-Submitted by David Drumm (Nal), Guest Blogger
During the Supreme Court oral arguments regarding the health care law’s individual mandate, J. Scalia considered the result of allowing the Federal Government to force people to buy health insurance by asking if the government “can make people buy broccoli.”
This is a classic example of the Slippery Slope argument. This type of argument tends to be, but is not inherently, fallacious. Its strength is determined by the number and inevitability of the steps from the top of the slope to the bottom. Scalia did not enumerate the steps, or their causal relationship, between the health insurance mandate and the forced purchase of broccoli.
Eugene Volokh writes about the actuality of slippery slopes:
I would have liked to illustrate the discussion with case studies of how the legal system has slipped down various slippery slopes, but unfortunately it’s generally very hard to tell whether legal change A in fact caused legal change B (even if it’s plausible that it did), … such case studies might therefore have become more controversial than persuasive.
Joey Fishkin is concerned that under the doctrine of Federalism, “Texas could pass a statute and force me to eat broccoli right now.” I’m sure that Robert Bork would point out that broccoli appears nowhere in the Constitution so there is no protected right to not eat broccoli. Michael Ramsey thinks “Texas could … constitutionally (try to) force [Fishkin] to eat [broccoli].”
Paul Krugman points out that “health insurance is nothing like broccoli.” Is Krugman suggesting that Scalia’s argument is an example of the hyperbolized rhetoric of a policy advocate?
H/T: ACS Blog, John Holbo (Crooked Timber), Dana Milbank (WaPo), CBS DC, Eugene Volokh.
JCTheBigTree
Not necessarily true.
Mike Spindell
Health care skyrockest because we have a law that no one can be turned away even if they can’t pay. Many take advantage of this. Also, Think about all of the illegals who go to the hospital for free care and the Hospital can’t turn them in because of our laws. Finally, government paying the costs of healthcare to those in medicare and medicade have also helped skyrocket prices.
This is apropos. I’m currently watching a co-worker shove a BIG doughnut down her piehole. I don’t really want to participate in an insurance market that is based on the experience of the American ‘market’ as the insured pool…
68% of Americans are either overweight or morbidly obese. It is an inarguable fact that being overweight/obese leads to health complications and the rest of us end up paying more because of that.
Health insurance costs are skyrocketing…partially because drug prices are obscene and partially because Americans are one unhealthy lot.
Inigo Jones1, April 29, 2012 at 10:37 pm
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BINGO!!!!!!!!!!
The government’s intervention in health care isn’t an intervention in the free market because health care isn’t governed by market forces. Take prescriptions for example. Each pharmacy pays a different price to the pharmaceutical company. Depending on the insurer, each consumer pays a different copay to the pharmacy. The consumer doesn’t know the retail price of the drugs, and the prescribing doctor doesn’t know what the patient’s copay is. The price system only works when consumers — not producers — set the price. If consumers don’t know the price, their purchasing decisions don’t serve as signals to producers.
The insurance industry in the US is best characterized as an extortion racket. Government mandated health insurance is a problem, but not for the reasons Republicans identify. The problem is not government interference in the market because there is no market. Because Republicans have the wrong diagnosis, their prescription for a cure is also wrong.
Inigo,
Very good point about health care’s lacking a market economy.
Malisha, the 1% may have most of the bucks but they apparently don’t have the market cornered on brains. As we used to say ‘We are ALL Bozos on this bus…’ and it may, quite sadly, only be when the tragic scenario you predict strikes them close to home….a child, a relative, a love….that they ‘get it’ and realize the real meaning of ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’ ….that is not simple advice, it is a quantum equation and the only recipe left for saving our Country and our planet. It is, after all, your neighbors house as well as your own that determines what kind of neighborhood you live in. Even now, people are streaming to this Country…..but now we also have those who are beginning to leave….it is not the time to stop being the place in the world that is not afraid to be free or not afraid to play by rules that are honest, fair and equitable. It’s also not time to spit on the work of our fathers who gave everything so we could live like human beings and show others that that is not impossible.
Well the federal government already DOES force us to buy broccoli. They force us to pay taxes, and out of these taxes come lots of meals for lots of feds going to lots of banquets at which broccoli has been served ever since peas went out of style. How are we not buying broccoli? We’re just not buying broccoli for our own consumption. And how insulting (in addition to injurious) is THAT?
Look at THIS slippery slope: If we don’t purchase insurance for our own healthcare, we will begin to slip down the “NO HEALTHCARE” slope that will put us, pretty soon, on the “NO HEALTH, PERIOD” slope that will, pretty soon, infect all the people we ride the bus and subway with that will, pretty soon, infect some of the people who serve the needs of the one percent (1%) that will, pretty soon, be a slope they don’t want to slip on at ALL. As in pandemic. I’m checking out before it’s a sure thing, of course, based upon my own projected healthcare picture.
Scalia is a bought and paid for worker bee for the Koch brothers and other corporate masters.
“Once the camel’s nose is under the tent………”
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I have never heard this before….it made me laugh… 🙂
actually though, many of us are just this side of camping and anything that could help keep the corporate profit mongers from stealing any more of the general stores from the tents would be most welcome…. (camels, btw,are a good thing…. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4930094.stm …)
Broccoli aside, the point remains; how far are we willing to allow the Federal government to intrude into our lives and, more specifically, our pocketbooks? If we allow THIS incursion, what will be next? Once the camel’s nose is under the tent………
Mike Spindell 1, April 29, 2012 at 10:17 am
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“Justice Scalia disagreed, saying, “The cross is the most common symbol of the resting place of the dead.”
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There are scores of crosses which represent very different things.
Some are associated with life, others death (opposites I suppose).
The Supreme Five ought not oversimplify like that.
Republicans, with mythical religiosity, intervened in the personal health care of Terri Schiavo but oppose health care reform for all Americans. All Americans deserve the same health care as Dick Cheney, the Vietnam War draft dodger! For Profit” Health Insurance is counterintuitive and an oxymoron!
“Is Krugman suggesting that Scalia’s argument is an example of the hyperbolized rhetoric of a policy advocate?”
“Justice Scalia disagreed, saying, “The cross is the most common symbol of the resting place of the dead.”
Were it just the hyperbole of a partisan it might be forgivable on some esoteric level. What it indicates though, is that this “esteemed” Justice is logically challenged and unfit for this position.
The government had better keep its hands off of my broccoli plants! I will defend them to the death!
GIVE ME BROCCOLI OR GIVE ME DEATH!
Maybe Scalia is senile. Can he be impeached?
I just came across this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/08/us/08scotus.html?_r=1
The question of the meaning of a cross in the context of a war memorial did give rise to one heated exchange, between Justice Scalia and Peter J. Eliasberg, a lawyer for Mr. Buono with the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Southern California.
Mr. Eliasberg said many Jewish war veterans would not wish to be honored by “the predominant symbol of Christianity,” one that “signifies that Jesus is the son of God and died to redeem mankind for our sins.”
Justice Scalia disagreed, saying, “The cross is the most common symbol of the resting place of the dead.”
“What would you have them erect?” Justice Scalia asked. “Some conglomerate of a cross, a Star of David and, you know, a Muslim half moon and star?”
Mr. Eliasberg said he had visited Jewish cemeteries. “There is never a cross on the tombstone of a Jew,” he said, to laughter in the courtroom.
Justice Scalia grew visibly angry. “I don’t think you can leap from that to the conclusion that the only war dead that that cross honors are the Christian war dead,” he said. “I think that’s an outrageous conclusion.”
Scalia made it clear he doesn’t even read the materials pertinent to his decisions from the bench….maybe his brocolli is GMO brocolli….
According to Scalia’s “Slippery Slope” reasoning if we don’t MAKE people buy brocolli we will be headed for anarchy Dare we imagine a world with brocolli running free in the streets without any rules or regulations governing speed limits or guns. Surely people remember the “Attack of the Killer Tomatoes” when tomatoes became obese and terrorized the nation.
Isn’t Scalia even a little affraid we will all just go to the carrots if we don’t mandate buying brocolli? If you think brocolli is bad imagine a world made of nothing but carrots. Now that is scary.
May I add that we have already fought Broccoli World War I overseas, which should be instructive toward a solution of this ongoing domestic broccoli war concerning slippery broccoli with oil on it.
ALEC is very powerful……