WINNERS AND LOSERS

On June 25, 2015 the Supreme Court upheld the provision for subsidies in the Affordable Care Act regardless of whether the insured procured their insurance coverage through their own state exchanges or were forced into the federal exchange as their own state’s demented leadership refused to establish an exchange.

This ruling makes clear the winners and losers in this ongoing battle over trying to legislate the availability of health insurance for millions of Americans previously denied access, whether due to pre-existing conditions or lack of affordability.

WINNER————–Chief Justice John Roberts whose concise, common sense opinion sliced through all the nonsense of those who brought the lawsuit out of spite, not out of genuine concern the law was harmful. Of course that brought the enmity of conservatives, some of whom (okay a really tiny portion of whom) believe the Good Justice was blackmailed or worse.

http://www.theblaze.com/contributions/was-supreme-court-justice-john-roberts-blackmailed/

LOSER—————-Justice Antonin Scalia whose sputtering dissent, with phrasing like “interpretive jiggery-pokery”, reminds one of a pillar of the community found with his pants down in the local whorehouse amongst a bevy of belles but who would have you believe he was about to lead them in prayer.

WINNER————-President Barack Obama whose signature legislative accomplishment has survived yet another insidious but withering attack from the forces of politics, not of righteousness.

LOSERS————-Republican candidates for their party’s Presidential 2016 nomination who collectively and figuratively had pie shoved in their faces as again their predictions for the demise of the ACA were dashed on the rocks of futility with reactions ranging from the ridiculous to the ridiculous, nothing sublime remotely within their capacity to bloviate. Several shared their opinions via Twitter which proves once again twitter is for twits.

The GOP Candidates React to the Supreme Court’s Obamacare Ruling

WINNERS………..American Citizens who now have reason to feel more secure in the knowledge that it is less likely they will face either financial ruin from receiving health care when they are not insured and that the availability of such coverage will inure to their physical and mental benefit…even in terms of saving lives… by being able to obtain treatment. 

Gee, imagine that, a federal law that actually is good for the lives of ordinary people.

Economist Paul Krugman highlights the way the law is working after only two full years of implementation.

……….The Affordable Care Act is now in its second year of full operation; how’s it doing?

The answer is, better than even many supporters realize.

Krugman cites, among other positives,  the expansion of coverage to as many as 15 million Americans,  Also

The newly insured have seen a sharp drop in health-related financial distress, and report a high degree of satisfactionwith their coverage.

Too, instead of a budget buster as the rampaging elephants would have you believe, it has helped in lowering the federal deficit and, if repealed, the deficit would rise again.

Krugman does not deny there are some difficulties, but not insurmountable ones. So long as a number of states refuse to expand Medicaid (placing a huge burden on state and local taxpayers, see http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/stateline/2015/6/24/not-expanding-medicaid-can-cost-local-taxpayers) millions of the most desperate are still denied coverage.

He further speaks of premiums, which is a contentious issue, no doubt. However, the Commonwealth Fund found that the average increase in premiums for coverage under the ACA from 2014 to 2015 was ZERO.

http://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/blog/2014/dec/zero-inflation-nationwide-for-marketplace-premiums

Now average does not mean no increases for anyone anywhere. Anecdotal evidence of large premium hikes are plentiful, especially in internet forums. And even the study above reports substantial increases in some states with lower costs in others.

Which brings me to my real point about WINNERS & LOSERS.

So long as health insurance coverage in the United States is in the hands of private, mostly for profit companies, together with the ability of individual states to thwart the purpose of the Affordable Care Act and in light of the vagaries of state laws, insurance regulations, and insurance commissioners, there will be WINNERS and LOSERS in the game of health inusrance coverage and thus health itself.

The health and welfare of our citizens should not be subject to gamesmanship with keeping score a regular and necessary part of it.

This nation needs to wise up and create a system with true universal coverage. This could be achieved through a single payer system as our successful Medicare program could be expanded by making everyone eligible. That is my personal preference.

There are also hybrid systems such as in Australia with mandated coverage for all supported by general revenue taxes, a levy equivalent to our Medicare tax, and private insurance for some.

To me the chief flaw built into the ACA is that it is vulnerable to wanton attacks for purely political purposes, none of which have had either the intent or the ability to actually improve health care coverage in this country.

Of course the saddest part of these attacks is that the assailants simply do not care what harm they cause.

We can acknowledge that no system can be perfect. But our current system, even with the successes of the Affordable Care Act is still far below perfect.

Now, as we adjust to the reality of the ACA it will becvome ever more evident that we have a ways to go.

Let’s make WINNERS of the vast majority of our citizens and consign the LOSERS who oppose a better healthcare coverage system to the back pages of history where they belong.WINNE

HOLDING HANDS—AND MUCH MORE—SOON TO BE LEGAL FOR ALL

The Supreme Court has agreed to hear an appeal from gay couples whose marriages are illegal in some states in the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals. On Friday, January 16, 2015 SCOTUS voted to accept the appeal involving same sex marriage bans in Ohio, Michigan, Tennessee, and Kentucky.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/16/supreme-court-gay-marriage_n_6439926.html

A couple things are surprising about this.

First of all, the decision appealed from, that of the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals, was by a 2-1 majority of a three judge panel. The losing parties could have asked for a review by the Circuit En banc which would have meant a re-hearing before all the judges in the Circuit. Since the two ruling judges were Bush appointees, and since all other Circuits ruling to date have struck down bans, it is very likely the entire court would have reversed.

And since that review was possible it was a little surprising that SCOTUS did not refuse to accept the case until further action by the Circuit judges as a whole.

Although the Supreme Court leans conservative…absurdly so as in Citizens United (which they certainly are not)…it did strike down DOMA in 2013 which action, at least in part, has led to the ensuing decisions in federal courts.

The 6th Circuit decision was premised on the notion that gay marriage should be a matter for legislatures, not courts.

Were that notion to be followed by SCOTUS in this appeal, it would undermine and effectively be a repudiation of Loving v Virginia, the 1967 case that negated state laws against interracial marriage. Recall that marriages between the races were once considered to be as immoral and as contrary to Biblical teachings as some continue to claim gay marriages are today.

Of course any prediction of Supreme Court decisions is fraught with peril for the predictor. And the most harrowing of these potential perils is pure embarrassment at being wrong, no matter the level of legal expertise and knowledge of the inner workings of the Court and the nine Justices. My own level of expertise is surpassed by many observers with far greater experience dealing with the history and nuances of Constitutional Law.

Yet it is difficult to imagine a Supreme Court with the recalcitrant likes of Justices Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas being able to stem the tide of history. As we saw in the Affordable Care Act ruling Chief Justice John Roberts abandoned his natural conservative bent to provide the saving vote, albeit in a strange construct claiming the law was entirely within the power of Congress to tax while he, in effect, ignored its power to govern Interstate Commerce.

In a way looking at the ACA as a tax scheme satisfied the conservative base while simultaneously appalling and infuriating that same base by finding that “tax scheme” all huggably legal. Of course the conservative base considers any tax scheme to be the greatest sin perpetrated upon mankind.

Since Justice Anthony Kennedy has been ever more consistently liberal on any case remotely touching upon gay rights adding him to the four Court liberals is not illogical with the chance that Roberts finds a way to come aboard withe the majority.

Somehow 6-3 decisions of the Court sound more persuasive to Americans than does a 5-4 one. But the assumed persuasiveness is questionable given the 7-2 Roe v Wade decision and we know how well that has been embraced. Brown v Board of Education was a unanimous decision but  met both immediate and long term resistance in practicality if not in legal challenges.

Morality aside, there is simply no reason for gay marriage bans to be upheld. Not that I agree that such unions are immoral, but the Supreme Court does not rule on the basis of morality. Thus, we still have the death penalty.

SCOTUS has ruled that laws forbidding gay sex are unconstitutional in Lawrence v Texas. It has ruled that denying gay married couples certain federal benefits in states banning gay marriage is wrong in the DOMA case. It seems inconceivable, as an extension, that it would permit states, in effect, to restrict the interstate movement of couples legally married in one state by disallowing them to enjoy the same marital rights as other couples.

From that point is just a short distance to determining that there is no Constitutional justification to banning consensual adult couples from marrying no matter their gender.

I can just picture Rick Santorum rubbing his hands in glee now that he can fulfill his lust for the family dog.

DEATH DOES KILL, BUT TO WHAT PURPOSE?

It is no secret that I am unalterably opposed to capital punishment. One of my earliest posts in this blog was this. https://umoc193.wordpress.com/2010/11/17/death-kills/

There I recounted how I came to this position when I was about 14 years old. I have touched on this topic in other posts and in many comments in other forums.

There are many reasons why I believe the death penalty is wrong but in reality it boils down to this—it is wrong to kill. While I do allow for exceptions those are irrelevant here. But the most practical and possibly persuasive argument is that innocent people can be executed. The proving of innocence post death is very difficult to establish but there are some notable cases in which a good argument could be made that the condemned was not guilty. http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/executed-possibly-innocent

One of the cases cited here, that of Cameron Willingham,  I paid particular attention to him in my blog post linked to above and his story can be found here. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/09/07/090907fa_fact_grann

Willingham’s situation is singular if not unique in that he was convicted of murdering his children by arson but there is ample evidence that not only was he not guilty of setting the deadly fire but that the conflagration was an unfortunate accident and no crime whatsoever.

That is shameful of course but our Supreme Court has ruled that actual innocence is no justification for overturning a death sentence so long as the procedures that led to that sentence and denial of appeals met Constitutional criteria. The language in that case, Herrera v Collins, 506 US 390 (1993) is not precisely those words. Herrera was seeking Habeas Corpus relief from his death sentence because new evidence suggested he was innocent. However, Chief Justice Rehnquist looked at the innocence claim as not a Constitutional claim so the Court could not consider it.

Were petitioner to satisfy the dissent’s ‘probable innocence’ standard…the District Court would presumably be required to grant a conditional order of relief, which would in effect require the State to retry petitioner 10 years after his first trial, not because of any constitutional violation which had occurred at the first trial, but simply because of a belief that in light of petitioner’s new-found evidence a jury might find him not guilty at a second trial.

But in a later case, and only in dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote this:

This Court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is “actually” innocent.  Quite to the contrary, we have repeatedly left that question unresolved, while expressing considerable doubt that any claim based on alleged “actual innocence” is constitutionally cognizable.

In re Troy Anthony Davis, 557 US____(2009)

One might believe, though, that the execution of an innocent person is exceedingly rare. But a new report from the National Academy of Sciences of The United States of America sheds some scientific light by statistical analysis to conclude that 4.1% of death sentences (1 in 25) is imposed on an innocent person. (Spare me the Mark Twain reference here).

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/04/23/1306417111

There have been 1373 executions in the U.S. since 1976 as of April 1, 2014. Applying this analysis means that 57 of these condemned were not guilty.

But another aspect of the death penalty is highlighted by this story. Jill Meagher was raped and murdered in September 2012 in Australia. Adrian Ernest Bayley pled guilty and was convicted of this murder and was sentenced to life imprisonment. Australia does not have capital punishment but still the story of her surviving husband, Thomas Meagher, is remarkable for the absence of a blood lust for revenge on his part towards Bayley.

Indeed, he learned to look at Bayley not as the thoughtless crude animal he originally envisioned but as a human being who was somewhat a victim of the circumstances and total environment in which he existed.

I’ll let Meagher speak for himself and note that I am not in total agreement with his premise. Truth be told I would take a harsher tone with the killer. http://www.salon.com/2014/04/28/the_monster_myth_what_i_learned_from_seeing_my_wifes_killer_in_court/

Far too often when I am reading or hearing about true crime cases the victim’s family members, close friends, and even some of the law enforcement folks who investigated the murder or the prosecutors speak of how the murderer “deserves to die” for his crimes.

They never cite how execution will prevent other murders or any of the other ephemeral effects of imposing the ultimate sentence. Instead their vocal support lies entirely within the realm of pure vengeance. “You took this life and now you must die”.

Tom Meagher’s utter disregard for vengeance is significant in that he refuses to totally demonize the man who took the  breath away from the woman Meagher loved to the max.

Well, “vengeance is mine” saith the lord. If the folks looking at destructive tornadoes and other killing events are willing to attribute all this to god’s will, mysterious or not, why then can they not leave the question of vengeance to her?