Strawberries.

'Tis the season, and I've been putting the chest freezer to good use this weekend.

In political news, Mr. Ezra Klein's analysis in the Washington Post was interesting yesterday -- a concession of sorts. He'd been plugging the Affordable Care Act, offering not only economic analysis, but political and legal takes too.

Turns out, it might just be that Individual Mandate will be found unconstitutional afterall, but the overall law can still survive. Now if only we could find a neutral wonk with economic expertise to analyze how the underwriting reforms can be kept as promised, if non-consumers of the health insurance industry maintain their right to opt out. Would the numbers still add up? (not that that means anything to the legal analysis...)

Posted at 4:31 PM ET, 06/28/2010
Conservative legal case against the Affordable Care Act suffers a setback
One of the things that has confused me about the attack on the Affordable Care Act's constitutionality is that it's so limited. The Affordable Care Act isn't under attack, actually. Only the individual mandate is. And though the individual mandate is important to have, it could be replaced with some sort of automatic enrollment scheme, or some sort of modified penalty in which failure to purchase insurance locked you out of the bill's protections for a certain number of years. The strategy seemed like trying to destroy a car by convincing a mechanic that the carburetor doesn't fit and needs to be modified and replaced.

Avik Roy's post on today's Sarbanes-Oxley ruling helps the story make more sense: Conservatives were hoping that the absence of a specific "severability clause" -- language stating the law could stand even if a part was removed -- meant that if a part of the law was struck down, all of the law would be struck down. That doesn't make much sense to me, and it turns out that the Supreme Court agrees: As Roy notes, a part of Sarbanes-Oxley was struck down today, and there was no severability clause, and the court kept the rest of the law standing.

So long as the Individual Mandate isn't foisted upon all (non consuming) medical consumers and individuals are all allowed to pursue other options, without faking a quick religious conversion or some other legal opt-out -- that meet their own economic and healthcare needs, I personally don't care if the Act lives or not.

No skin in the game, and all that.

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FWIW: