Cognitive Dissonance

Bill,

Another wonderful psychiatric term. This one describes the discomfort felt when a person attempts to hold onto two contradictory notions or beliefs at the same time. Americans clearly hate the individual mandate that is at the heart of Obamacare, with approval rates hovering in the 30% range. Yet the provision to forbid insurers from excluding patients with preexisting illness has 85% approval. Could someone please explain to our beloved countrymen that the one is fiscally impossible without the other?

The politics of what will happen next is any body's guess, if the ACA is overturned entirely the public policy implications are clear. There will be no further effort at health care reform for a generation. The Republican plan to gut Medicare will fail, because older Americans like Medicare just the way it is, and they vote. Thus the fiscal rape of the young  by the old will continue unchecked. The iniquities of the system that produces 60% of all personal bankruptciess will continue. Costs will continue to escalate inexorably.

I wish I shared your optimism about our future. I predict the coming election season will produce new lows for venality, vituperation, mendacity, and the absence of serious conversation. At the end of it we'll get a new President that, no matter who he is, half the country will loathe, and a Congress about which we'll feel even worse.

BTW, the invalidation of the ACA by Supremes would have a direct effect upon your faithful correspondent. That's what allows me to insure my 24 year old son through my plan at work (another wildly popular provision of the act) without paying rapacious rates in the marketplace, which of course subsidizes ll those freedom loving freeloaders who refuse to pay for the health car they get. That's the 1st time I can every remember that happening. Wonder what they have next in store for me.

Eli