Difference between broccoli and healthcare is that the federal government realises it wouldn’t be fulfilling the purpose of the union as outlined in the declaration of independence of general welfare if it let those in its borders starve to death. While yes, medicare does exist, those that don’t qualify for food stamps don’t risk bankruptcy if they get a hankering for broccoli one day.
What is it about liberals that makes them so intellectually bankrupt that they spout this kind of nonsense so regularly and then declare themselves paragons of virtue?
He isn’t a jackass. He doesn’t want people to die in the street. His job is upholding the Constitution by striking down illegal legislation created by the Congress and Executive branches.
Might they strike ACA down? Yes. Does that make them evil, stupid, insane? No.
As I pointed out elsewhere it is purely the Democrats fault. Purely. No one else to blame but themselves since not one Republican voted for it in either house. All the Dems had to do was write the Act as a Tax. Healthcare is 17% of the economy so a new tax levied on everyone of 15% should cover it.
Taduh! Single payer universal health care! Instead they gave us 2700 pages of muddled incomprehensible garbage with pork and cutouts and special deals for everyone. I am especially enamored of the rule that prevents Doctor Owned Hospitals from expanding or creating new Hospitals but Big Business For Profit and Non-Profits are OK.
You mean like the United States National Health Care Act that was killed by the Tea Party in 2009?
The EMTALA is pretty much accepted be everyone. Other than pure malice against the poor, what reason could heave to challenge it?
“It’s wrong to let someone painfully die of a burst appendix in the hospital parking lot, due to refusal of treatment” is about up there with “the earth is round” in accepted statements.
If Liberals are “Intellectually bankrupt” you must very “Liberal”, straw manning like that. Specifically the greedy jackass was referring to Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA). He was saying the government shouldn’t require hospitals to treat emergencies. Yes Congress members should have did their job and read it too. I have to read arcane technical manuals, but I don’t complain I’m being tortured. Unlike this dishonorable rat, I can be fired for negligence. So can Congress.
I would have much preferred UHC, but was that going to happen, given the traitorious Conservative tools who whoring themselves out to Republican lies? (Death panels? really?) I feel given the political climate this was the best Democrats could do.
You want a better bill? Give a Republican official a blood letting punch to the reproductive organs for stonewalling and playing politics with American lives for their own selfish political gain. Obama tried to a compromise, part of this bill is such, but instead they lied their spineless heads off. What absolute traitors. Given the uncountable deaths the dysfunctional healthcare system has caused, Republicans are more destructive to American than any terrorist. In fact I will state that again. Republican Congress person > Osama Bin Ladin in demonstrated malice against the Americans.
Now you have this unfireable viper arguing for American deaths from a position of power.
I hate Scalia as much as the next guy but he seemed to just be doing his job. The broccoli quip was ridiculous, always has been a sham, but so what? It’s not his job to present a reasoned case for the petitioners during the oral arguments. If it is so dumb, legally, then it could easily be shot down by the petitioner.
You know, Tao Revenge, I can’t help chuckling as I imagine you in law school:
DEAN: Your criminal law instructor threatened to kill you?
TR: Yes, Dean, I am saying exactly that: Professor Hawkins stood up in class and threatened to kill me!
DEAN: What, exactly, did he say?
TR: We were talking about transferred intent, and he said, “Now, if I aim a gun at you, TR, and shoot, but I miss and hit that young lady next to you…”
DEAN: He said ‘if?’
TR: Well, yeah, but then he said, “No, no, my plan all along was to kill you!” Me! His plan all along was to kill me! He said so!
DEAN: Young man, do you know what a ‘hypo’ is?
TR: Yeah, sure, that needle thing addicts use to shoot up. Why?
I dunno, he kinda has a point, couched though it is in breathless outrage. Scalia wasn’t posing a hypothetical; he was saying that the correct way to cure the free rider problem in healthcare is to avoid taking responsibility for the care of the uninsured.
Well, as I read it, he was saying that a constitutional way way to cure the free rider problem would be to avoid taking responsibility for the care of the uninsured.
And he is correct. So far as I know, there is no constitutional provision that mandates that the government, or private entities, care for people who don’t have insurance or the ability to pay out of pocket for emergency services. Is there?
Undoubtedly this simple factual statement will produce more howls of outrage. But is it true? Yes.
For Scalia’s purposes, “correct” and “constitutional” are the same thing. I’m not sure you are correct, though; I think if you asked the American people they’d say emergency medical care is a fundamental right. Certainly it’s been accepted as a fundamental right in the rest of industrialized society.
But it’s not “deeply rooted in our nation’s history,” is it? Nor is “implicit in the concept of an ordered society,” those being, IIRC, the two touchstones of fundamental rights.
The Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act was passed in 1986. That hardly can be said to be a requirement deeply rooted in our nation’s history. And the Act only applies to hospitals that accept payments from the Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) under the Medicare program. Granted, that’s a lot of hospitals, but it isn’t a mandate on every single hospital.
And whether or not its a right in the rest of industrialized society is not dispositive as to whether its a “fundamental right” within the meaning of the Constitution.
Nor is a poll of the American people. And when the issue was same-sex marriage, you didn’t appear to agree that a poll of the American people would produce any legally useful information, as I recall.
Did I miss some piece of caselaw that finds emergency medical treatment to be a fundamental right?
I don’t think anyone can reasonably argue that it isn’t implicit in the concept of an ordered society. The actual phrase is “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty” (Palko v. Connecticut, 302 U.S. 319), which it doesn’t fit quite as well into.
Contraception and abortion are neither deeply rooted in history nor implicit in the concept of an ordered society, and yet both are fundamental rights, under the “privacy” proxy.
Certainly I’m not saying that the Constitution does confer a right to emergency medical care. I’m saying that it’s a right that goes beyond the Constitution, which as your side is fond of saying, doesn’t “confer” rights. In other words, it’s just something which is necessary to a civilized society, like sewers.
Are there federal sewers?
There are in DC, I imagine.
Do you think the individual mandate violates any fundamental rights, perhaps the right to not eat broccolli?
PRE Palko, and I have to think of the case name, decribes the “orderly pursuit of happiness”, concerning what a LIBERTY is under the 14th AM
The right to marry, raise a family and engage in the common occupations of life.
While I do not agree with Roe, the concept is embodied in the 14th.
The 4th AM is embodied in privacy also, as another example, if a search is UNreasonable, it invades an expectation of privacy.
The SC chose to incorporate most of the BoR to the states overruling 100+ years of precedent set by the Marshall Court, so the big 9 will always be at odds.
Yes, I knew I’d get in trouble for not looking it up, which is why I signaled uncertain memory by saying ‘IIRC.’
Well, I’d say that ‘privacy’ is the fundamental right, and that both contraception and abortion are expressions of that right.
I don’t agree. For that matter, I don’t agree that people have a cognizable legal right to sewers. I agree that sewers are a wise idea. But saying something is a right means that the denial of it creates a legal remedy.
No. There is no fundamental right to be free of entanglements like health insurance. My own opinion is that the mandate is constitutional, because we confronted this issue in 1943 and decided it. I don’t think it was the wise decision then, but we’ve now built up sixty years of caselaw and infrastructure that relies on that decision. It’s too late to turn back the clock. The mandate is constitutional, in my view, and does not infringe on any fundamental rights.
Not necessarily. Marbury had a right to his commission, but Madison didn’t have to give it to him.
edited
Isn’t that like what Prosser said, and I assume of Prosser and Keaton on Torts “For Every Wrong, the Law Provides a Remedy”