would be many who are offered healthcare that is substandard, such as the one I had been offered. Any employer should be embarrassed to even suggest it their employees.

Yet, although the healthcare mandate of the ‘Obamacare’ Bill has the provision requiring people to purchase healthcare it doesn’t have any teeth should an individual decide not to buy in. In other words: if you choose not to purchase healthcare there is no penalty. The Obama Administration has gone to great lengths to ensure that anyone choosing not to purchase their own healthcare would not be penalized in any way. This is not the case with Mitt Romney’s healthcare plan or his idea of the plan that would work for America.

This is what I feel the Justices on the Supreme Court are missing, or at least appear to be missing in there very dismissive discussions with the Solicitor General this week. I find it difficult to think that a Supreme Court Justice wouldn’t consider recusing themselves when they or their significant others are in bed with the very organizations that are lobbying against the matter they are hearing at that moment. And their comments are more than indicative of their reluctance to see this case with a blind eye to partisanship.

As they smugly banter about the idea of allowing people without health insurance to die rather than receive healthcare at an ER at the expense of the members of society who do have insurance, I wonder if they are intending to promote that idea and whether the callousness in their demeanor is sincere. I know how painful it is to watch children dying because the parents don’t have healthcare. When my daughter had her first heart transplant my husband was in the military. There were many others waiting for kidneys or livers who didn’t have the same luxury government provided healthcare. To see them wasting away while their parents attended fund raisers hundreds of miles from their child’s hospital bed was more than my heart could bear.  If Justice Scalia had any form of a heart beating inside the cavity beneath his head and neck, he wouldn’t be able to even suggest such a thing. And yet he did.

My faith in our justice system fades every day as I witness the politics that have poisoned our supposedly non-partisan court systems. Blindness to truth and legal merit makes our justices no more than prostitutes to the highest bidder. How can we ever take them seriously in circumstances that matter when we can’t even rely on them to make a legitimate decision in cases such as this? I can only sigh and hope this election year passes more expediently than it appears it will and that the masses in this country will begin to recognize a shill when they see one. And that is only my opinion.