As we await the Supreme Court's ruling on whether they're going to strike down either all or part of the Affordable Care Act, which could be coming as early as this Monday, leave it to Fox News to bring us such terribly insightful commentary as this tidbit by Brit Hume on this week's Fox News Sunday. What would either presidential campaign do without him?
WALLACE: I want to just bring that up in the time we have left with you, Brit, Assuming that the court were to strike down all or part of Obamacare, do you see the Obama White House campaigning against the court saying this is a political decision by a Republican court? And if you elect a Republican president he'll have -- the court will become even more conservative?
HUME: The administration of the president might do that. I think it would be a mistake to do that. Because this a president who has become known, I think, to the public as a blamer. And here again he would be blaming somebody else for something of his that failed. And my sense is, it wouldn't work.
What he, it seems to me, would be wise to do is the same thing Romney would be wise to do and that is to have some plan ready to go. And say OK, that has failed, let's move forward and try this, this, and this. Republicans would be in that situation as well. They'd been saying this wasn't any good. OK, what is your plan Mr. Romney.
Obviously, Governor Romney can come out and say, you know, we want to have tort reform. We want to do some of the ideas the Republicans tried to advance during the health care reform debate, didn't go anywhere with it. So they would have the outlines of something to say.
But it seems to me, that both sides need something constructive to say. I don't think blame casting is going to work.
Note to Brit Hume -- Mitt Romney had a health care plan that wasn't just "ready to go" but one he actually passed as governor of Massachusetts -- which looks an awful lot like the one that SCOTUS might strike down this week. I guess Hume doesn't think proposing something completely different now will be a political problem for Romney and that no one actually realizes that the Affordable Care Act was modeled after the legislation he signed as governor.
Hume's suggestions for an alternative was the typical Republican claptrap about tort reform and I'm sure if he was given a chance to elaborate, deregulation and a race to the bottom with insurance companies shopping for states to relocate to where they can abuse the system to maximize their profits instead of insuring their customers would have been included as well.
The Republicans have had no new ideas on reforming our health care system because they don't care if we stick with the status quo or not or they'd have done something besides a huge giveaway to big pharma when Bush was in office. I do actually agree with Hume on one point he made here and President Obama suggesting another program as we move forward from here, and that's if the entire law does get overturned, I really hope it leads to a push to bring us single payer.
If there's no desire for single payer, there is always another European model where the private insurance industry is what's available to the citizens, but that market is regulated in the same way utilities are regulated in the United States. Either way, we need to be taking the profit margin out of the system and CEO's and Wall Street speculators being allowed to get rich off of it and the industry being forced what they should be doing, which is providing a service to their customers instead of figuring out how to deny care and maximize profits for people who don't have any interest in caring whether the sick in this country can afford to go see a doctor.
Getting something done to change the status quo is going to involve a huge amount of public pressure or our politicians will be content to do nothing. Citizens being fed up and letting our elected leaders know about it might be the only good thing to come out of a bad ruling from our Supreme Court this week. They're going to do a lot of damage if they actually overturn the entire law and not just the mandate.
