Opinion of the court, delivered by David Lamb:
The American health care system is a lot like Former President George W. Bush: it has a soft spot for the private sector, it costs the nation dearly, and it was a lot more popular seven years ago.
It’s also similar in that it exists in a world unburdened by basic economics; where the American system has a public program—Medicare—that will use federal money to treat cancer in a retired sixty-eight-year-old who no longer pays income taxes, it has no such program to help a fifteen-year-old buy antibiotics for pneumonia, even though local and state governments have invested tens of thousands of dollars in the fifteen-year-old’s education and even though the fifteen-year-old has decades of income taxes yet to pay.
It has been five months since Mr Bush fled from Washington, and yet the United States’ health insurance system, dreamed up by depression-era businessmen in rooms full of cigar and cigarette smoke, has continued to plague Americans like a self-induced lung cancer, that is, from the inside, out.
While President Obama’s proposed health care plan broadens eligibility standards for Medicaid—the public insurance program for low-income Americans—proposes another national plan to compete with private insurers, and mandates health insurance for children, it doesn’t socialize medicine, leaving the possibility that some citizens will remain uninsured. These people, who will be between eighteen and sixty-five, and in jobs which don’t provide health care benefits—often ones that pay below the national average—will be forced to pay more for health insurance if they want it.
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