Hacker News Reader

Comment by truffdog | Hacker News Reader

As long as this is done via Congress passing laws to cover up loopholes, it's not going to work. It takes too many years to push through legislation, and the health care industry can reorient to bilk their customers some other way too fast. A competently run agency with a ton of authority is required.

Not sure that you could get that past the Supreme Court, or run it competently over the long term given our depressing partisan split on health care, but you know. If this were Canada, that would be the way to make this work.

View on HN

This is kinda an absurd take. On one hand you have people saying 'hey if you want x congress should make it law, the courts can't do anything about it.' but you're saying 'if Congress passes a law it won't work and only the courts can do something about x' it can't be both...

IMO the people with said power and responsibility just want to finger point. But what do you do when no one is willing to put on the pants?

> but you're saying 'if Congress passes a law it won't work and only the courts can do something about x'

That isn't at all what they were saying.

They were saying that instead of Congress trying to make rules through the legislative process (which moves to slow to work), Congress needs to create and authorize a federal agency to make these rules (like the FAA or FCC.) The portion about the supreme court is regarding whether such an agency would be deemed constitutional.

It could also take years for it to change in practice. If someone bills you improperly you might be dealing with it for years and have no recourse outside of the courts.

Extremely different mechanisms protect a hospital from a patient lifting a box of bandaids and some OTC pain reliever vs a hospital unlawfully billing them zillions of dollars.

Congress can delegate authority to any existing or new agency.

The real court case to upend this country would be one that limits or nullifies the delegation capability.

But at least we’ll have small government again lol.

They are currently fighting about Chevron deference, which would functionally be a way for the courts to squash agency independence.

Clarence Thomas has this bit where he says "you guys are doing all these crazy contortions to do stare decisis on these old New Deal decisions that enable the modern administrative state, but the real answer is that they were never constitutional to begin with and should be reversed." This would clearly be a giant disaster, but I think his argument is probably correct.

We don't really do constitutional amendments any more though, so I'm not sure if there are any answers other than court packing to ensure continuous Constitutional Calvinball.

Yeah, I reached the same conclusion myself, a long time ago.

Most of the New Deal was gutted by the courts in the 1930s and 1940s and everything else that remains from it just has never been challenged, mostly from a lack of inspiration, lack of awareness, or distraction by other causes.

I would be skeptical of anything we’ve just assumed is American that came about from the New Deal.

I’ve got a couple full agencies in my crosshairs, and I’m excited about that.

Sure, its going to be a disaster, and I’m empathic about people losing other civil rights they have gotten used to that this court is going to re-evaluate, but I’m glad I can leave and that my particular causes will give me the openings I want.

You can leave what? What causes?

leave the country while still using changes that might be inconvenient for others

Clearly not all that empathic if you're on here bragging about how great it is that you can simply opt to not lose your civil rights.

Play the cards you're dealt. I don't have influence on the courts and neither do the people protesting on its doorstep.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com