Health Care BS

On Friday, April 15, the justices of the Supreme Court will discuss in conference whether to grant Virginia’s petition for certiorari. If four of the nine justices vote in favor, Commonwealth of Virginia v. Sebelius will leap over the laborious and protracted appellate process and go straight to the high court.

Many court watchers claim to know what the justices will (or will not) do, but the Supremes have a propensity to surprise even the most sophisticated “experts.” And last Monday, they issued a ruling in a seemingly unrelated case that offers at least a glimpse of what their decision might be on Friday:

The decision … rejected an effort to end Arizona residents’ ability to claim a state tax credit on their contributions to a private school tuition organization, even though the state’s constitution bars direct government spending on religious institutions.

The ACLU wanted the Court to penalize citizens of Arizona for contributing their own money to organizations it deemed less worthy than others. This would have meant that a contribution to, say, the ACLU would be tax exempt but not a gift to a tuition program connected with a Catholic school. However …

Kennedy and the four conservative justices in the majority appear to believe that a citizen’s money is theirs, not the government’s, unless the state takes it through taxes … If that sounds familiar, it should, because it goes to the heart of the fight over Obamacare’s individual mandate—is it the individual’s money or the government’s that would be used to pay for health care?

And ObamaCare’s individual mandate definitely interferes with your ability to dispose of your money as you wish. It takes away your right to keep your money in your pocket instead of buying an insurance policy you may not want or need. This presupposes that the government has first say on how your paycheck is spent.

There will be a variety of criteria considered in the Court’s decision to accept or deny Virginia’s petition, and it is a long shot, but the Arizona decision suggests the possibility that four justices might be open to an expedited hearing on a case whose implications for individual liberty reach far beyond those of the Arizona case.