Health care in less than an hour.

So America will get a new health care law in a little less than an hour. No one knows what will be in it, no one knows why it's needed. The one it replaces, Obamacare, was deeply unpopular. Except for the bits people liked. In fact, the only bit that was really unpopular was the part that said "this is how we need to pay for all the bits you like". It's not that voters are against paying for health care, they just think it should be paid for by someone else.

It's a bit like the rest of politics. If you take apart the Tea Party position on government, for instance, the basic argument is "we want the bits we like and depend on, but we don't want to pay for them!" They like Medicare and Social Security, for instance. And a strong military. They want to reform Medicare and Social Security, but not to the point where they lose money. (If you're on Social Security, your income, in real terms, goes down anyway. It's the same with all pension systems. The British one is particularly good at unnecessarily declining, by the way.)

Folk like being able to keep their kids on their health insurance until they've definitely left college. Folk like it when they can't be turned down for coverage, especially if the refusal to pay is arbitrary and capricious, like it was. Folk like the "no lifetime cap" thing - it always seemed to cover about 40% of the needed care. In fact, people like most of the law. Just not the bit about paying for the coverage.

I still think the Supremes are going to deem the law unconstitutional, and I think it will be decided on spurious grounds. The reason why? The conservative justices have an awful lot of hubris among them. And they have no problem with judicial activism.

Carolyn Ann