June 27, 2012

Tomorrow's Gonna Be Tense

The Supreme Court decides on "Obamacare" tomorrow. This is personally important to me for a few reasons; if they strike down the entire law, I won't be able to stay on my parent's health insurance as long as I can now, and I'm also more likely to be denied health insurance in the future because I have a pre-existing condition. If they strike down the individual mandate, then there's a good chance that premiums will go up because health insurers will keep having to accept high-risk patients without getting more healthy patients to balance it out, and that would suck for me too when I eventually have to buy health care.

So I'll probably blog about it! But in the meantime, ThinkProgress made a really spot-on observation about the reporting over this which focuses on how it will impact the presidential elections in November:

It is, of course, mildly interesting to speculate upon how tomorrow’s decision could influence whether a man who currently lives in a luxurious house in Washington will continue to live there for several more years or will instead be forced to move to a different luxurious house in Chicago. But you know what matters a whole lot more? Whether the Supreme Court decides to strip millions of Americans of their future access to health care. 
Every year, hundreds of thousands of Americans file bankruptcy because they cannot afford their medical bills. Thousands more are locked into jobs their hate because they cannot risk losing their employer-provided health insurance while they have a preexisting condition. According to one study, about 45,000 people die every year because they do not have health insurance. So, in a very real sense, the Supreme Court is deciding tomorrow whether to allow tens of thousands of people to die every year until Congress is able to pass another health care bill. Something, by the way, which took seventy years to accomplish the first time around.
 So yeah. Cross your fingers, folks!