It settles nothing.

The Supreme Court’s ruling on Obamacare settles nothing. The debate over “access to quality healthcare” will continue ad nauseum.

Yet it need not. Health care shouldn’t be something that dominates political debate any more than computers, cell phones or movies-on-demand in our homes dominate political debate. (These three things have in common the fact that they are all better than they were five years ago and they are all less expensive.)

Taking just one of them, imagine if we had decided that everyone has a right to “access to quality data processing.” Imagine some federal bureaucracy thrusting a clunky, expensive and largely useless computer into every household. Imagine the fight over what software would be installed. On one side of the debate would be the entitlement crowd insisting that failing to install a thousand dollars worth of Adobe Photoshop (and failing to spec out the machine so that it would efficiently run Photoshop) would unfairly deny photography enthusiasts “access to quality digital photo editing.”

On the other side would be the fiscal hawks saying, “We can’t afford to put Photoshop on every computer in every household in America.”

The debate would never be satisfactorily resolved and we would therefore all have the same undifferentiated, highly mediocre and mostly unsuitable-for-our-particular-purposes computer.

Or instead consider the laptop computer upon which I composed this piece – the laptop that is ten times faster and half as expensive as the computer that it replaced (and has installed upon it all of the software that I want or need and none that I don’t).

The healthcare debate springs from the false premise that only the government can ensure “access” to health care. That is patently false. The more the government gets involved in health care, the more expensive (and thus scarce) it becomes.

When I was in high school computers existed but average people had no “access” to them because of their cost. Today nearly every school kid has a computer.

So ask yourself two questions. One, did the government do that or did the free market? And two, how is health care any different?

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Paul Gleiser

Paul L. Gleiser is president of ATW Media, LLC, licensee of radio stations KTBB 97.5 FM/AM600, 92.1 The TEAM FM in Tyler-Longview, Texas.

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7 Responses

  1. Ken says:

    Ditto, but it is not about healthcare-there is something in the bill about gold and also several other non healthcare things, not to mention the IRS and Homeland security parts of the bill. It is really about government control of citizens. Justice Roberts finely crafted a trap for Progressives and then threw the whole thing to the citizen voters to have the final word this coming November. Smart man. Reference The Blaze article on –five things Roberts.

  2. L Miles says:

    The Blaze article couldn’t be more wrong. Roberts took an insane position. It is NEVER right to do wrong in order to do right. He obliterated his Constitution obligation to interpret the Constitution properly. It is not his job to play politics. Read the dissenting opinions of the four Conservatives on the Court. Obamacare was UNCONSTITUTIONAL ON ITS FACE.

    Roberts just gave incredible life to the tyrannical forces of the Washington bureaucracies and Liberal establishment to force by stealth taxation any activity that they deem “appropriate” as they steal every last vestige of our Liberties. The Constitution was shredded by the Supreme Court and we are left with no majority on the Court to protect our Liberties from this point forward – anything goes!

    We can now be taxed into submission, without limit, to OBEY their removal of our Liberties and force “proper behavior” as they see fit, while freebees are granted to those willing to vote for more tyranny disguised as benevolence.

  3. L Miles says:

    Chief Justice John Roberts and most informed Americans knew that the OBAMA-abominable “Affordable Health Care” law (Obamacare) was 2,700 pages that not a single Representative or Senator read or understood before being passed by a Democrat dominated Congress after bribes, kickbacks, threats and coercion were used to attain the final fraudulent passing vote as signed into law by Obama on March 23, 2010.

    Yet, Roberts saw fit to approve the unlawful astronomical new bureaucracies, taxes and regulations in Obamacare that will smother all competitively (liberty) driven health care innovations in the industry. This is guaranteed to destroy the best healthcare system in the world. It will be replaced by a top-down, dictatorial system where each patient is just another number, statistic, burden, and source of government cost to be managed by non-medical bureaucrats who couldn’t care less about the Doctor or the Patient relationship. Rationing of health services and physician compensation will be limited by the national debt/deficit. Death Panels will determine health services given to the aged and to the unhealthy patient’s life-style. Yet, everyone will be “covered”, right? You will be beholden to the Emperor for your health care as his newly adopted Serf. You had bettered behave yourself or you will be punished!

    “Thank You” Mr. Roberts for your belief in BIG GOVERNMENT to be our new UNCONSTITUTIONAL MASTERS that replaces our choice of Doctor and personal health care decisions. You are a disgrace to the Supreme Court and its vital role as part of the Constitution’s mandate of checks and balances to protect our individual Liberty.

  4. Linda E. Montrose says:

    Right, it settles nothing! obamacare was never about “health”care. We haven’t seen anything but the tip of the iceberg in this legislation! The taxes buried with in this legislation, if left to stand, will bury us. The freedoms it robs us of have yet to surface…remember nancy pelosi saying you had to pass the bill in order to find out what all was in it??? Well, we are about to find out…justice roberts has opened a pandora’s box and dropped it from the trojan horse he rolled into the middle of America with his ruling! Justice roberts had to HUNT and sift through to find ANYTHING that he could put out there to say, even if THINLY veiled, this was anywhere close to be Constitutional! The supreme court FAILED America and her people!

  5. C M Solomon says:

    How many people know that ObamaCare, TaxCare by any other name, includes a new capital gains surtax that has nothing to do with health care, at all? The “health care” law contains a new 3.8 percent surtax on “unearned income” for high-income taxpayers (married couples making more than $250,000 in adjusted gross income or $200,000 if you are single). Unearned income includes capital gains (including sale of any real estate for that gain over $500,000). What other “jewels” are we going to find in the 2,700 page law that was never read before being passed by Congress in 2010?

    By the way, Mr. Chief Justice Roberts, why is it Constitutional to force health insurance companies to cover pre-existing conditions and at the same time require unlimited health coverage for any new patient for life? This is not insurance. It is welfare for anyone who gets sick. Anyone with a brain will see that this is a dictatorial method intended to force the health insurance companies out of business and force Socialized Medicine on the American people because Health Insurance Policies will be too expensive to afford. Only the bankrupt US government can afford this as it will ultimately offer “free health care” since it is a “right”, right? Printing money is cheap when you have a monopoly on the so-called “currency”. Trillions of national debt clearly has never, or will never matter to the Socialists/Marxists as they continue to buy votes to maintain their power.

  6. J Smith says:

    My my, with all the rants from the ‘rich’ folks, one would think something terrible had happened. In reality the Supreme Court simply did what they always do, declare something as Constitutional. You may rant and rave all you want to but what is done, is done. The Supreme Court has spoken. We now have a valid law that provides health care to over 30 million people who could not get it otherwise. Insurance companies can no longer tell you ‘you have exceeded your coverage, sorry’. Nor can they deny coverage because your condition was ‘pre-existing’. Also, millions of Seniors on medicare can finally get discounts on prescription drugs to close the gap created by the ‘republicians’ under GW Bush. So, what should we do? All most of you want to do is “REPEAL, REPEAL, REPEAL”. Not a single republician has the foggest idea of what to replace it with and won’t set down with democrats and try and ‘fix’ the bad things about the Law. So, just repeal and go back to where you and I are paying for everyone (even rich folks)who so desires, to go to the emergency room for their health care and let the rest of us pay for it. I for one, want everyone to share in the cost of those deadbeats, not just me.

  7. C M Solomon says:

    The Democrats or Socialists or Marxists don’t really believe in “everyone to share in the cost of those deadbeats, not just me”. In pushing the Obamacare (secret) legislation there was no such thing a “deadbeat”. Nancy Pelosi (the Jezebel of the House) and Barack Obamination always referred to these people as disadvantaged and needing government help (forcing dependency) and wanted to mandate everyone into a top-down federally dictated health COVERAGE plan to eliminate the private INSURANCE business that they hate. Only recently has the despicable Nancy referred to these people as “free-riders”, a kinder word than free-loaders, or deadbeats, as they surely are in most cases. Let me assure you that HEALTH CARE (genuine medical services) is the last thing on the mind of the egomaniac masterminds in Washington. Any excuse gaining control of the health care service industry where they can ration, deny, and dictate pitiful HEALTH CARE is all they want. POWER OVER US LOWLY SERFS IS THEIR DEVINE RIGHT, don’t you know!

    This is what happens when a tiny bit of benevolence in the emergency room is forced on hospitals by our Socialist leaders years ago. It created the expectation of entitlement from the beginning. Now, we have the “deadbeat” problem. Had everyone been encouraged by legislation to take out a Catastrophic Health Care policy funded by a Personal Health Savings account (as a tax credit) we wouldn’t have this problem. This type of policy could be just like a whole life insurance policy, the sooner you adopt it in your life, the lower the premiums for the rest of your life. Deadbeats would get their health care from Charity Hospitals if they want to take the risk and wait in line. What is wrong with that?

    Verdict: the Socialists in government deliberately created this problem in order to “fix” it with more Marxism by force. Damn the Constitution and the personal Freedom for which it stands! Now we have a bunch of duped and ignorant voters that believe in a total government takeover of the health care industry as our only option. If that happens, just don’t get sick, particularly if you are elderly. You will have 100% COVERAGE, for free (after taxes, of course). Just don’t count on the federal bureaucracy to give you CARE in a timely manner, if at all. As indentured servants of the FEDS, the MD profession will have little incentive to stay in business or stay current in the technology if they are ruled by coercion and mountains of regulations.

    How long is it going to take before the Marxists start legislation that include housing, transportation, food, cell phones, internet access, computers, child care, college education, and guaranteed income is a Constitutional Right in addition to Health Coverage (pseudo-Care). Can we consider “free-rider or deadbeat” a politically incorrect word at that point?

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