Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post sees a silver lining for the left if the Supreme Court strikes down Obamacare. He admits that conservatives may be buoyed immediately, but:
The long-term consequences, however, are obvious: Sooner or later, a much more far-reaching overhaul of the health-care system will be inevitable.
Robinson says that the defeat of Obamacare will just bring the country that much closer to the single-payer system that the left really wants. I’ve argued that, if the misnamed Affordable Care Act is overturned, it will be a second chance to over haul the health-care system incrementally and based on market principles. I’ve argued that nobody wants a rerun of the national trauma by which Obamacare was rammed through Congress with scant regard for public opinion.
Thus my first reaction to the Robinson column was that the columnist is living in a fantasy world. Or possibly, that, like James Carville, who has said that the Supreme Court’s overturning of Obamacare would be an electoral advantage for President Obama, Robinson is just spinning.
But a piece headlined “Don’t Get Drunk at the Individual Mandate Party,” by Daren Jonescu, shows why we should take the view of Eugene Robinson and people like him very, very seriously:
The individual mandate is merely the left's latest instrument in the effort to undermine liberty through health care; it is not the primary target. The Supreme Court's decision regarding ObamaCare's individual mandate will be extraordinarily important, and declaring the mandate unconstitutional would be a vital step in thwarting the left's achievement of government-controlled health care in the short term.
But constitutional conservatives must be careful not to allow the thrill of possible victory to blind them to the continuing threat coming from progressives determined to put the state in charge of life-and-death decisions for every citizen….
ObamaCare was the left's attempt to wedge open the door for future, broader government incursions into health care. Obama, Sebelius, Pelosi, and the rest of the socialist mob that pretends to be the Democratic Party would be quite happy to let the individual mandate go, if they thought they could get something much "better" — i.e., true universal coverage of the British or Canadian sort.
Seen in this light, Eugene Robinson’s column this morning isn’t fantasy. It is a game plan. I persist in believing the American public won’t buy a single-payer system. But polls show they didn’t buy Obamacare either. That didn't stop the Democrats. All candidates running for Congress should be pinned down and forced to answer questions about the single-payer system. This fight isn't over, no matter how the Court rules.