Yuval Levin cautions opponents of ObamaCare against focusing too much on the Supreme Court and the constitutionality of the individual mandate. "That is an important secondary question, but it is not where the future of our health-care system will be decided," he writes. "The key problem is the overall concept—which begins from the premise that our system of health-care financing will only keep costs under control if the government becomes an even greater force in the health sector than it is now and proceeds to create a system that will cause premiums to rise rapidly in the individual market and create major dislocation in the employer market, driving people into vastly overregulated exchanges that would push premiums higher still, and then initiate a program of subsidies whose only real answer to the mounting costs of coverage will be to pay them with public dollars and so inflate them further. It aims to spend a trillion dollars on subsidies to large insurance companies and the expansion of an unreformed Medicaid system, to micromanage the insurance industry in ways likely to make it even less efficient, to cut Medicare benefits without using the money to shore up the program or reduce the deficit, and to raise taxes on employment, investment, and medical research."
Conclusion: "the core case against Obamacare must be a sustained political case made on policy grounds, and the means to undo the law as a whole and pursue real reform will present themselves not next summer when the Court rules but next fall when the public does."
I'd add the point that "if the Supreme Court struck down ObamaCare, it might leave proponents of ObamaCare feeling a bit like anti-abortion advocates after Roe v. Wade: feeling as if an issue had been plucked out of the political process where it belonged and decided instead by a highly educated, unelected elite." That may not be reason enough to hope the court sustains the constitutionality of ObamaCare. But I share Mr. Levin's view that the political and policy fight here shouldn't recede because of the legal one.
