Paul Krugman on the Broccoli Fallacy

One of the ways in which the right wing have taken aim at the attempt to provide health care in this country is to compare the individual health care mandate (a conservative proposal invented by their very own Heritage Foundation) to the forced purchase and consumption of broccoli. Yeah, it doesn’t really work on any level, but did you expect the Supreme Court justices to act like Tea Party enthusiasts? Paul Krugman didn’t.

Given the stakes, one might have expected all the court’s members to be very careful in speaking about both health care realities and legal precedents. In reality, however, the second day of hearings suggested that the justices most hostile to the law don’t understand, or choose not to understand, how insurance works. And the third day was, in a way, even worse, as antireform justices appeared to embrace any argument, no matter how flimsy, that they could use to kill reform.

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