There is a stark difference, though, between a law which merely (allegedly) distorts economic behavior, and one that affects privacy. The former is only vaguely addressed in the Constitution, in the form fo the 9th and 10th Amendments, and even then the Commerce Clause gives the federal government much power in this arena. The latter, however, is very specifically addressed in the 4th Amendment, and there is no catch-all like the Commerce Clause that would undermine it.

True enough. However, something like Obamacare has the potential to cause both massive economic destruction and massive violations of privacy. I mean, the government --the IRS!!!-- will have access to your health data. Sit down and think about what they could learn about anyone by connecting the dots between your Internet, phones and health databases as well as those of the people connected to you. I don't see much good coming from this. I hate to take a paranoid stance but I sure feel, rightly or not, we are living through a pole shift. Our country is being mutated into a beast few of us might recognize as the USA in the future. This really saddens me. I hope I am wrong.

You see clearly, like seeing Godzilla rising from the East River and about to come ashore. And you are 100% correct.

"All we need is another man like Richard Nixon again" -- sung to the theme song of 'All in the Family'. So, Tricky Dicky had an "enemies list" and wanted to use IRS data. If he had had IRS data, NSA data, CIA data, FBI data, and Obamacare data, we might not have a country now.

Nice.

> This is the same Supreme Court that enabled Obamacare, a law that allows the Federal Government to force every american to buy something.

That's exactly like saying the Federal Government forces everyone to get married and have children, since they'll charge you higher taxes if you don't.

As it stands, I can remember a greater perversion of authority: the USA PATRIOT Act...

I've been guessing that W, Cheney, etc. knew quite well that the Patriot Act was unconstitutional but estimated, apparently correctly, that it would take years for the SCOTUS to strike down the law and in the meanwhile W, Cheney, etc. could "take the gloves off", go after the Jihaders, and teach them a lesson, not to mess with the big, bad US, that would last 1000 years. Why is it always 1000 years?

However at this point it appears that W and Cheney were not the brightest bulbs on the tree because we really have not exactly roasted all the Jihaders.

Indeed, OBL could laugh that just a few wacko Muslims sucker punched the US into wrecking its commercial airline system, trashing its Constitution, blowing $3 trillion (net present value) on absurd foreign adventures, killing 4000+ US soldiers and seriously wounding tens of thousands more, and still got run out of Afghanistan like so many before.

You know, there's good liberal stuff, good conservative stuff, some places for genuine argument, and then there's just plain dumb stuff. We blew it.

> We had to pass it to find out what's in it

Er, is it so amazing that you have execute code and see the results of the running process before you can really find the bugs?

No, the right analogy is to have someone write mission critical aircraft embedded code; don't have anyone review it; run no simulations; hell, don't even debug it; load it on a 787 and say "we have to fly it to see if it works". That's what our representatives did. Ready for takeoff?

Nice!

And then we will debug the code while flying at 0.75 Mach at 35,000 feet!

When people see how bad it is, e.g., the IRS grabbing money out of their bank accounts, the people will understand "what's in it".

The people who passed it had their fun and, due to the delay in implementation, so far have not had to pay for their fun.

When people don't like it, Congress can repeal it, and the next president can sign the repeal. Mostly the waste will have been however many paper pushers wrote 10^10th pages of bureaucratic nonsense no one will ever read.

> I am sure you meant well but I found your write-up somewhat scattered and lacking a logical conclusion supported by prior points. This is easy to do if one is writing with passion. I've done it too.

IANAL! But my 'point' is that there is a process of bringing cases, claims of unconstitutionality, to the SCOTUS and now that process has started. There will be the issue of a plaintiff having 'standing' to bring the case, but maybe now 120 million Verizon customers have such standing; if not, likely still Google does. At this point, someone's gotta have enough standing.

Then the 'conclusion' is that in 1-2 years we will find out what the SCOTUS wants to do about what appear to be laws enabling serious violations of at least the Fourth Amendment.

To respond to much of the discussion in this thread, I made a side point that it is the job of the SCOTUS to defend the Constitution and not to permit bending the Constitution so that the Executive branch can find it easier to go after bad guys. So, in particular, a lot of the discussion here about just how we will get the bad guys will mostly just be set aside during this process and mostly the SCOTUS will not be much influenced by that consideration. Sure, maybe some Admin lawyer can argue something about 'treason' or "the Constitution is not a suicide pact", but my guess is that the main issue will be just a simple, clear protection of at least the Fourth Amendment. SCOTUS is interested in defending the Constitution and not much interested in how to stop Boston wackos with pressure cookers.

For a longer term 'conclusion', I pointed out that if after the SCOTUS decision the citizens still want NSA listening in on pillow talk, steamy e-mails, tracking people to their romantic meetings, etc., then we can try to amend the Constitution.

> If your point is that we will ultimately be protected by the Supreme Court, I think you are wrong.

No, in simplest terms the process has started; likely nothing can stop it; SCOTUS will make a decision, in all likelihood defending the Constitution; and then we will see where we stand.

That this process will move inexorably to a solid (the other two branches won't argue with it) conclusion is, in the context of much of the discussion in this thread, quite significant: Or, we can discuss this and that issue and fine point and what if, but, still, this unstoppable process will move to its conclusion which promises to be quite meaningful.

For being "protected", I see no alternative to the usual from Jefferson

"The price of liberty is eternal vigilance".

For Obamacare, I don't know what the legal status is or what cases have been decided.

For me, my guess is just that Obamacare is so poorly designed that too soon so many people will be screaming bloody murder, especially appropriate in the context, that Congress will just repeal it.

I don't think that Obamacare was ever a serious attempt to help the US healthcare system but just some political posturing -- Nancy had a really good time, a lot of fun. She had the smile of a Homecoming Queen. Now that she's had her good time, we can go back to reality.

Obama? He knows nothing about Obamacare: How do we know? Because during his efforts at helping it pass, too soon he said things that were really dumb, got slapped down hard, and then just shut up. In particular, at one point the US College of Surgeons put out that what Obama said was "uninformed, misinformed, just plain wrong, and dangerous". And that caused Obama to shut up. One more point was, one of his tear jerk cases said that due to her existing bad health she couldn't get insurance. Nonsense: All she had to do was move to a state with 'community rating', e.g., as I've been told, NYS. Obama's interest in Obamacare was about political posturing, not healthcare. Also someone from Arkansas, maybe Bill Clinton, said that Arkansas had a program for people like her.

If the IRS comes after many people, Obamacare will go down in flames.

But for SCOTUS and Obamacare, that case is less clearly about the Constitution than the attack on the Fourth Amendment by grabbing all that Verizon data.

> One more point was, one of his tear jerk cases said that due to her existing bad health she couldn't get insurance. Nonsense: All she had to do was move to a state with 'community rating'.

That's actually one of the points Justice Ginsburg addressed in her concurring/dissenting opinion about the Obamacare case.

In the long term Obamacare systems have failed in individual states that have tried to impose it, because the inevitable result is that neighboring states dump their unhealthiest people into those states using a community rating.

It's the same problem as any other actuarial scheme like life insurance or fire fighting. Having a lower whole-community rate for everyone only works when the most-expensive people can't unilaterally decide to arbitrage against the least-expensive community.

With Obamacare the incentive for that type of arbitrage is drastically reduced, as wherever you are moving from will have some form of community rating as well.

Of course with the old scheme it is likely that the state using community ratings would have moved to establish a firm time-based residency requirement. But then it would not be possible to claim that all someone has to do is move to the right state. For that 12-24(+?) month window that person would be essentially screwed.

You are trying to take Obamacare seriously. Sure, it's a serious issue, and no doubt in the 2000 pages of the bill and the 10s of thousands of pages of 'regulations' there is some good thinking.

But my overwhelming impression is that Obamacare was, in the end, poorly designed. Maybe enough writers of 'regulations' can make it helpful, but I doubt it. I just believe that the whole thing was politics, not healthcare. Or, I can't trust in the seriousness of something that made Nancy smile like a Homecoming Queen. And I can't trust the academic 'health care system economic planning' community. That's Karen Davis, right? I've been too close to such academics, and I wouldn't trust it to hand me a band aid.

The exceptions have already started. Supposedly Congress doesn't want it for themselves (does this mean they actually read some of it or understood it was junk just on general principles?). Some states are fighting it.

My guess is that after Obama leaves office there will be no one strongly supporting it. Then the IRS will torque off one too many people, and Congress will just repeal it. I'm just guessing of course.

Congress already has healthcare (tremendously good healthcare), so obviously they wouldn't want to replace it with Obamacare, as that is only what is good enough for everyone. Instead they will simply say the existing Congressional pension/healthcare system meets PPACA requirements and call it a day.

That's the same thing they did for military Tricare health care (which is as socialist as they come, by the way :P). Instead of replacing Tricare with the national plan they simply declare that Tricare is a national plan that complies with the requirements for PPACA.

I wouldn't be surprised if Obamacare is altered in the future but I would be surprised if it's repealed entirely, especially once people start to realize how many people have nothing else to rely on.

And then in about 10-20 years or so we'll have people like today, screaming and protesting "KEEP GOVERNMENT OUT OF MY OBAMACARE" in completely unironic fashion, just as they do with Medicare today.

Yes, there are problems now, e.g., "how many people have nothing else to rely on.".

But, really, the existing system has faced such problems for a long time and put in place a complicated, disorganized, collection of pieces, patchwork, to respond to it. E.g., there is the Hill-Burton hospital act where to build a hospital can get Federal money but then can't turn away patients who can't pay. So, do 'cost shifting' and charge more for patients who can pay. Or have a city run and funded hospital. Patchwork.

Could we improve it? To borrow from Cheney, no doubt. Could we make it worse? No doubt.

To me, the 'sausage making' process of Obamacare promises a poorly designed product. And the origins and motivations of Obamacare concern me: As I recall, really Obamacare was in its first drafts (did anyone read the 2000 pages enough to do a second draft?) was basically pulled off the shelf from where it had been stored by a health care team under Senator Ted Kennedy. There the dream, Ted did like the "dream", was simple -- socialized medicine.

I suspect that 'socialized medicine' can be made to work well; maybe it does in Switzerland. But I don't trust the results of the people who want 'socialized medicine' in the US mostly just as I don't trust the people who just want socialism in the US. My guess is that too soon we will be paying too much (yes, we are now, also) or screaming about bad medicine like people do in the UK and Canada.

In a sense Medicare and Medicaid have an advantage because they are mostly just payment mechanisms placed on top of what is roughly, very roughly, a 'free-enterprise' system. But if just socialize the whole thing, then can end up with a bad version of the USPS.

I'm not against the Federal Government doing some things: In places what the Federal Government does works out great -- Hoover Dam, Bonneville Dam, TVA, Los Alamos, NSF, NIH, DARPA, funding of the top three dozen or so US research universities, the Interstate highway system, the FAA (the safety and engineering parts; some of the air traffic control parts), in the end most aspects of the USPS, the Agriculture Extension Service of the USDA, the FDA (pretty good on safety, a bit slow on efficacy), and more. For the VA, I don't know: There are complaints about the access and quality, but I know no details.

So, for Obamacare, I'm concerned that in the US 'socialized medicine' is just super tough to get right and that the Nancy, etc. efforts are not even 10% as serious as needed. Then, from the structure of the 'board' or 'panel' appointed by the president, I'm concerned that Obamacare will become a 'political football' that results in low quality health care at high prices.

"Political footbal"? For an example, that's my view of 'climate change' and 'clean energy': For fossil fuels, use 'climate change' as an excuse to tax them and throttle them. E.g., in his 2008 interview at the SF Chron., Obama explained his intention to raise carbon taxes enough to "bankrupt" our coal fired plants -- then 49% of our electric energy and, as I recall, ~23% of all our energy. I suspect he was just posturing, but it was dangerous. Then supposedly about $92 billion of the various 'stimulus' and TARP (I and II) funds went for 'clean energy' but turned out to be make-work jobs and campaign contribution kickbacks. Supposedly since then we've thrown another $45 billion at 'clean energy' -- to me, 99 44/100% about politics, e.g., campaign contribution kickbacks, and the rest water and not at all about energy or the even the climate (in my view, there's no very good evidence that the climate is at risk).

So, with US socialized medicine, I fear 'waste, fraud, abuse' from a political football.

E.g., now we've got NSA: Politics? Sure: No politician wants to get blamed for "being soft on terrorism". So, NSA suspends good judgment and goes overboard -- 'over reaches', e.g., data on calls of 120 million or so Verizon customers, maybe all the US e-mail traffic, maybe all the US phone voice data.

E.g.? Sure: Snowden was a GED, contract, bottom level employee in Hawaii but apparently had his fingers directly on huge volumes of data, all at the NSA supposedly just terrific at 'computer security'. Why? Poor oversight. Poor execution. From the White House, don't give a sh!t about the details and otherwise a political football.

I fear the same for a US national health care system. Yes, what we have could be better, but it could also be worse, and for having it worse Nancy is just the person to lead us there.

Maybe in an honest moment Nancy would have said, "We will just pass it. That's all we can do. Then we will leave the details up to the execution of the Executive branch, in some big office buildings somewhere within 100 miles of the Washington Monument, and pass more bills if really necessary. So, we will just get it started and then let others make it work well." But they don't have to make it work well -- they might just make a mess. I'm thinking, re-engineer and rebuild a Boeing 747 in flight, with people who just started learning about sheet metal.

Well I think I agree in principle that the implementation of healthcare should be left to a free market-esque system, with oversight and resourcing provided by the government.

It could even be much like those "basic income" schemes being floated around here; the government pays out up to a certain cap to cover basic preventative and "major life function" care. If people want fancier doctors that's fine, but they have to pony up the excess themselves.

I think the best examples of government interaction with the business sector have come when the government says this is what needs to happen without enforcing how it has to be done, and then letting entrepreneurial types figure out how to do it best. I see no reason why healthcare has to be fully nationalized, or why ObamaCare can't be the first step toward a system like that.

I believe you are going in the right direction.

More generally, you are correct because you are trying actually to think about it. If we think about it carefully, we might actually get something both better and quite good. E.g., along the lines you said, if some Hollywood actress wants her nose again to look like it did when she was five years old, then she can pay a top Beverly Hills plastic surgeon. If some poor guy in a ghetto has a badly swollen foot and can't even pay taxi fare to the hospital, then he gets the basic work on his foot for free. Fine. That's like a 20 second, free hand, rough sketch of a Boeing 747 -- making it fly like a real 747 is a lot of hard work yet to do.

I wish we'd done that work. I can't believe we did.

"All she had to do was move to a state with 'community rating'", is that it?

In simple terms, yes. Or if she is really sick, just show up at the emergency room of any Hill-Burton hospital. The US healthcare system is a patchwork with problems, but broadly for people with serious, e.g., life threatening, medical problems, we don't turn them away -- first cut, broadly, with holes in the cloth.

But in the case in the Obama town hall, supposedly the woman could pay a reasonable amount for health insurance. In that case, just move to a community rated state, wait whatever waiting period if any, get medical insurance at the same rate as everyone else in that 'community rated' state, and be fine.

Could argue that in part Obamacare is a path to 'community rating' for all the states. But some of the states don't want community rating -- as far as I can tell, really only the richest states want that.

My view, in brief, is that Obamacare was not about healthcare. Instead, Obama wanted to play politics and, generally, just wanted a bigger Federal Government to have still more ability to play politics. Nancy wanted a big case of 'socialism' -- Nancy just dreams of socialism, in particular of Big Daddy Big Federal Government taking care of everyone and making everything 'all right', especially for insecure, single women with small children. Really Nancy wants to use the Federal Government to establish a lot of 'social and cultural values' that would conflict with 'limited government'. Nancy wants a big, security blanket, socialistic government providing a basic level of material support and quality of life for everyone.

I could agree with Nancy except I fear that her hands on the economy would make the economy so sick it couldn't provide what she wants, that is, she will choke the goose that lays the golden eggs. If Nancy could actually do a good job, then we have something to discuss; I just fear that Nancy will make a mess, a disaster. To me it's first mostly a matter of simple competence at execution and not 'political principles' or 'social philosophy'. I just think her boat will leak and not float.

And, yes, even if in simple terms the execution is good, there will be the issue of motivation -- if the 'floor' provided by the Federal Government is high enough, then a lot of people will try less hard and the goose will lay fewer golden eggs.