1. Forget the broccoli. It’s clear we may have to mandate the purchase of capers; otherwise, Jon will prevent everyone from getting decent pasta and chicken.

2. Jon needs a new travel agent.

3. If the GOP thought calling the ACA the cockroach of public policy would doom it, that’s what they would call it. Or “death panel.” Same principle.

Who stays in hotels where the sheets aren’t at least 1200 count, if not 1500?

Jon, you gotta quit slumming.

42% negative even before highlighting the mandate that way is already pretty high. There are other defects as well, e.g., no public option, ban on reimporting medicines. . . Also selling ACA under false pretenses as if it were a necessary package in order to get coverage to age 26, which is nonsense. Yet the mandate does seem the most inflammatory of all. Turd in the punch bowl?

Any bets SCOTUS will simply punt on Thurs and retire for a balmy summer?

I think that the 5 will do as much damage as possible and then retire for a balmy summer. I wonder why they keep putting off announcing their decision.

The individual mandate is simply the cockroach in the bed of the Affordable Care Act.

Bullshit. Not addressing the cost side, or the Public Option” or “Single payer” is the issue for me.

Keeping the insurance companies in business taking my money is the deal killer.

Because they can’t actually say they are out of time before they actually are.

Otherwise they may simply be delaying the carnival to follow on the front steps until they can quickly get out of Dodge for awhile.

“The individual mandate is simply the cockroach in the bed of the Affordable Care Act.”

A cockroach? The mandate is an attempt to render America in servitude to the insurance industry just as the SJC adjudicated Scott’s servitude to a master. It is utter nonsense and the fucking money wasted out our tailpipes in servitude to oil fucking whores is liberty denied liberty lost. They are fucking cowards…..

Because they are cowards…….

After global nuclear war, the only ones left alive will be the cockroaches and the US Health Insurance Industry. The bill is nothing more than a platinum plated gift to that Industry, written by a former Industry executive who is an aide to Sen. Max Baucus(D). Health care should be classified as a right and not a profit center, ergo single-payer is the only humane policy.

They’re trying to decide how best to profit from their decision, and they’re still debating which route will best enhance their wealth.

The mandate wasn’t the “cockroach” in ACA; rather, ACA was the lipstick on the mandate pig.

The mandate was the objective all along: That single payer and public option were never remotely considered is the proof.

If SCOTUS approves the mandate, the government will be able to force us to tithe directly to private companies for those services the government should provide. You really think it will stop with the MPPCHI ACT (Mandatory Purchase of Private and Crappy Health Insurance)?

Fascism? You betcha!

After global nuclear war, the only ones left alive will be the cockroaches and the US Health Insurance Industry.

LOL!

FDL IS NO LONGER FDL. This Cenk Uygur piece posted today in Huff. Post is what I would have expected from the old FDL (especially JON). It’s the fairest I could expect a writer to be towards Obama WITHOUT acting the fool. To argue the ACA, w/o the mandate, as a good Bill requires voters to ignore the obvious – IT ISN’T.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cenk-uygur/individual-mandate-affordable-care-act_b_1623963.html?utm_hp_ref=homepage

Broccoli, cockroaches, lipstick, and global nukulear war…………

I’m totally friggin lost here……

Remember as well that because the Democratic Congress back then decided not to include the usual “severability clause” in the legislation, the Supreme Court can decide not only to throw out the mandate, but the entire law (or various parts of it, which is the Administration’s position.)

http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/03/the-glitch-that-allows-the-supreme-court-to-throw-out-all-of-obamacare.php

“In the event of an adverse ruling, the administration takes a peculiar view: that the law is “partially severable.” They say that if the court scotches the mandate, it should also eliminate provisions in the law guaranteeing that everybody will receive health insurance, regardless of prior health conditions. This reflects a certain policy rationale: that the health insurance system will crumble if people aren’t required to buy into it, and thus only sick people take advantage of the coverage guarantee.”

In other words, Jon might not be able to order a sauce without capers, or a room without cockroaches. It will be either live with the cockroaches or sleep in a closet.

That is a great article. How many ways can you say it. Don’t go in the freaking barn with them guys.

x2

It is an election year after all…. doncha know it’s time to fall in line.

Cockroaches in the bad? That might be worse than bed bugs. Or at least on a par.

Here’s an even better article,posted on Yves Smith site today. It’s a must read for Dems who are fed up with Barry Obama and fed up with those who know better but choose to concede way too much to him for who knows why:

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/06/back-obama-the-cool-self-aware-irony-drenched-con-artist.html

How many of these state based health insurance corporation are considered public charities with tax exempt status?

Have you seen the IRS filings of these alleged not for profit public charities which are in fact very profitable, health insurance corporations? BCBS / Kaiser How is it that these corporations enjoy tax exempt status and we who fail to have health insurance ($2000 a month servile premium) pay a punitive “TAX PENALTY,”to the tax man? Who bought this bullshit? Slave-owners!!!!

Like Dred Scott who was deemed property, we are all now property for corporations to rape plunder and steal because GOVERNMENT cannot control the corporate entities they created under law, by design.

They say ignorance is bliss. Well here is the price you pay for that bliss! Its called the corporate proctor fist.

We approach the fourth of July asking the very same questioned asked by America’s founders?

Corporations, undue influence of corporate money in public policy. Taxation without representation, when corporate buys law legislating human servitude to yet another “corporation,” under fear of tax penalty, while corporation is tax exempt.

This is like segregation sponsored at the state level, protecting entrenched interest using race as the wedge issue. Now State based corporations use a form of economic segregation as a wedge issue. Pitting people against people, appealing to the most vile of human traits, to protect business models which do not provide the consumer with value, period. They ply the drunks with booze and then the vandal steals the handle used to start the model T Ford?

The behavior of the US Congress is like that of a drunk who decimates his family, all enabled by undue influence of corporate money in the political process. Money is the drug and power and influence is the high! Meanwhile cogent meaningful behavior modification, like sobriety is never achieved because people make money at the expense of other’s dysfunction or the unfortunate luck of the genetic draw, and we the American people suffer the consequences, as do the children of parents addicted to the drug called alcohol.

A ballot initiative modeled after Jefferson and Madison’s original 11th Amendment contained in the bill of rights is and would be the stake driven into the heart of the corporate predatory vampire. America needs to adopt this amendment and amend the Bill of Rights. It speaks to every issue discussed here. It is our right to demand it, now!

So as we party and get hammered this coming fourth of July lets not forget who wrote that yucking declaration of independence and why it was written. And understand this America, that the direction which Congress and the SCOTUS have taken America is complete opposite direction from Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence and opposite the purpose and intent of the original 11th amendment as proposed by Jefferson and Madison. Original 11th amendment is antibiotic effective in treating and controlling corporate metathesis, developed over 200 years ago. Unfortunately like so many things which can provide value for Americans and America. It has been kept out of view and buried by corporations and their co-dependent enablers decimating liberty. Why America buys the corporate bullshit instead of Jefferson’s wisdom is explainable. Must be lasting effects of all the booze soaked into the brains of Americans celebrating that 4th of July? Like most drug addicts it becomes all about the “drug” the “high” and “party,” losing sight of the real reason for the celebration.

Well stated. I think that technically this is Corporatism rather than Fascism, but I won’t argue that point with you, since the end result is the same.

Missing from your analysis is that an awful lot of people with no college age or young adult children and no pre-existing condition suspect that they will have to engage with the mandate.

If the “good” provisions may not now or ever apply to me but the bad one may or will, I am going to place more weight on the bad provision.

Did Cenk Uygur have another fit of objectivity in.re. Obama and the “D” party? Not to worry, he’ll be defending Obama again after he’s reprimanded by Al Gore and his “Epic Partisan Man”, Michael Shure.

I don’t remember ever having a serious illness from the ages of 18 to 26, so that provision is pretty meaningless, in my opinion.

The dumbing-down of the US population has been an unmitigated success, and benefits the MIC by providing more cannon fodder to enforce global corporate hegemony. Walt Kelly was correct when he had Pogo declare that “we have met the enemy, and it is us”.

Jon isn’t talking about you, he’s talking about 61% of those surveyed in a poll.

Good call, it seems that’s the way it is these days, huh? It’s tougher & tougher to find ideological Progressives these days, I guess the cost is very high. When I think back to the ideologically reasoned fight Jane & team waged the 1st year of O’bama’s regime, it seems a lifetime ago.

“It’s tougher & tougher to find ideological Progressives these days, ….”

Ain’t that the truth.

I think that link is a bit off, or incomplete.

Neither Hatch, Romney, or Bush 41 is a libertarian conservative. They’re pretty far right, but primarily control freaks as well. There is a similar contingent mirrored on the left, I think, but with more socialist sympathies.

Opposition to the mandate is mostly a libertarian bent which spans left and right in some odd ways. If right wing, libertarian Barry Goldwater had still been alive, he would certainly have attacked his GOP-mates who were first to cook up the pro-mandate mania. So support and opposition to the mandate have never been as simple to parse as party label, or left-right.

Also the link has a bizarre suggestion that the Dems thought they were doing the GOP a favor by pursuing the mandate. This is troubling due to its timeframe — if the Dems really had that impression, they were tone deaf for an awfully long time before ACA actually came up to a vote.

Agreed. You see and hear the beatdown and breakdown of liberals/progressives who refuse to go along with the obama lemmings.
This was so evident with Kucinich and that forever pissed me off with him. Days before his turncoat vote on obamacare, he swore up and down he ain’t voting for a bad law.

“…a bizarre suggestion that the Dems thought they were doing the GOP a favor by pursuing the mandate.”

Pretty sure I heard Obama say exactly that in a TV interview.

I also heard Mitchy say there was no way the Republicans would allow Obama to have a “victory”. Obama, obviously, never heard that.

Another aspect of this is that even tho the popular provisions are probably real (like the ‘nother ten million folks or whatever eligible for Medicaid) it’s toothless in the era where Medicaid is so defunded (it’s actually expensive compared to single payer, but because of our US system with constellations of health care oligarchs, is unaffordable) that US doctors really are in the red when they see medicaid patients.

Like, (and this is for real – ask any doc) they actually LOSE money when seeing medicaid patients. For real. No joke.
And seeing Medicare patients is close.

Doctors seeing negative income from taking on medicaid/medicare patients is a cause I hope some fellow lefties take on. Along with supporting the people of the UK who are seeing their NHS, the most egalitarian healthcare system in the world (and also one of the most cost-effective) “Americanized” despite much protest from doctors and nurses.

Not to worry everyone. The whole bill will be struck down and no one will bring it up again. Forget single payer. The voters will squash that too. Health Care is going to crash.

At age 18 I had surgery on my back. My son at age 19 had a appendix attack which cost $26,000.

I’m not so pessimistic for the longer term.

Sooner or later the Dems will swing back to a trifecta, and they have learned their lesson. Hopefully their collective memory will suffice awhile.

They can plant a seed through Medicaid and Medicare bent toward a slowly spreading single payer agenda. Ted K might have done it this way. . . how to boil a frog with minimal pain, no?

Pay for it with steep increases in the progressive tax structure. Meanwhile put a stern leash on the residue of insurance corps and big pharma.

I’ve said it before: I honestly think many proponents of the mandate are simply old grouches who relish the idea of forcing those damn kids to buy insurance. I have tried, with no success, to persuade them that the law is salvageable without the mandate using many of the cogent arguments Jon has presented here. They typically respond in a stick-their-fingers-in-their-ears fashion and repeat talking points about adverse selection and free riders and those damn kids who think they’re invincible.

Mandates have become to (some) Democrats what tort reform is to Republicans. As we all know, Republicans think health care costs are high because litigious lowlifes constantly sue doctors to get a payday. A lot of Dems, OTOH, are truly convinced that there are masses of young healthy people with very high incomes who are willfully and wantonly withholding money from the system and if we just make those selfish whippersnappers buy insurance everyone’s premiums will magically go down. Because, you know, health insurance works exactly like car insurance, which is why Dem pundits and politicians use that analogy to compare people without health insurance to uninsured motorists.