this is where i parked my car

Brilliant. Let's make the justices but their own insurance and maybe they'll stop playing stupid games with people's live

You may be better able to get a discussion if you actually start a discussion.
What should we discuss? Haven't read the article but presumably you're right. What to discuss?

steephie,

Well, interested parties could discuss the merits of the case, for example; or they could discuss what would happen to Obamacare if the Supreme Court rules for the plaintiffs. Would it completely fall apart, forcing (a Republican) Congress to radically modify it? Would the hold-out states be pressured into setting up exchanges? (The plaintiffs argue that subsidies may not be provided through the federal exchanges, only the state ones).

I'm a Republican (mostly) and I believe there are merits to obamacare. Not everything is good, but I think throwing out the whole thing is to take every tax dollar collected over the last 5 years or so and throw it away.

Things I Like:
Every American has health insurance: as a guy who had a family without insurance when my wife broke her ankle twice, broke her toe once, and needed med we couldn't afford on numerous occasions, it would have been great to have *something* affordable.

Things I Don't Like
Fees forcing you to either pay for obamacare or pay a hefty fine
Fees to either take obamacare or another insurance or pay a hefty fine: I understand increasing taxes to cover the care, but it stops being a freedom when I'm forced to pay when I choose not to take insurance. No other thing does that. If I don't want car insurance, I don't buy a car. There are other forms of transportation that are free, if I don't want to pay for sales tax, don't buy the item. Food (here) isn't taxed. If I don't want home insurance, PMI, or any other insurance, I can find a way to opt out, except obamacare. Dictatorships demand someone have or not have something and penalize you for not having it.

I disagree with members of Obama's crew and other political people being immune to the above. If it's good enough for the people, it's good enough for the president and political leaders. It's hypocritical (and dictatorial) for someone to be immune to something in one breath and force everyone else to suffer it in another. When he designed it, he gave himself and others lifetime immunity to paying for it. That's crap.

I Don't Like Paying For Someone Else's Abortions. Again, if I was given the opportunity to opt out, then I couldn't complain here, but religious groups and members should be given some voice on this issue.

@TruNinja (a sorta reply to some points)

If you don't have any insurance, but can afford it, and you end up in the emergency room, bad things happen. If we allowed you not to have insurance until you needed it, insurance companies would only carry sick people and risk averse people. The fine or tax or whatever is to try to force those issues not to play too large a role in the system. There are other ways to solve the same problem, but they would probably be seen as worse by you. Cover everyone under a national system such as Medicare for everyone, with taxes covering everyone, even with allowed buy-up insurance.

The no recission and no pre-existing condition denial stuff is pretty important for getting people coverage. There were pools of people that had a condition which forced them to go into government high risk pools, which was just us covering them anyway. And recission is just crap.

I don't really like Obamacare, but not sure if the "well, if I don't want car insurance, I just don't buy the car" thing works with health insurance, since it would be "well, if I don't want health insurance, I just will die".

As for the paying for abortion, are you going to let me opt out of paying for the wars, nsa and such? It is health insurance, that is paid for out of premiums.

I love the title ... a threat *to* the ACA?

First of all, there is far more threat "from" than "to" the ACA. But more to the point, anyone who has the unmitigated gall to label this disastrous piece of legislation with the word "affordable" ought to have his (or her) head examined for soft spots.

If I were in the Republican Congressional leadership I'd do something like this.

Pass a bill fixing this problem entirely in Obamacare's favor, *but* also attach something like a pro-growth tax reform package that includes all sorts of popular goodies. Then watch and laugh as the president has to veto the bill which could save his signature legislative achievement because of other ideological commitments. Or, even better, he signs it and we get the reform the tax code desperately needs, and Obamacare still goes down later under the myriad other problems with the law.

Thanks for the thought-provoking post, VirtualBob. The main reason that I called it a threat *to* the ACA is because it would have been meaningless, grammatically speaking, to say that this Supreme Court case represented a threat *from* the ACA, and the Court case is what I was discussing.

But thanks for your insights.

@Invictus,

That's an interesting idea, but I don't think the GOP base is in any mood for such subtle machinations at the moment. It would be very dangerous I think.

Perhaps. But this is something which, at worst, does nothing but embarrass the president and, at best, gets us idyllic tax reform (or some other GOP policy which is popular but anathema to the president).

I'd wager the base would latch on to something like that, especially in tandem with a solid Republican replacement to Obamacare. Ed Gillespie almost won in Virginia running on such a plan, after all.