Health Care Reform? Or Health Insurance Reform?

I had an interesting conversation last night that was quite possibly the best (and quite possibly the only) good argument I've heard against the ACA (the artist previously known as #hcr). The argument was essentially that the law achieves a laudable goal—insuring over 30 million new Americans—but without reforming all of the problems with actual health care. As a result, we'll simply have 16 million people buying into an already expensive and inefficient Medicaid system and another 16 million or so using government subsidies to buy health insurance that is grossly inflated in price. Moreover, there is already a shortage of primary care physicians in this country, so people will not get more preventative care; newly insured people will more likely go to specialists who will simply order needless and expensive tests. Costs will continue to rise, and not much benefit will be gained. Result: While more people will be insured, the ACA has the effect of expanding an already broken system.

A Primer on Congressional Powers

Although I have criticized the media for jumping on the "Health Care Reform Might Be Unconstitutional" bandwagon, I am going to jump on it myself. To give the reader an understanding of the issues involved in the question, here's a brief primer on Tenth Amendment jurisprudence and Commerce Clause jurisprudence.

I am Phineas Gage

I have never doubted that Hume was right about the human mind. Reason is—and can only be—the slave of the passions. Perhaps the reason that I have never doubted Hume is that I have never found a better way of explaining myself.

Students of psychology will be familiar with Phineas Gage, the railroad construction foreman whose personality was forever altered when a tamping iron was blown through his head, destroying part of his frontal lobe. The damage to his brain caused the once even-tempered railroad foreman to become an impatient, reckless, unbalanced figure.