Crony capitalists fear that the Supreme Court might gut Obamacare

The reality of ObamacareBack in August 2009, I wrote about a conversation I had with a Leftist physician regarding the upcoming legislation that would turn into Obamacare. One of my contentions was that Obamacare was a step to single payer and would end up bankrupting America’s existing medical establishments. He disagreed. Here’s the relevant part of my post about that conversation:

What this doctor likes about mandatory universal health care is that it forces the voluntary uninsured into the system.  He thinks it grossly unfair that they are not paying into the system, while people who need insurance are paying.  If there were more money in the system, the person with a preexisting condition would not be required to pay as much for his insurance.  In other words, he thinks that the insurance system should be a cross between an uninsured motorist requirement and social security.  He freely admits that this is a government mandated spread the wealth approach, and one of which he approves.

Because he has a philosophical approach that requires everyone to be in the health care market, whether they want to be or not, he is unperturbed by CBO numbers projecting vast increases in the cost of health care under the new plan.  He thinks the CBO people, being accountants and not doctors, have no idea what they’re talking about.  What he envisions is a brave new world in which the government simply provides more insured people who will use medical services.  He finds it inconceivable that universal health care (which is a system by which all people are insured, but medical care providers continue to be privately owned) can shade into a single payer, government-owned system.

Put another way, this doctor loved the fact that the health care market would get a huge financial bonus from new policies sold to the previously uninsured.  He was, I believe, representative of most of the corporate healthcare providers who gleefully signed on to Obamacare.  Rather than fearing that they’d eventually be forced out of the healthcare market, they eagerly anticipated new customers being forced into the market.  No wonder, then, that they’re panicking now at the possibility that the Supreme Court might gut the Obamacare exchange system:

 The Wall Street Journal mentions this morning that our now-socialized health care sector is filing panicked Supreme Court briefs in the upcoming King v. Burwell case that emphasize not legal arguments but the disruption to their business model if Obamacare’s state subsidies are struck down. In other words, they mostly submitted policy briefs to the Supreme Court—not legal briefs.

You know what I think is going to happen?  I think that Roberts is going to play policymaker and legislator again, and that he’s going to support the new status quo.  Moreover, I think that he’ll do this because the Obama team knows something about his adopted children.