Polarized Over Health Care, United on Drama of Ruling
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER
WASHINGTON — Lawmakers are not usually eager to get back to Washington after a weekend in their districts, especially during campaign season. But Representative Michele Bachmann boarded a flight from Minnesota on Sunday night — even though the House will not meet until Tuesday — to make sure she would not miss the Washington moment she has been excitedly anticipating, the Supreme Court ruling on President Obama’s health care law.
“The decision on Obamacare goes well beyond health care,” Mrs. Bachmann, a Republican and a vocal opponent of the law, wrote in an e-mail. It “will determine whether or not the court believes the government has a right to mandate that Americans buy a product or service, a direct impact on our freedom and liberty.”
The impending heath care ruling by the Supreme Court has become this city’s O. J. Simpson verdict crossed with a papal conclave — polarizing, maddeningly unpredictable and shrouded in mysterious signaling. The ruling is expected to come this week, either shortly after 10 a.m. on Monday, the last scheduled day of the term, or on an extra day later in the week.
For members of Congress, health care lobbyists, campaign officials and thousands of lawyers (and the thousands more who have just taken the LSATs) who populate the squat office buildings across the district, the wait for the fate of the health care law has become all consuming.
They constantly check Scotusblog, a Web site devoted to the doings of the court. They play Health Reform Bracketology, a Web site where they can choose among various possible outcomes. They fret, write multiple versions of news releases and fret some more, wondering when the decision will be revealed.
In Documents on Pain Drug, Signs of Doubt and Deception
By KATIE THOMAS
A research director for Pfizer was positively buoyant after reading that an important medical conference had just featured a study claiming that the new arthritis drug Celebrexwas safer on the stomach than more established drugs.
“They swallowed our story, hook, line and sinker,” he wrote in an e-mail to a colleague.
The truth was that Celebrex was no better at protecting the stomach from serious complications than other drugs. It appeared that way only because Pfizer and its partner, Pharmacia, presented the results from the first six months of a yearlong study rather than the whole thing.
The companies had a lot riding on the outcome of the study, given that Celebrex’s effect on the stomach was its principal selling point. Earlier studies had shown it was no better at relieving pain than common drugs — like ibuprofen — already on the market.
The research chief’s e-mail, sent in 2000, is among thousands of pages of internal documents and depositions unsealed recently by a federal judge in a long-running securities fraud case against Pfizer. While the companies’ handling of the research was revealed a dozen years ago, the documents provide a vivid picture of the calculation made by Pfizer at the time and its efforts ever since to overcome doubts about the drug.
Will we love the health-care law if it dies?
By E.J. Dionne Jr.,
Any day now, the U.S. Supreme Court may make possible something that has yet to happen: an honest and complete discussion of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA).And if it throws out all or part of the law now popularly known as “Obamacare,” we will need a fearless conversation about how a conservative majority of the court has become a cog in a larger right-wing project to make progressive political and legislative victories impossible.
I still harbor the perhaps naïve hope that some conservative justices — Anthony Kennedy? John Roberts? — will pull back from judicial activism and allow the voters to decide the fate of the health-care law in this fall’s elections. And here is where the court’s reintroduction of the health-care issue into the political debate could be turned into a blessing by allies of reform, provided they take advantage of the opportunity to do what they have never done adequately up to now. They need, finally, to describe and defend the law and what it does.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ej-dionne-will-we-love-the-health-care-law-if-it-dies/2012/06/24/gJQAPpQC0V_print.html
Published on Monday, June 25, 2012 by CommonDreams.org
Metaphor and Health Care: On The Power to Make Metaphor Into Law
Perhaps as early as today, the conservative–dominated Roberts Court will choose a metaphor that will affect millions of people and perhaps change the history of our country very much for the worse.
Back in 1978, linguists Michael Reddy and George Lakoff, working independently, demonstrated that metaphor is fundamentally a matter of thought, and that metaphorical language is secondary. Conceptual metaphors shape our understanding and can determine how we reason. Consequently, metaphor is central to law, as Citizens United showed by making the metaphor Corporations Are Persons into a law, with vast political consequences.
Today’s likely judgment was prefigured in the 2008 Republican presidential race when Rudolph Giuliani likened health care to a flat screen tv. If you want a flat screen tv, buy one; and if you don’t have the money, go earn it. If you can’t, too bad, you don’t deserve it. The same with health care, he argued, imposing the metaphor that Health Care Is a Product.
This was a sign that conservative strategists were looking for a way to impose this metaphor.
Barack Obama helped them. He bought into that metaphor when he chose the Interstate Commerce clause as the constitutional basis of his health care act. He had an alternative — Medicare for All — since Congress has the duty to provide for the general welfare.
But Obama accepted the Health Care as Product metaphor because he wanted to regulate the insurance industry, and Congress has the power to regulate interstate commerce. In doing so he fell into a conservative trap. The Interstate Commerce clause rests on the metaphor that Health Care is Product. That led to Supreme Court justices arguing that the individual mandate is forcing people to buy a product, and that, they hinted, is unconstitutional — at least 5-4 unconstitutional. The argument is that if the government can force you to buy one product, it can force you to buy any product — even broccoli.
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