Perhaps not. As I said, it's a vague term. I probably wouldn't use that term myself, but I imagine that the people who died in those weather might have a different opinion. Something may be a catastrophe when it happens to me, but a minor problem when it happens to you.
Global warming is more scary than global cooling because a) There is not scientific basis to expect major global cooling anytime in the near future, and b) We know how to warm things up--just release a lot of CO2 into the environment. What we don't know is how to turn the heat back off.
There is a veritable graveyard of discredited scientific theories (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superseded_scientific_theories). When has consensus ever been the genesis of truth? Danish professor Henrik Svenmark (http://www.space.dtu.dk/Medarbejdere.aspx?lg=showcommon&id=38287&type=publications&page=1) has a different theory for phenomenon of Global Warming
Yes, Svensmark offers very good example of a "discredited scientific theory." A real skeptic would ask why anybody would continue to place any credence in Svensmark's theory, considering that the supposed correlation between cosmic ray flux and global temperatures has not held up (self-styled "skeptics" of climate science usually chop off their graphs about 1990 or so to avoid revealing this inconvenient fact).
How 'bout Richard Lindzen? Does not a PHd in Applied Mathematics count?
Not for very much. I've got a PhD. Most of the people I know have PhD's. That and five bucks will buy you a Starbucks coffee. Richard Lindzen is what we call a "guy with a pet theory." In most every field of science, there's a couple of guys like that hanging around the fringe. Scientists who have a pet theory, but have never managed to muster the evidence or arguments to convince any other scientists, and who just can't seem to let go of their pet notion even though their field has long ago moved on. Lindzen has a hypothesis that there is a cloud mechanism that will kick in Real Soon Now to protect us from the consequences of CO2 induced global warming. But he was never able to take his hypothesis to the next level to make it a real theory, which would require coming up with a well-defined physical model and expressing it in a mathematical form that could be used to test it against historical climate data. This is the sort of "sanity testing" that genuine scientific skeptics require of a theory, and Lindzen has never managed to achieve it.
You are engaging in a classic style of rationalization known as "the fallacy of the excluded middle," or a "False Dilemma"
No genuine skeptic would accept, or much less make, such an argument. A real skeptic would ask, "Are these genuinely our only options? Do nothing to mitigate CO2 or else sabotage all our bridges and power plants? Does climate science really predict that there are no benefits to CO2 mitigation short of immediately demolishing our entire infrastructure?
And of course, if you read the actual science, you find that there are indeed substantial benefits of mitigations of CO2 that can be attained without "tearing down power plants, knocking over radar antennas and destroying bridges," and that the only people suggesting that such things are necessary are the self-styled global warming "skeptics." Which is, of course, why you don't see the real scientists like Hansen doing such things.
I love how you go from arguing that we should look at all evidence, to suddenly jumping to the idea that there is going to be a catastrophe, and then an even bigger catastrophe. There is the alternative, that some warming won't cause any insurmountable problems at all.
Yes, wishful thinking is one alternative, although not one that a genuine skeptic would choose.
"Catastrophe" is a vague term. Are the expected consequences of global warming catastrophic? That would depend upon whether you would consider more extreme weather events like the recent heat wave and wind storm in the midwest, or last year's drought in Texas, or the wildfires in Russia the year before, to be catastrophic. On the other hand, if your idea of catastrophe requires something like the Venus Syndrome, that is extremely unlikely, at least based on our current understanding of climate science.
Of course, if there really is some unknown mechanism of global warming that produced a Medieval Warm Period--and which could potentially kick in at any moment to supplement--or worse, amplify--the expected warming effect of CO2, then all bets are really off, and perhaps the Venus Syndrome is back on the table.
Whatever you choose to call them, it is clear that there are a group of people who like to style themselves "anti-skeptics". These people have very little understanding of Earth Sciences and believe that other people's beliefs should be determined solely by National Science Association press releases.
"National Science Association"? I'm a scientist and I've never heard of them. But it is no single science association that has reviewed the evidence and concluded that concerns about CO2 are well-founded--it is pretty much every elite scientific society in the world. Here is a partial list
They hold dodgie polls where they claim 70% of scientists say there is some degree AGW since 1950 and the problem is serious.
There are people who are skeptical of the computer modelling predictions, people who are skeptical of whether you can model such a complex system accurately at all, people who are skeptical about the forcing values, people who are skeptical about the amount natural variation, people who are skeptical about the weightings given to solar fluctuation all the way through to people who are skeptical that the Earth hasn't warmed and believe it is actually cooling.
Yes, there are people who are "skeptical" about anything that challenges their fixed beliefs, yet remarkably credulous about such things as the ability to deduce medieval global climate from third hand accounts of agricultural practices in northern Europe.
As far funding and conspiracies go the fossil fuel industry is fairly trivial. Heartland spent $18,000 fund air fares and accommodation for one skeptic's lecture tour and this apparently is a scandal.
Just to pick a couple of examples, Koch Industries has spent over $30 million on lobbying efforts to create public doubt of the reality of global warming. Exxon has spent over $10M. It is worth noting that a million dollars can fund a pretty robust research project. Imagine all of the science that could have been done if these companies had spent the money funding real scientists. But clearly, they knew that funding genuine science would not help their case. So they spent it on public relations instead.
It was Jones at the CRU who did block the publication and work of other scientists trying to publish temperature records that showed the cooling since Roman times and the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age actually existed.
Yet somehow, nobody has managed to produce the unpublished work that (according to climate science "skeptic" myth) they supposedly prevented from being published. A genuine skeptic would find that odd, don't you think?
nd they managed to get them dismissed as inconsequential local variations in the IPCC report. It was the IPCC that purported to rely on peer reviewed data when over a third of its references weren't including the Himalaya glacier melting figures quoted from a mates article in WCF propaganda and put it in the report and executive summary as scientific fact.
Yet nobody has managed to find any important conclusions or recommendations of the IPCC report that are not solidly based in peer-reviewed science (and by the way, it is a climate science "skeptic" myth that the IPCC is only allowed to cite peer-reviewed studies). So the "skeptics" are reduced to picking on inconsequential, and long-corrected, errors like the one on the Himalayas. But oddly, these "skeptics" be
Whatever you choose to call them, it is clear that there are a group of people who like to style themselves "skeptics" who reject the overwhelming consensus of climate scientists--a consensus that has been reviewed and endorsed by the National Academy of Sciences (along with nearly every elite professional scientific society in the world). It is also clear that this "skeptic" point of view has been supported by an extremely well-funded public relations campaign backed by individuals and organizations who have a financial interest in sales of fossil fuels.
A distinguishing feature of this kind of "skeptic" is that their "skepticism" is notably one-sided.
For example, a genuine scientific skeptic will read the scientific literature on historical climate reconstruction and will reach the following conclusions: Reconstructing global temperatures prior to actual temperature recording is difficult, and relies on the use of "proxies," which are indirect methods of estimating temperature. These are subject to a variety of errors and artifacts, and global coverage is spotty. In addition, there is limited information regarding factors driving temperature, such as atmospheric CO2 and energy output of the sun. This is an active area of research and quite interesting, but does not really shed a great deal of light on modern global warming, which has unambiguously been demonstrated to be the result of increased atmospheric CO2.
On the other hand, the "skeptic" will reject the great mass of climate reconstructions (generally with ad hominem remarks about climate scientists or scientists in general), but will accept as gospel truth a just-published article that yields divergent results suggesting that temperatures in the past might have been higher than previous estimates. Similarly, the "skeptic" will enthusiastically embrace the "evidence" of third-hand accounts of medieval agricultural practices in northern europe as indicating that there was a warm period during medieval times--and conclude (in a bizarre jump of logic) that if medieval times were warm for some reason that (with our very limited information about climate drivers of the time) we don't understand, that we don't have to worry about the fact that we are currently seeing exactly the type of temperature increases that are predicted as a consequence of the CO2 that we are adding to the atmosphere.
Of course, a real scientist will have a very different reaction: We don't know if there was some unexplained process that warmed things up during medieval times--there isn't enough information to figure out for sure that that really happened, or if it did, what the cause was. But what if it did? That's even more disturbing. We know what the modern warming is due to--it's due to increased CO2. What if there is some other process that could produce a comparable warming in the absence of increased energy from the sun (because we've measured that, and we know it's not increasing)? Wow, that's really scary! What if that unknown process were to suddenly kick in on top of CO2? The projected warming from CO2 is bad enough, but add in some warming from some other unknown mechanism on top of that, and we could have a real catastrophe! This makes controlling CO2 even more important than I thought!
I use Celsius for scientific work, but if I want to know what it's like outside, I'd rather see the temperature in Fahrenheit. Fahrenheit is nicely human-sized, with 2 digits sufficient to determine how comfortable you will be over the most commonly encountered range of temperatures. Celsius is a bit too coarse-grained, so you really need 3 digits to get a good idea of what it "feels like."
There's no doodle of him. But if you search for him on Bing, you find all the relevant info.
In English, the word "but" is normally used to denote a contrast, so your wording is clearly designed to give the impression that Bing is superior to Google in the amount or relevance of information provided.
This certainly is a false impression, wouldn't you agree?
You know, any single feature, it's easy to think, "Well, there are only so many ways of doing things, a pad has to be sort of rectangular, an so forth." But looking at them in combination, I think there is some justice for Apple to feel that Samsung is copying their products. Whether patent or copyright law actually protects Apple from this sort of "look and feel" imitation--or whether it should--are of course two different questions.
This is not a standards essential patent, which means that Apple is not obligated to license it. Apple feels with some justice, that Samsung has copied the overall look-and-feel of Apple's products. Since that is to vague to be an effective basis for a lawsuit, Apple is going after Samsung based on individual features. They aren't looking for money from Samsung--they want to make Samsung differentiate its products more clearly from Apple's.
"Mass hysteria" (an unfortunate term for a real phenomenon, IMO) was my guess from the outset, based on 1. The symptoms reported are typical of mass hysteria. 2. Nobody claimed responsibility (somewhat unusual for a terrorist attack). 3. Symptoms resolved fairly rapidly, with no deaths (so pretty incompetent poisoning, if that was what it was, but typical of mass hysteria)
Am I unusual in that most of my documents do not require particularly high security? Or do other people like to imagine that everybody wants to steal their stuff because it makes them feel important? And as far as deleting it, who cares? Anything of value is multiply backed up. The Cloud is just one more backup.
And in fact, although meteors are in fact falling, that is by no means evident to the watcher on the ground. It is not uncommon to see the track of a meteor start near the horizon and "rise" higher into the sky.
I mean sure Obama, Nancy or Harry reid will ever be subject to it, they will call it whatever they think people want to hear.
I will introduce no new taxes on anyone making less than 250k (LIAR!)
I'm sure that they will not be subject to it, since they have health insurance. The same goes for most of the American public, except people who are too poor to afford health insurance, who won't pay it because the law provides financial assistance for those who are too poor to pay.
The main reason for the fee (or penalty, or discount, or tax deduction, or whatever you choose to call it) is to counterbalance the provision that prohibits insurance companies from excluding coverage for pre-existing conditions. The insurance companies were concerned that people would try to "free ride" by putting off getting insurance until they actually had an expensive health condition. This could drive insurance costs up greatly (and hurt insurance company profits). The penalty, originally proposed by the conservative Heritage Foundation, provides some incentive not to wait until you actually are ill to get insurance.
Actually, the Obama Administration's primary (and presumably, strongest, in their opinion) argument before the court was that the penalty was constitutional under the Federal Government's power to regulate interstate commerce. Suggesting that if that argument failed, that the penalty would nevertheless be constitutional under the Government's power to tax was a fallback position. So the Supreme Court disagreed with the first argument that the penalty was valid even if it was not regarded as a tax, but accepted the second.
But it's pretty foolish to argue that being unable to predict a future decision of the Supreme Court somehow makes Obama a liar. There certainly is no indication that the Administration knew in advance that the commerce justification would not be considered constitutional----indeed, it was a question upon which even famous constitutional scholars disagreed, and were unable to predict how the Court would rule.
Simply because they did not want it to be called a tax since it makes Obama a flat out liar.
He certainly explained quite accurately how the plan worked. So what did he "lie" about? -- a future decision of the Supreme Court that even Constitutional scholars had difficulty predicting?
As the mandate is to give money to private insurers, and not the government itself, it does not fall under the Constitutional definition of a legal tax.
Big deal. This is nothing new. If I don't choose to donate to private non-profit charities, I pay more tax.
Let's say you get cancer, and you get laid off (not, of course, because you were sick and taking lots of time off for doctor's appointments..."just a general downsizing in a down economy"), and you're out of work for a while and can't afford to keep up the high-end plan that you had through your employer. When you sign up with a different insurance provider that fits your new budget, they won't be able to exclude paying for cancer therapy because it was a "pre-existing condition."
I was surprised and impressed by the ruling...I didn't expect the Supreme Court to look beyond the semantics to the bottom line. Even liberal Constitutional scholars thought that this might be a sticking point.
*sighs*...you're conflating "healthCARE" and "health INSURANCE". They're not the same thing, no matter what Obama says.
No, health insurance is a means of providing health care. A clumsy and expensive means, to be sure. But its profitability to the insurance industry is such that any reform of health care delivery that threatens to cut into their revenue stream has historically met with a deluge of industry-funded propaganda and fear-mongoring. We would save a huge amount of money if we could cut out--or at least greatly reduce the power of--those middlemen. But based on the experience of previous administrations, Obama clearly saw that as a politically unattainable goal.
While I agree that not having health insurance is really risky and dumb, taxing someone for not buying / wanting something goes against freedom
I don't recall "freedom from taxation" being anywhere in the list of freedoms in Constitution. But if it makes you feel better, you can think of it as a tax break for those who choose to buy insurance and who therefore are less of a burden on the publicly funded health safety net, such as emergency rooms. At the bottom line, it's the same thing, after all.
On top of this, the research that the biotech companies are doing is mostly me-too research which doesn't benefit the public. In spite of this, industry is continuing to milk the public of their subsidy from patent protection on products that were ~50% developed at public expense anyway.
As an academic pharmacologist, I can tell you that this is pretty much a myth. Almost always, the great bulk of the work in bringing an idea to the point of a useful treatment is done in industry--detailed PK, toxicity testing, formulation, development of industrial processes for large-scale production, and clinical trials on human populations are by far the most expensive part of drug discovery.
End patent protections for medical technologies. Because of capitalism, and markets, and other realities which sensible people accept, this will drive prices through the floor.
Which means that pharmaceutical companies will no longer be able to afford to fund such large research efforts, which means less research done overall, and fewer jobs for people with biomedical degrees.
I think the complex interplay between academic and industrial research is not well understood outside the field. Academic researchers are able to pursue basic ideas that may not have easy-to-see short-term payoffs in terms of medical applications. Occasionally, they will discover something new that can be further developed by industry for a therapeutic end. Licensing fees paid to universities for patented discoveries end up subsidizing teaching and academic research. And a great deal of academic research depends upon pharmacological tools developed in industry (often "failed" drugs that for one reason or another turned out not to be viable candidates for therapy, but are still incredibly valuable for research applications).
In my field of Pharmacology, most graduate students enter our program, not with the expectation of becoming an academic researcher, but with the goal of going into industry. While there has been some contraction in the industry, our students are still highly successful in finding industry jobs. Our program is old enough that it is not uncommon to see recent graduates hired by students who graduated from our program several years back. We've also also seen students go into related areas that take advantage of their expertise, such as working for the FDA or for venture capital firms that invest in biotechnology.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps not. As I said, it's a vague term. I probably wouldn't use that term myself, but I imagine that the people who died in those weather might have a different opinion. Something may be a catastrophe when it happens to me, but a minor problem when it happens to you.
Global warming is more scary than global cooling because
a) There is not scientific basis to expect major global cooling anytime in the near future, and
b) We know how to warm things up--just release a lot of CO2 into the environment. What we don't know is how to turn the heat back off.
Because concerns about CO2 are not based solely (or even primarily) upon curve-fitting the past temperature record. They are based upon the physics of radiation and the physical properties of CO2 and water vapor, the fruits of a huge mass of research carried out in the century since the potential of CO2 to modify climate was first recognized by scientists--science which predicted the modern warming over 3 decades ago, before it became so glaringly evident in the temperature record.
Yes, Svensmark offers very good example of a "discredited scientific theory." A real skeptic would ask why anybody would continue to place any credence in Svensmark's theory, considering that the supposed correlation between cosmic ray flux and global temperatures has not held up (self-styled "skeptics" of climate science usually chop off their graphs about 1990 or so to avoid revealing this inconvenient fact).
Not for very much. I've got a PhD. Most of the people I know have PhD's. That and five bucks will buy you a Starbucks coffee. Richard Lindzen is what we call a "guy with a pet theory." In most every field of science, there's a couple of guys like that hanging around the fringe. Scientists who have a pet theory, but have never managed to muster the evidence or arguments to convince any other scientists, and who just can't seem to let go of their pet notion even though their field has long ago moved on. Lindzen has a hypothesis that there is a cloud mechanism that will kick in Real Soon Now to protect us from the consequences of CO2 induced global warming. But he was never able to take his hypothesis to the next level to make it a real theory, which would require coming up with a well-defined physical model and expressing it in a mathematical form that could be used to test it against historical climate data. This is the sort of "sanity testing" that genuine scientific skeptics require of a theory, and Lindzen has never managed to achieve it.
You are engaging in a classic style of rationalization known as "the fallacy of the excluded middle," or a "False Dilemma"
No genuine skeptic would accept, or much less make, such an argument. A real skeptic would ask, "Are these genuinely our only options? Do nothing to mitigate CO2 or else sabotage all our bridges and power plants? Does climate science really predict that there are no benefits to CO2 mitigation short of immediately demolishing our entire infrastructure?
And of course, if you read the actual science, you find that there are indeed substantial benefits of mitigations of CO2 that can be attained without "tearing down power plants, knocking over radar antennas and destroying bridges," and that the only people suggesting that such things are necessary are the self-styled global warming "skeptics." Which is, of course, why you don't see the real scientists like Hansen doing such things.
Yes, wishful thinking is one alternative, although not one that a genuine skeptic would choose.
"Catastrophe" is a vague term. Are the expected consequences of global warming catastrophic? That would depend upon whether you would consider more extreme weather events like the recent heat wave and wind storm in the midwest, or last year's drought in Texas, or the wildfires in Russia the year before, to be catastrophic. On the other hand, if your idea of catastrophe requires something like the Venus Syndrome, that is extremely unlikely, at least based on our current understanding of climate science.
Of course, if there really is some unknown mechanism of global warming that produced a Medieval Warm Period--and which could potentially kick in at any moment to supplement--or worse, amplify--the expected warming effect of CO2, then all bets are really off, and perhaps the Venus Syndrome is back on the table.
"National Science Association"? I'm a scientist and I've never heard of them. But it is no single science association that has reviewed the evidence and concluded that concerns about CO2 are well-founded--it is pretty much every elite scientific society in the world. Here is a partial list
In fact, there have been multiple peer-reviewed surveys using valid statistical survey methods of opinion in the field. All have found that there is a high degree of consensus among qualified scientists.
Yes, there are people who are "skeptical" about anything that challenges their fixed beliefs, yet remarkably credulous about such things as the ability to deduce medieval global climate from third hand accounts of agricultural practices in northern Europe.
Just to pick a couple of examples, Koch Industries has spent over $30 million on lobbying efforts to create public doubt of the reality of global warming. Exxon has spent over $10M. It is worth noting that a million dollars can fund a pretty robust research project. Imagine all of the science that could have been done if these companies had spent the money funding real scientists. But clearly, they knew that funding genuine science would not help their case. So they spent it on public relations instead.
Yet somehow, nobody has managed to produce the unpublished work that (according to climate science "skeptic" myth) they supposedly prevented from being published. A genuine skeptic would find that odd, don't you think?
Yet nobody has managed to find any important conclusions or recommendations of the IPCC report that are not solidly based in peer-reviewed science (and by the way, it is a climate science "skeptic" myth that the IPCC is only allowed to cite peer-reviewed studies). So the "skeptics" are reduced to picking on inconsequential, and long-corrected, errors like the one on the Himalayas. But oddly, these "skeptics" be
Whatever you choose to call them, it is clear that there are a group of people who like to style themselves "skeptics" who reject the overwhelming consensus of climate scientists--a consensus that has been reviewed and endorsed by the National Academy of Sciences (along with nearly every elite professional scientific society in the world). It is also clear that this "skeptic" point of view has been supported by an extremely well-funded public relations campaign backed by individuals and organizations who have a financial interest in sales of fossil fuels.
A distinguishing feature of this kind of "skeptic" is that their "skepticism" is notably one-sided.
For example, a genuine scientific skeptic will read the scientific literature on historical climate reconstruction and will reach the following conclusions: Reconstructing global temperatures prior to actual temperature recording is difficult, and relies on the use of "proxies," which are indirect methods of estimating temperature. These are subject to a variety of errors and artifacts, and global coverage is spotty. In addition, there is limited information regarding factors driving temperature, such as atmospheric CO2 and energy output of the sun. This is an active area of research and quite interesting, but does not really shed a great deal of light on modern global warming, which has unambiguously been demonstrated to be the result of increased atmospheric CO2.
On the other hand, the "skeptic" will reject the great mass of climate reconstructions (generally with ad hominem remarks about climate scientists or scientists in general), but will accept as gospel truth a just-published article that yields divergent results suggesting that temperatures in the past might have been higher than previous estimates. Similarly, the "skeptic" will enthusiastically embrace the "evidence" of third-hand accounts of medieval agricultural practices in northern europe as indicating that there was a warm period during medieval times--and conclude (in a bizarre jump of logic) that if medieval times were warm for some reason that (with our very limited information about climate drivers of the time) we don't understand, that we don't have to worry about the fact that we are currently seeing exactly the type of temperature increases that are predicted as a consequence of the CO2 that we are adding to the atmosphere.
Of course, a real scientist will have a very different reaction: We don't know if there was some unexplained process that warmed things up during medieval times--there isn't enough information to figure out for sure that that really happened, or if it did, what the cause was. But what if it did? That's even more disturbing. We know what the modern warming is due to--it's due to increased CO2. What if there is some other process that could produce a comparable warming in the absence of increased energy from the sun (because we've measured that, and we know it's not increasing)? Wow, that's really scary! What if that unknown process were to suddenly kick in on top of CO2? The projected warming from CO2 is bad enough, but add in some warming from some other unknown mechanism on top of that, and we could have a real catastrophe! This makes controlling CO2 even more important than I thought!
I use Celsius for scientific work, but if I want to know what it's like outside, I'd rather see the temperature in Fahrenheit. Fahrenheit is nicely human-sized, with 2 digits sufficient to determine how comfortable you will be over the most commonly encountered range of temperatures. Celsius is a bit too coarse-grained, so you really need 3 digits to get a good idea of what it "feels like."
You said
In English, the word "but" is normally used to denote a contrast, so your wording is clearly designed to give the impression that Bing is superior to Google in the amount or relevance of information provided.
This certainly is a false impression, wouldn't you agree?
I'd say this constitutes "some justice."
You know, any single feature, it's easy to think, "Well, there are only so many ways of doing things, a pad has to be sort of rectangular, an so forth." But looking at them in combination, I think there is some justice for Apple to feel that Samsung is copying their products. Whether patent or copyright law actually protects Apple from this sort of "look and feel" imitation--or whether it should--are of course two different questions.
This is not a standards essential patent, which means that Apple is not obligated to license it. Apple feels with some justice, that Samsung has copied the overall look-and-feel of Apple's products. Since that is to vague to be an effective basis for a lawsuit, Apple is going after Samsung based on individual features. They aren't looking for money from Samsung--they want to make Samsung differentiate its products more clearly from Apple's.
"Mass hysteria" (an unfortunate term for a real phenomenon, IMO) was my guess from the outset, based on
1. The symptoms reported are typical of mass hysteria.
2. Nobody claimed responsibility (somewhat unusual for a terrorist attack).
3. Symptoms resolved fairly rapidly, with no deaths (so pretty incompetent poisoning, if that was what it was, but typical of mass hysteria)
Am I unusual in that most of my documents do not require particularly high security? Or do other people like to imagine that everybody wants to steal their stuff because it makes them feel important? And as far as deleting it, who cares? Anything of value is multiply backed up. The Cloud is just one more backup.
And in fact, although meteors are in fact falling, that is by no means evident to the watcher on the ground. It is not uncommon to see the track of a meteor start near the horizon and "rise" higher into the sky.
I'm sure that they will not be subject to it, since they have health insurance. The same goes for most of the American public, except people who are too poor to afford health insurance, who won't pay it because the law provides financial assistance for those who are too poor to pay.
The main reason for the fee (or penalty, or discount, or tax deduction, or whatever you choose to call it) is to counterbalance the provision that prohibits insurance companies from excluding coverage for pre-existing conditions. The insurance companies were concerned that people would try to "free ride" by putting off getting insurance until they actually had an expensive health condition. This could drive insurance costs up greatly (and hurt insurance company profits). The penalty, originally proposed by the conservative Heritage Foundation, provides some incentive not to wait until you actually are ill to get insurance.
Actually, the Obama Administration's primary (and presumably, strongest, in their opinion) argument before the court was that the penalty was constitutional under the Federal Government's power to regulate interstate commerce. Suggesting that if that argument failed, that the penalty would nevertheless be constitutional under the Government's power to tax was a fallback position. So the Supreme Court disagreed with the first argument that the penalty was valid even if it was not regarded as a tax, but accepted the second.
But it's pretty foolish to argue that being unable to predict a future decision of the Supreme Court somehow makes Obama a liar. There certainly is no indication that the Administration knew in advance that the commerce justification would not be considered constitutional----indeed, it was a question upon which even famous constitutional scholars disagreed, and were unable to predict how the Court would rule.
He certainly explained quite accurately how the plan worked. So what did he "lie" about? -- a future decision of the Supreme Court that even Constitutional scholars had difficulty predicting?
Big deal. This is nothing new. If I don't choose to donate to private non-profit charities, I pay more tax.
Let's say you get cancer, and you get laid off (not, of course, because you were sick and taking lots of time off for doctor's appointments..."just a general downsizing in a down economy"), and you're out of work for a while and can't afford to keep up the high-end plan that you had through your employer. When you sign up with a different insurance provider that fits your new budget, they won't be able to exclude paying for cancer therapy because it was a "pre-existing condition."
I was surprised and impressed by the ruling...I didn't expect the Supreme Court to look beyond the semantics to the bottom line. Even liberal Constitutional scholars thought that this might be a sticking point.
No, health insurance is a means of providing health care. A clumsy and expensive means, to be sure. But its profitability to the insurance industry is such that any reform of health care delivery that threatens to cut into their revenue stream has historically met with a deluge of industry-funded propaganda and fear-mongoring. We would save a huge amount of money if we could cut out--or at least greatly reduce the power of--those middlemen. But based on the experience of previous administrations, Obama clearly saw that as a politically unattainable goal.
I don't recall "freedom from taxation" being anywhere in the list of freedoms in Constitution. But if it makes you feel better, you can think of it as a tax break for those who choose to buy insurance and who therefore are less of a burden on the publicly funded health safety net, such as emergency rooms. At the bottom line, it's the same thing, after all.
As an academic pharmacologist, I can tell you that this is pretty much a myth. Almost always, the great bulk of the work in bringing an idea to the point of a useful treatment is done in industry--detailed PK, toxicity testing, formulation, development of industrial processes for large-scale production, and clinical trials on human populations are by far the most expensive part of drug discovery.
Which means that pharmaceutical companies will no longer be able to afford to fund such large research efforts, which means less research done overall, and fewer jobs for people with biomedical degrees.
I think the complex interplay between academic and industrial research is not well understood outside the field. Academic researchers are able to pursue basic ideas that may not have easy-to-see short-term payoffs in terms of medical applications. Occasionally, they will discover something new that can be further developed by industry for a therapeutic end. Licensing fees paid to universities for patented discoveries end up subsidizing teaching and academic research. And a great deal of academic research depends upon pharmacological tools developed in industry (often "failed" drugs that for one reason or another turned out not to be viable candidates for therapy, but are still incredibly valuable for research applications).
In my field of Pharmacology, most graduate students enter our program, not with the expectation of becoming an academic researcher, but with the goal of going into industry. While there has been some contraction in the industry, our students are still highly successful in finding industry jobs. Our program is old enough that it is not uncommon to see recent graduates hired by students who graduated from our program several years back. We've also also seen students go into related areas that take advantage of their expertise, such as working for the FDA or for venture capital firms that invest in biotechnology.