Steven Pearlstein: Eat your broccoli, Justice Scalia

[babylonsister]

Steven Pearlstein: Eat your broccoli, Justice Scalia



If the law is an ass, as Mr. Bumble declares in “Oliver Twist,” then constitutional law must surely be the entire wagon train.

Like most Washington policy wonks, I spent too much of last week reading transcripts of the Supreme Court arguments over the constitutionality of the new health reform law. This was to be a “teaching moment” for the country, an opportunity to see the best and the brightest engage in a reasoned debate on the limits of federal power. Instead, what we got too often was political posturing, Jesuitical hair-splitting and absurd hypotheticals.

My first thought on perusing the briefs filed in the combined cases was to notice what wasn’t there: any involvement on the part of Corporate America.

For the past 20 years, big business has complained endlessly about escalating health-care premiums, which they correctly blamed on “cost-shifting,” including paying indirectly for the free care provided to the workers at firms that did not provide health benefits. They wanted an end to fee-for-service medicine that rewarded doctors for providing more care than necessary. Some even talked of reforms that would begin to move the country away from an employer-based insurance system.

Yet despite the fact that “Obamacare” did all of those things and more, there was not a single brief in support of the law from an organization representing big business.

more...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/steven-pearlstein-eat-your-broccoli-justice-scalia/2012/03/30/gIQAyGkynS_story.html?hpid=z2

[CAPHAVOC]

1. Re: paragraph 3 and 5.. Have you ever heard of Blue Cross and Blue Shield?

Maybe you did not study enough.

[Kolesar]

2. Pearlstein: then isn’t the solution to require everyone to buy “catastrophic” insurance?

If there is a legitimate challenge to the law, my hunch is that it is likely to come over the question of whether the individual mandate is as narrowly drawn as possible to achieve its objective. If regulating the interstate market for health care requires regulating health insurance, and if assuring a healthy insurance market requires solving the problem of free-riders who drive up premiums and taxes for everyone else, then isn’t the solution to require everyone to buy “catastrophic” insurance?

Roberts asked that question twice, but got no satisfactory answer, either from the solicitor general or any of the other justices. The reason is that there is no good answer. The safer ground for health reform was always to base it, at least initially, on policies that cover major medical events such as a heart attack, a premature birth, or treatment of cancer or a serious chronic condition. Yet such an approach has always been rejected out of hand by liberal Democrats and powerful “disease lobbies” who were intent on finally achieving health-care coverage that was both universal and comprehensive. Now their over-reaching has not only driven up the cost of health reform and made it difficult to win broad political support, but has also put the entire law in constitutional jeopardy.
...
I think Pearlstein may have meant "major medical", not "catastrophic".
In any case, that's a thinker!

[Puzzler]

3. Actually the quote is...

"the law is a ass- a idiot..."

Mr. Bumble had a problem with "an" for some reason.

Maybe it was Dickens version of "teh"?

[Igel]

4. Maybe it's "an history" in reverse.

Pronunciation of initial h was iffy for a few centuries and only in the 19th century, not entirely consistently, came to make "gentility" and good breeding.

"An history" was proper: in pronunciation it was "an istory". "An" is the form when a word begins with no pronounced consonant, ortography be damned.

Those not so well bred wouldn't be trained on where to pronounce h. They hypercorrected and often pronounced it where it wasn't written. Then you'd get "a hass", which I find hard to understand. Perhaps "a ass" is a compromise and told readers in the late 1800s that Bumble actually said "a hass."

Czech writers often do something like this. Instead of showing colloquial language consistently, they'll use a single word or ending. Since all the various options tend to line up--if you use option D then you're all but forced to use A, B, and C--you don't have to make reading hard by writing in colloquial. You can telegraph your intent and say a lot about a character with one or two words or case endings.