If the Affordable Care Act does end up completely overturned by the Supreme Court, millions of conservatives will erupt in cries of jubilation and proceed to sprint several victory laps while emitting the most unadulterated spew of hateful gloating imaginable. Either knowingly or unknowingly, they will be cheering on the return of 2.5 million Americans under the age of 26 to the bankruptcy-fraught existence of the uninsured. They will be ululating over the millions of children who suddenly find themselves living in a country in which a congenital heart defect will preclude them from coverage under their parents’ health insurance. They will celebrate the ludicrous status quo of having our health insurance tied to the fickle, profit-driven whims of our employers because of the predatory, laughable-yet-gut-wrenchingly-depressing Wild West of the self insurance market. They will fist pump to the return of rescission, in which your insurer can refuse to pay for your chemotherapy after one of their employees -- who they pay hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to comb through your medical records in search of grounds for denial of coverage-- discovers that you didn’t report a previous trip to a dermatologist to treat some long-ago face acne. They will raise their glasses to the continuation of the preexisting condition. Perhaps worst of all, they will thrash about in unabashed glee over the perpetuation of a health care system that takes up a whopping, deficit-inducing 18 percent of our GDP, almost a full 10 percentage points above every other developed nation on earth; these nations have adopted either the individual mandate or a single payer system to offer health care that is far superior to the US’ by just about every available statistical metric.
And why will conservatives be so happy? Because a law that was first proposed by a conservative economist, endorsed by the utlra-right wing Heritage Foundation, and enacted by a Republican Massachusetts governor suffered the unfortunate fate of being signed by a Democratic president, and conservatives must adhere to their tribal, troglodyte modus operandi of never letting progress get in the way of offering a middle finger to their Democratic brethren. And so onward they will march, pausing long enough for Glenn Beck to refuel his acid-filled tear ducts before they continue dragging us down into the Ayn Randian dystopia that future historians will look back at in unambiguous disbelief.