Supreme Court's Debate on Health Care/Health Insurance

Topic of the week around political blogland is the Supreme Court's current debate on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, the "landmark" healthcare reform bill signed by President Obama a couple of years back.

Comment on this issue is really "beyond my pay grade" (nada). Attempting interpretation of astrology relating to this debate would become tangled up in too much fog, variables and complexity to be useful. The only time I've ventured into anything connected with the Supreme Court was in noting that Chief Justice John Roberts shares my birthday, 27 January (but not birth year). When mentioning this in a post several years ago, while still very wet behind the ears as far as US politics and the finer points of applied astrology were concerned, I wrote:

US Chief Justice John Roberts has Sun and Mercury in Aquarius, with Aquarius' modern ruler Uranus conjunct Jupiter in Cancer. Jupiter is traditionally connected with law, and government. Incidentally, with his natal Moon almost certainly in Pisces, Sun in humanitarian Aquarius, and that conjunction in sensitive Cancer , I'd say Chief Justice Roberts is a compassionate man, it's good to see such a person occupying that lofty position.(27 Jan. 1955, Buffalo, New York)

Since then I've come to the conclusion that my Pollyanna-ish view of Chief Justice Roberts and the impact his astrology were mistaken. If he is indeed compassionate and sensitive he reserves these traits for his intimate relationships. Compassion for, and sensitivity to the needy masses doesn't seem to enter much into his professional decisions.

Surfing the net for related astrological insights, I stumbled upon a non-astrological blog: His Vorpal Sword written by Hart Williams. Hard to resist a blog title taken from Jabberwocky, one of my favourite poems by Lewis Carroll:

.....He took his vorpal sword in hand;
Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.....

Mr Williams' post dated 26 March is titled Athena and the Jurists and opens like this:

Any astrologer worth her salt would tell you that there is not a lot of good that you can expect from a grand Supreme Court argument over the future of health care, held on a day when Mercury is retrograde, Saturn is retrograde, and Mars is retrograde. And, since, like global warming, astrology is easily refuted, except by observation, allow me to make this observation on the madness of the zeitgeist.

That's the only mention of astrology in the complex and interesting post. I was very glad to find this unusual non-astrological writer who doesn't immediately disparage astrology. Thank you Mr. Williams! That was rather a good astrological point he made too.

My experience of US health care isn't wide enough to write about the current issue with any grain of credibility. I've lived here only since 2004. All I know for sure is that the National Health Service of the UK, flaws and all, beats the current US system, or the system that would come to pass if the Supreme Court upholds The Affordable Care Act, hands down.

This quote from a debate about the debate, hosted by Amy Goodman, reported at Truthout outlines what I think needs to be said:

DR. STEFFIE WOOLHANDLER: Well, the insurance industry wrote the framework for Romneycare in the form of Blue Cross Blue Shield Foundation in Massachusetts that wrote the original framework. When it came time for Obamacare, the Senate framework, which became the backbone of the law, was written by none other than Elizabeth Fowler, whose previous job had been vice president of WellPoint, the nation’s largest private insurance company. The insurance industry spent hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying on this bill. They gave hundreds of millions to the Democrats and hundreds of millions to the Republicans, both supporting and opposing the bill, but assuring that voices from the left who supported real universal healthcare, real single payer, were shut out.

The only way those voices ultimately got heard was because people showed up in front of the White House in white coats and demonstrated. Doctors and nurses got arrested in Senate hearings. We forced the issue of single payer back onto the agenda against the wishes of the private health insurance industry. And that’s what needs to happen if we’re ever going to get to a real universal system that’s affordable, that gets rid of the private health insurance industry, and recaptures that $380 billion in excess paperwork costs and uses it to cover everyone.

I found this this morning - Will Fudeman sings Charlie King's parody of John Lennon's well-known Imagine- advocating for universal single payer health care in the United States. I'm absolutely certain that John Lennon would approve and would have added his voice to this. Oh my - if only he could!