Only in America could there be a firestorm controversy over providing access to health care for 30 million plus U.S. citizens. At least this is the general perspective shared by much of Europe as to WHY the Affordable Care Act’s provisions are opposed so fervently here in America. As many know Europeans enjoy universal health care coverage. It has become as engrained into their social fabric as Medicare and Social Security has here. As a result they are utterly confused as to why there is a debate over this issue. The articles here provides a small glimpse into the confusion our neighbors across the Pond are experiencing over this perculiar political battle over health care.
Europe Is Baffled by the U.S. Supreme Court
Europe is scratching its head over possibility that the U.S. Supreme Court will strike down President Obama’s signature legislative achievement. As the judiciary and the Obama administration trade legal barbs over the high court’s authority, the idea that health care coverage, largely considered a universal right in Europe, could be deemed an affront to liberty is baffling.
“The Supreme Court can legitimately return Obamacare?” asks a headline on the French news site 9 POK . The article slowly walks through the legal rationale behind the court’s right to wipe away Congress’s legislation. “Sans précédent, extraordinaires” reads the article. In the German edition of The Financial Times, Sabine Muscat is astonished at Justice Antonin Scalia’s argument that if the government can mandate insurance, it can also require people to eat broccoli. “Absurder Vergleich” reads the article’s kicker, which in English translates to, “Absurd Comparison.” In trying to defeat the bill, Muscat writes, Scalia is making a “strange analogy [to] vegetables.”
Perhaps the British newspaper The Independent summed up the situation best when it stated;
With the stroke of a judicial pen, unelected judges would have voided the most important piece of health legislation since the Medicare and Medicaid Acts in 1965, and destroyed the boldest effort yet to give America what is taken for granted in every other industrial country: universal health coverage.
Additional Article:
‘Obamacare’ at the mercy of the supreme court
If Americans are promised not just liberty but life and happiness, is there not a constitutional right to affordable healthcare?
