George Will is Ecstatic Over Legal Challenges to Health Care Reform – Just Giddy at the Thought of Taking Health Care Away From Millions

It’s Why He Fits Into the Conservative Mainstream

The egregious columnist for the Washington Post, George Will writes about the legal challenge to health care reform and it is not hard to read the glee in his tone at the possibility that a legal technicality may upend part of the law.

Scott Pruitt and some kindred spirits might accelerate the ACA’s collapse by blocking another of the Obama administration’s lawless uses of the Internal Revenue Service. Pruitt was elected Oklahoma’s attorney general by promising to defend states’ prerogatives against federal encroachment, and today he and some properly litigious people elsewhere are defending a state prerogative that the ACA explicitly created. If they succeed, the ACA’s disintegration will accelerate.

The problem is that one reading of the law is that insurance subsidies may only be available with state run exchanges, and Republicans in many states blocked creating those exchanges because, well because they saw their role in government as preventing people from getting low cost health insurance and access to health care.  So the law has a fallback position, namely Federally created exchanges.

It is not clear that the restrictive interpretation of the ruling will prevail, and it is largely a result of sloppy drafting by the Obama folks, proving once again how terrible these people are at the actual practice of governing.  Mr. Will seems to think health care reform will die if this part of the law is found to be unworkable.  But what is more likely  to happen is anger and resentment against Republicans. 

The reason for this is that while a majority may not like the health care reform law, after a while tens of millions of people will have health care insurance and taking that away from those people is not going to be politically popular.  It will of course take decades before Republicans give up on their opposition.  After all it was only yesterday that they accepted Social Security. The fight to kill Medicare and replace it with an unworkable plan that places the cost of health care on the elderly and impoverishes them, that is the system we had before Medicare, is still alive and will be so for decades.  Like the factions in the Balkans, they never forget, never forgive and forever live in the glorious past.

As for Mr. Will, who undoubtedly has great health care and great insurance, well, let’s just let him bask in his hope of denying that to others.  It may be that is all he lives for.