I never understood why there could be any argument or how the result could be in doubt – except on grounds of the ideologies of certain appointees to the Court – about the insurance mandate.
Here’s an example. I’m an urban homeowner. If the City says they have to replace the sewer lateral to my home, it’s for my good health and the health and safety of the community. Then they put it in and they make me pay for it. So if local government can make you buy something you don’t particularly care to buy for yourself…. Get the point?
Probably there are many such examples. Yet I don’t know the subtleties of the issue lately resolved in favor of the mandate. I do know the President will be expected to defend it, and the whole scheme of legislation, in the election. And I know it’s going to cost me money. But I’m going to vote for him anyway.
The health care act is eventually going to cost me money because my family has “Cadillac” health insurance, provided as part of my compensation by my employer. Soon part of that compensation will be considered income, just like the cash money it would cost me to buy it for myself. And the taxes on that income will help defray the costs of certain benefits, say, coverage for pre-existing conditions, people less fortunate than I will enjoy under this legislation.
Many petit bourgeois types find this upsetting. And they, and their big bourgeois friends who couldn’t personally care less about the cost of health insurance nor indeed who stays healthy and who gets sick, have got the “tea partiers” upset about it too, even those tea partiers who will never pay a cent of the penalty or the tax, and even, or so it might seem, those who aren’t insured at all but are afraid of the legislation for no articulable reason anyway.
There’s no need to repeat in all detail the steps in that argument. Bourgeois types, with a real fear of seeing the cash balances in their accounts dwindle in order to pay the public costs of health care, have to generate other kinds of fears among people who don’t share their interests, in order to influence and, they hope, control the outcome. These are necessarily false fears precisely because the real interests involved are not the same. And so I say, put yourself in the shoes of the working poor, because you’re a lot more likely to become one of them than to become one of the Few.
Next: Whose Shoes?
