Opponents of the Affordable Care Act who believe the Supreme Court will declare the law unconstitutional are going to be disappointed next year when a majority of the nine justices vote to uphold it. It will likely be a 5-4 decision, but moderate conservative Anthony Kennedy will, I'm confident, recognize that without the law, the free-market system of health insurance, so highly valued by conservatives, will implode, sooner rather than later.
The high court announced earlier this week that it will hear oral arguments on the constitutionality of the law next March. A decision is expected in June, just a few weeks before the parties hold their conventions. Regardless of which way the justices go, the decision will ensure that health care reform will be as contentious a campaign issue as it was in 2008.
Here's the reality. The provision of Obamacare at the heart of the constitutional challenge -- the requirement that all Americans will have to buy health insurance if they're not eligible for a public plan like Medicare or Medicaid -- is a "must have" for the nation's health insurance industry.
The plaintiffs who filed the lawsuits, including the attorneys general of 26 states, either haven't been paying attention to what's been happening in the private insurance market, or have chosen to ignore it out of blind allegiance to ideology.
The indisputable fact is that our employment-based system of private health insurance has been crumbling for years, to the point that potential new business for health insurers is, for all practical purposes, nonexistent. And ironically, it is their practices and policies, made necessary by profit-hungry shareholders, that have led to this state of affairs.
The only way the big insurance firms have been able to increase the number of premium-paying customers they actually want to insure is to "steal" market share away from each other, or from smaller competitors. ("Steal" is their word, not mine.) The nation's largest insurers have become giants primarily through mergers and acquisitions, not through insuring people who previously were uninsured.
We got more evidence of the demise of employment-based health insurance just last week from a Gallup survey. It revealed that the percentage of American adults who get their coverage from an employer is continuing to decline, dropping to 44.5 percent in the third quarter of this year. That's down from 49.8 percent when Gallup started conducting the insurance surveys in 2008. The Employee Benefit Research Institute reported in a September analysis of insurance trends that the steady erosion of our employment-based system dates back to 2000.
The one bright spot in Gallup's most recent report was that the number of young adults with coverage actually increased during the third quarter of this year, undoubtedly because adult children, thanks to Obamacare, can now stay on their parents' policies until age 26, if they can't find a job that offers coverage. But finding a job that offers coverage is becoming increasing unlikely, of course, because the number of employers still offering health benefits keeps dropping.
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