Thursday, June 28, 2012

Affordable Care Act

As I'm sure most of you know, this morning, the Supreme Court upheld the healthcare bill (ACA). From a political philosophy perspective-and this may surprise some of you who know me-I do think the sovereign has the right regulate, even mandate, healthcare coverage. However, that gets very complicated in a dual sovereign system such as the one in the United States. So, you begin to see why I can say the sovereign has the power and right to do this, yet still say the federal government should not. The Constitution was designed to limit the federal power, and leave the rest to the states. (Yes, later the states were limited by the Amendments, etc.) In my opinion, if one of the sovereign States' peoples voted to institute a healthcare system for that State, and could fund it, then more power to them.

All that said, what do I think of the ACA? I (like most of Congress) have not read it. So what the actual changes will be, I can only speculate. But I will predict that it will not have a huge impact on the majority of Americans. I think it is safe to say that most citizens have very little knowledge of what laws are in place that keep things running in the manner we expect, or prevent things from running as well as they could. People just are too oblivious to notice. It will probably be the same with this.

There is one exception: I can expect to make some money off of it. A new bureaucracy will lead to more business for lawyers willing to take on administrative law cases.