Brief Note on For-Profit Health Care

When the whole health care system’s goal is first to make a profit, and when the state also supports the health care system in that goal, the system becomes an extortion racket. This doesn’t mean that individuals or organizations in the system must be forbidden to make a living or even a profit, but that their goals cannot be allowed to override the goal of keeping people healthy.

The Biden administration’s solicitude of health insurance and pharmaceutical industry profits is discouraging, though it is probably politically necessary. Yes, Jeff Zients, Biden Administration White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator, I am looking at you.

Taney Court II: the Right to Infect

And once again, the Supreme Court's liberals are acting like jurists, while the "conservatives" are acting like Twitter trolls. Dahlia Lithwick, writing at Slate, offers a horrified summary. It seems that the conservative wing of the Roberts Court is ready to declare that the emergency measures the Biden administration is undertaking to control covid are to be forbidden under doctrines that cannot be found anywhere in precedent, statute law, or the Constitution. The Roberts Court is living up to my description as Taney Court II.

Three-and-a-half years ago, I wrote: “Federal law is now a matter of whim. The full extent of this failure will be felt in all aspects of our lives. Our very lives will be in danger.” And now, it seems, the Supreme Court is ready to declare plague-spreading a constitutional right, or at least one that can only be forbidden by a deadlocked Congress.