The law of unintended consequences is a cruel mistress. I wonder what transparently partisan Republican a-hole, Antonin Scalia, is going to have to say if/when the health insurance industry in America collapses and is replaced by a nationalized single payer system?
This is the heart warming scenario as presented at TPM:
Last week’s Supreme Court oral arguments over the constitutionality of “Obamacare” raised a terrifying specter for the health insurance industry: What if a 5-4 conservative majority rules the individual mandate unconstitutional and severs it, while the rest of the law stands?
If that happens, then by 2014 insurers would be forced to sell insurance to all consumers, and not hike premiums based on peoples’ pre-existing medical conditions — but without a requirement that everybody enter the risk pool. That, experts believe, would create an inherently unstable system: Older, sicker people would buy insurance, healthy people wouldn’t, premiums would rise, more healthy people would drop their coverage and so on until the market collapsed altogether.