Well I'm back from my month-long "vacation" and it appears that health care reform is now just awaiting the extra point (sometime, someone should do a study about why certain processes receive football analogies while others get baseball).
Anyway, I'd like to respond to two points that I've been reading from the Usual Places that I disagree with.
1) Mitt Romney's support for Massachusetts' health care but condemnation of ObamaCare will somehow doom his presidential bid. Um, no. There are many things that can and probably will doom his presidential bid, but the seeming inconsistency of his view in this regard is not one of them. Poll after poll has shown that the American public has a pretty dim understanding of what is actually in this bill, and it would be very easy for Romney to contrast state-level plans with national-level plans as well as point out differences real and imagined between ObamaCare and Massachusetts to sound reasonable in a sound byte.
2) That a Supreme Court challenge is crazy. My 10,000 foot view of the current Supreme Court is that it is activist when it wants to be, as seen in the recent campaign finance decision, which was much more far-reaching than it needed to be (and the conclusion that corporations have the rights of individuals is pretty radical to my ears). I don't know if the Court is more or less political now than it has been in the past, but do you really think that Scalia wouldn't come up with some argument to overturn the individual mandate, no matter how contrived?
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