If Health Law Is Overturned, What Will Liberals Do?

By MICHAEL D. SHEAR
NYT

If the Supreme Court strikes down all or part of President Obama’s health care law, it will have unraveled a legislative compromise that many liberals had viewed with suspicion from the beginning.

In one of the ironies of recent politics, Mr. Obama was a late convert to the merits of the individual mandate that now appears to be in danger of being declared unconstitutional.

But the president’s embrace of the mandate — and his willingness to abandon a so-called public option to get a health care deal — was a hard pill to swallow for many of his Democratic supporters.

The Affordable Care Act promises to provide health insurance to millions who lacked it. But it also stops far short of the idea that health care is a basic right for everyone living in the country. And it embraces the market-based system of private health care delivery that has long existed in America.

(More here.)