I'm going to step out on a limb and predict that if this passes both houses and is signed, the Supreme Court will strike it down.
You just can't have a law that requires people to buy something. There's nothing in the Constitution that can be remotely construed to allow the government forcing people to purchase things.
Now at the state level it's a different matter entirely. Congress could have easily come up with some kind of reward-punishment system that required states to find some solution. And then you'd have 50 states each trying different ideas. They could harvest the best from each other. But it does not appear (to me) that the goal here is iterative, incremental solutions to a pressing problem. It appears that the goal is Big Design Up Front, Top-Down control, and over-engineering every possibility.<sarcasm>An obvious recipe for success</sarcasm>
In the last decade, and with this bill especially, I think we've finally reached the end-game of the American federalist experiment. It's become obvious that we can't meet our current obligations, and it's also become obvious that politicians get elected making promises for even more obligations, not fixing the ones we currently have. So the goal isn't to "fix the system" The goal is to gin up new and various ways to keep making more promises while blaming all problems on the other party. The party's over, but it might be another 20 years before the cops show up, so let's have fun while we can!
You just can't have a law that requires people to buy something. There's nothing in the Constitution that can be remotely construed to allow the government forcing people to purchase things.
Now at the state level it's a different matter entirely. Congress could have easily come up with some kind of reward-punishment system that required states to find some solution. And then you'd have 50 states each trying different ideas. They could harvest the best from each other. But it does not appear (to me) that the goal here is iterative, incremental solutions to a pressing problem. It appears that the goal is Big Design Up Front, Top-Down control, and over-engineering every possibility.<sarcasm>An obvious recipe for success</sarcasm>
In the last decade, and with this bill especially, I think we've finally reached the end-game of the American federalist experiment. It's become obvious that we can't meet our current obligations, and it's also become obvious that politicians get elected making promises for even more obligations, not fixing the ones we currently have. So the goal isn't to "fix the system" The goal is to gin up new and various ways to keep making more promises while blaming all problems on the other party. The party's over, but it might be another 20 years before the cops show up, so let's have fun while we can!