March 29, 2012 | 1:52 PM |

Post-Supremes: Deconstructing The Health Law Arguments

FILED UNDER: Insurance, Medicine/Science, Personal Health, Politics, health law, U.S. Supreme Court
Webcast Replay: Health Reform And The Court (Kaiser Health News)

Screenshot of the Kaiser Health News' webcast "Health Reform And The Court." Click the above image to link to the full webcast replay.

If, for some reason, you haven’t had enough parsing of this week’s judicial thrashing of the national health care law, listen to this thoughtful Kaiser Health News analysis by a panel of smart reporters and observers who covered the past three days of oral arguments on the health law before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Asked what happens to the provisions of the law that are already in effect if the entire law is invalidated, Tom Goldstein, publisher of the Scotusblog said he’s not sure of the legal term but, basically “God only knows.”

About the author

Blogger, CommonHealth Rachel Zimmerman worked as a staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal for 10 years, most recently covering health and medicine out of the paper’s Boston bureau. Rachel has also written for The New York Times, the (now-defunct) Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the alternative newspaper Willamette Week, in Portland, Ore., among other publications. Rachel co-wrote a book about birth, published by Bantam/Random House, and spent 2008 as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT. Rachel lives in Cambridge with her husband and two daughters. View all posts by Rachel Zimmerman →

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     No matter the outcome of the Supreme Court’s decision on the
    individual mandate to buy health insurance, the Affordable Care Act
    remains flawed because it will leave at least 26 million people
    uninsured and does nothing to reduce healthcare costs. We need publicly
    funded universal healthcare — we need single-payer Medicare-for-all.

    Instead
    of mandating everyone purchase insurance from a for-profit company, we
    should expand and improve what we already know works: Medicare, whose
    administrative costs are only 3%. With Medicare-for-all, we would save
    $400 billion annually.

    Medicare is constitutional, loved and
    cost-effective. It should be improved and expanded to cover everyone
    under a single-payer healthcare system.  It’s time for this. Even Mark
    Bertoli, CEO and Chairman of Aetna Insurance has said as much ( http://www.healthcare-now.org/single-payer-health-care-is-coming-to-amer… Let’s not accept any more of the ‘it’s not politically feasible’ excuses!