April 02, 2012|Dan Rodricks
The Orioles have new orange and black banners along Russell Street and Pratt Street, and aren't they pretty, and aren't they grand, and shouldn't we be grateful? The banners proclaim "20 Years," and we're all supposed to understand and appreciate what that means — two decades since the fabulous, taxpayer-funded Oriole Park opened at Camden Yards. But, who cares? It's been nearly 30 years since the Orioles were in a World Series, 14-soon-15 since they had a winning season. In the Angelos era of Baltimore baseball, pessimism springs eternal in the human breast.
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When he was mayor of Milwaukee (1988-2004), John Norquist famously led the effort to demolish the city's Park East Freeway, an elevated commuter conduit strikingly similar to Baltimore's Jones Falls Expressway. They replaced the Park Freeway with a landscaped boulevard to make downtown Milwaukee more human-friendly. I'm not the only Baltimorean who would like to see the same thing happen to the JFX, from about North Avenue south. In a recent online interview, Mr. Norquist explained how such projects could be funded: "A lot of freeways are headed beyond their design life, so they have to be rebuilt. ... It's cheaper to just tear it down and replace it with a surface street, so you win the cost argument by comparing it with rebuilding the freeway." Jones Falls Boulevard — let's get on with it.
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My colleague columnist Eileen Ambrose points out that a slight majority of Americans oppose the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, though they don't even know what it does. (There's nothing as fast-acting as ignorance to form the basis of an opinion.) Two years since the law's passage, many Americans still don't get that it's about reducing the costs of insurance for those of us who have it and expanding medical coverage to those who don't.
"Please explain how requiring 30 million more individuals to purchase health insurance will prevent shifting the cost to everyone else!" asked a reader from Timonium, who apparently missed explanations about how the uninsured cost the rest of us an estimated $1,000 to $1,100 on annual premiums. It stands to reason that, with more Americans in the massive pool of insurance premiums, the overall costs to the rest of us will either go down or stabilize over the long term. What we're doing now — and have been doing for decades — is not sustainable.
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As for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's broccoli analogy — that, if the federal government can require us to buy health insurance, it can require us to buy broccoli — I wish I had a dollar for every reader who wrote to say the analogy was "spot on!" (What's with the overuse of this British expression, anyway? It sounds like something from Downton Abbey, what one earl says to another while sipping brandy in wingback chairs: "That comment about the Exchequer was spot-on, old boy!" Enough already.)
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The dishonesty in Justice Scalia's analogy is its implication that, with the Affordable Care Act, government is being Big Brother, forcing Americans to eat broccoli — or exercise — or face a penalty for not doing so. That's not the central purpose, though expanded access to medical care is certainly a good thing. The central purpose is to address the cost of health insurance, exacerbated every day by the millions of uninsured. That they can't afford broccoli does not affect the rest of us; that they don't have health insurance does.
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Speaking of broccoli: The better version of that vegetable, in my humble opinion and that of my Mediterranean ancestors, is broccoli rapini, or broccoli rabe (pronounced rahb). At Isabella's in Little Italy, a corner shop near the neighborhood bocce courts, they offer a brick-oven pizza with broccoli rapini and soppressato, the peppery dry salami. Nice.
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One last thing (for now) about the Supreme Court and Obamacare: Even the Reagan administration's solicitor general sees in the Roberts court the ideology-based "judicial activism" that conservatives complained about for years. Charles Fried, now a Harvard law professor and constitutional scholar, said he was surprised at the tone of questioning by Justices Scalia and Samuel Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts during last week's hearings. "The vehemence they displayed was totally inappropriate," Mr. Fried told the Los Angeles Times. "They seemed to adopt the tea party slogans."
Dan Rodricks' column appears each Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. He is the host of Midday on WYPR-FM. His email is dan.rodricks@baltsun.com.
