A sharply divided U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday upheld the centerpiece of President Barack Obama\’s signature healthcare overhaul law that requires that most Americans get insurance by 2014 or pay a financial penalty.
Last week, many of us followed with much anxiety the Supreme Court debate about the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, referred to in some circles as “Obamacare.”
The Supreme Court appeared closely divided along ideological lines during tense arguments over President Barack Obama\’s healthcare law on Tuesday, with conservative justices vigorously questioning the Obama administration\’s lawyer on whether Congress had the power to require people to buy medical insurance.
I broke a bone in my foot several weeks ago, and I’ve been limping around in an expensive, ugly boot and shlepping to doctors ever since. A simple slip costs lots of money — happily, not entirely to me. I have health insurance; I’m lucky.
As a loyal Jewish Democrat and longtime advocate of social justice, she never thought she would find herself fighting Jerry Brown, a man she voted for three times for governor. Yet the 94-year-old is suddenly on the wrong side of Brown’s proposed budget cuts that would slash state spending by $12.5 billion, ripping a hole in numerous social service programs and eliminating others entirely.
In the always lively Jewish Journal of Los Angeles, Rabbi Elliot Dorff writes in a cover essay that \”support for universal health care is an imperative in Jewish law.\” Is it now? On health care reform, Rabbi Dorff has his classical sources all lined up — most having to do with obligations on the community to rescue its needy, the captive, and those otherwise endangered. The communal court system can compel a person to give charity in support of the poor. Proper medical services are a necessity in a Jewish community. And so on. Whether through socialized medicine or government health insurance, something must be done: the fact of there being 40 million uninsured Americans is \”intolerable.\”
Whether or not we are believers in the Obama plan, or any of the particular plans for universal health care currently winding their way through Congress, support for universal health care is an imperative in Jewish law. Although what is available in medicine and its cost have changed radically, particularly over the past century, the fundamental right to receive good care — and to be compensated for giving it — goes very far back in our heritage, though perhaps, ironically, not all the way to the Torah or even the Mishnah.
I don’t know which is more dispiriting: the New York Times’ failure to call Betsy McCaughey a liar, or Barack Obama’s failure to call Chuck Grassley a liar. It’s tempting to think of both failures as cowardice, a mortal fear of being branded “liberal.” But ironically it’s liberalism itself that makes them both mistake their cowardice for fair-mindedness.
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