I can’t help but thing that this whole thing was planned. Ramming the law through in the dead of night, 2700 pages of regulations that nobody even read, and for me the kicker is that things weren’t supposed to really kick in until after the election. To me this doesn’t sound like a “law” this sounds like a charade - pass the thing with one vote in the dead of night, then have the SC strike it down, and then run on the issue in 2012. While convoluted, to me, it’s not *that* convoluted.
“Look we gave you healthcare but the evil SC just took it away. Vote for me”.
Finally, I’ll probably get flamed for this - but - the few provisions of the law that *DID* kick in right away (which I would argue were the only provisions that were really meant for consumption) are not all that bad - like incentivising adoption of electronic medical records, incentivising quality care with ACO’s and reforms that really do make a good deal of sense (at least to me).
I appreciate your optimism that the provisions you cite seem "not all that bad" from your perspective.
Keep in mind that you're looking in from the outside while some of us are getting hit by them on the inside. While they may seem to have laudable goals to you, the provisions you cite are just the same onerous top-down, inefficient Federal mandates that never work as intended elsewhere.
Why would you believe that arbitrary, restrictive Federal regulations would work any better in a hugely complex system like medicine than they would anywhere else in the economy?
C’mon, getting the thing passed took an enormous effort & cost - no way would subsequent vacating thereof by SCOTUS be part of some nefarious plan to make it into a 2012 election issue. The whole point of most of it kicking in after the election was so voters & SCOTUS wouldn’t notice how horrible it is; that’s not consistent with some scheme to get SCOTUS to overturn it pre-election.
“The big win of my administration was overturned by the SC for you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-us levels of moronic. Vote for me.”
You do realize that the whole point of incentivising adoption of electronic medical records was so the gov’t could get its hands on your 4-th Amendment protected private information, right? once they have the details of your health, they can tax & regulate YOU far beyond what Orwell imagined. Really good reforms were not included, and Congress (as usual) is exempt from the whole thing (huh, wonder why). A smidgeon of good does not justify the overwhelming bad.