Health-care lawsuits: Delaying the inevitable

As if our political system were not having enough trouble already, we now confront the possibility that a highly partisan judiciary will undo a modest health-care reform that is a first step toward resolving a slew of other difficulties.

As you watch the lawsuits against the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act work their way through the courts, consider that what you are really seeing is a great republic tying itself into as many knots as possible to avoid facing up to a challenge that every other wealthy capitalist democracy in the world has met.

Yes, all the others have decided that it’s both more just and more efficient for all their citizens to have health insurance. Countries do this in different ways. Some rely primarily on government, others on a mix of private and public resources. But given the costs of health care, even the most conservative governments have concluded that the public sector has to play a large role in its provision.

Not us. No, thanks to our own peculiar brand of conservatism that sees government-subsidized health care as a lurch down the road to serfdom and dictatorship, we kept finding ways to evade the problem — until last year’s breakthrough. But having failed to block health-care reform in our elected branches of government, conservatives now hope that they can achieve their end through judicial fiat. They were against judicial activism until they were for it.

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