Without a mandate it doesn't work at all. Since if insurer's can't reject for prior conditions, and there are price controls, then the lack of a mandate means the smart thing to do is just wait until you get sick and then go buy insurance.

Personally, I'd say the best way to handle this constitutional issue (if it remains one, a district court judge isn't going to be the final say by a long shot and undoing this law could be difficult without the court undoing a lot of settled law around the commerce clause) is:

Option A
You make buying health insurance optional with all the existing provisions for subsidy and whatnot. And you say "and hospitals will no longer receive any federal reimbursement for care provided to uninsured individuals. It is legal to let these people die in your parking lot since they chose to not get insurance."

Option B
If it is indeed constitutional for states to have a mandate (and is there any challenge still standing to the constitutionality of Massachusetts mandate)? Then the federal government sets up the framework and runs it through states where getting any piece of the federal healthcare pie requires the state to have local mandates. Then all those government who insisted they didn't want federal money anyway can put their money where their mouths are.

As detestable as I find the subject of Philip Ray Greaves' book, his arrest bothers me.

I'm unclear on the details. What are the charges? I don't think there is a criminal statute for detestable subject matter. Perhaps the theory is that the book aids and abets pedophilia? It's a stretch.

Obscenity

It's a stretch. He lives in Colorado I believe. The AG of Florida (who's an anti child porn crusader) ordered a copy of the book, interpreted that as giving him jurisdiction to prosecute him under Florida's rather broad obscenity laws. It's questionable whether the extradition will go through.

Eugene Volokh (a UCLA law professor who has written on the law around crime facilitating speech) posted on his blog about the case.

http://volokh.com/2010/12/20/pedophi...scenity-charge

Awww. It looks like some members of the GoP (namely those who decided to not work over the holiday break) are upset about the work Congress has been doing this week during it's "lame duck" session.

Guess they should have gone to work! I wonder what their constituents think about that.

Another right-wing psychopath. Luckily, he was caught in time.

I'll be on a boat and will resist any temptation to actually watch the State of the Union since it is even more irrelevant now than in most years.

But I just want to put it on record that when I'm elected president I'm going to go back to the pre-Wilson norm of delivering the state of the union in letter form.

And unlike Jimmy Carter, the last president to just send a letter, it isn't going to be some long thing. It will just say

And I will do it this way for no other reason than to watch the cable show pundits stroke out.