Jennifer Rubin at the Washington Post posted an article yesterday summing up her feelings about the Supreme Court debate this week.

Ms. Rubin wrote that Obamcare suffered a severability trainwreck at the Supreme Court. The argument for striking down the entire law if the individual mandate is found unconstitutional is that without the individual mandate to herd customers to insurance companies and provide financial support for the other provisions of the law, the goal of universal access would be thwarted. The individual mandate is the only way that Obamacare can provide insurance coverage for everyone. Because Obamacare goes against basic business principles (as well as the U. S. Constitution), it will not work.

The article reports:

It was that kind of day for the government. The argument today was another instance in which the challengers rolled up their sleeves, got into the text of the statute and made a convincing case. The government never sufficiently spelled out how the mandate could be severed from the rest of the bill without upsetting the intricate system of subsidies and the goal of expanded access. In hiding the ball from the public by virtue of an overly intricate fog of misdirection, and in disguising the essence of the scheme — healthy, young people who might not otherwise want insurance are compelled to buy it to ameliorate the costs of others — Congress sent the Supreme Court a legal knot that will be hard to undo.

Part of the arguments for Obamacare come from people who do not understand how insurance works. There does need to be some protection for people who develop serious medical problems so that their insurance companies cannot abandon them–however, we can use a fly swatter instead of a nuclear weapon to deal with this issue and still get the job done.

If the free market were allowed to operate in health insurance, we would be able to find our way out of any current insurance problems without doing things that will not work and are unconstitutional. A few basic suggestions–tort reform, portability of health insurance from one job to another, tax breaks to help people afford health insurance, selling health insurance across state lines. These ideas are all constitutional and might actually help solve the problem of the high cost of health insurance.