PanemCare
Wendell PotterHope the Supremes Strike Down ObamaCare? Get Ready for PanemCare
Since Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia clearly isn't going to take the time to actually read the health care reform law before he decides whether or not it's constitutional, maybe he and a couple of his buddies on the High Court can catch a screening of The Hunger Games, the movie about children battling each other to the death in a futuristic America, renamed Panem.
"You really want us to go through these 2,700 pages?" Scalia asked during arguments on the constitutionality of the law last week. "Is this not totally unrealistic? That we are going to go through this enormous bill item by item and decide each one?"
He joked that spending time to read the Affordable Care Act before the Court decides its fate would put him in danger of violating the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment. LOL, Judge.
Cruel and unusual punishment is crucial to the Hunger Games, but it only lasts 142 minutes and no one in the audience gets hurt, mitigating anybody's risk of violating the Constitution. The movie portrays a government completely disconnected from the people who struggle every day for the most basic elements of survival, including medical care. Only the wealthy residents of the Capitol have access to hospitals and modern medicine, which, fortunately for them, seems to have a cure for everything.
This society-gone-bad scenario of denying basic care to citizens based on their income or social status seems on the big screen not only cruel and unusual but even incomprehensible. I can just hear Justice Scalia asking, again, "Is this not totally unrealistic?"
Guess what, Judge, it's not. In fact, it's occurring every day in what is still called the United States. And if you and your colleagues decide to scuttle ObamaCare, it won't be long before we have PanemCare. For many Americans, we already do...