the individual mandate has been ruled unconstitutional justices have just got to the centerpiece provisions of the obama health care law. don't adjust your television that's just the mainstream media throwing out facts they're throwing them out the window again in pursuit of breaking news we'll show you where they drop the ball and ask some common sense questions about america's raging health care debate. plus one is buying an i pad or i fall in a crime well if you're from a country that has bad blood with the u.s. i could be talking about you sell to some iranians here in the u.s. we'll get to the core of the issue.

and it's thursday june twenty eighth seven pm here in washington d.c. i'm liz wall and you're watching our t.v. . well a historic victory today for president obama's landmark health care law the supreme court decided to uphold the controversial legislation it's an issue that has divided the country and the mainstream media this morning rushed to break the supreme court's decision here's some of the chaos outside of the supreme court. the individual mandate has been ruled unconstitutional justices have just got it both the centerpiece provisions of the obama health care law if in fact that's the final word on the individual mandate they could be a little bit more complicated like getting complaints that from ation we're going to get afflicting information as they say there's been some confusion out there conflicting reports coming in from inside the supreme court so let's let's hold off

i'm drawing any final conclusions are still trying to figure this out be cautious with this we're trying to do the best we can right now as we sort through it and we need it later a lower third actually may not be correct for a take several minutes as a reading through this again i we are reading now that the entire law has been out held. well in the rush to break the news they got it wrong the supreme court did not overturn the individual mandate thereby to four decision in fact i'll hold all parts of the law that's what happens when you want to get a first instead of getting it right well of course this is a success for president obama he can now tell this as a campaign promise fulfilled in doing so they've reaffirmed a fundamental principle that here in america in the wealthiest nation on earth no illness or accident should lead to any family's financial ruin i know there will be a lot of discussion today about the politics of all this about who won and who lost

and how these things tend to be viewed here in washington but that discussion completely misses the point whatever the politics today's decision was a victory for people all over this country whose lives will be more secure because of this law and the supreme court's decision to uphold. so a huge political victory for obama but is this for historic ruling a victory for the american people and what does it mean for you to discuss this i was joined by nick gillespie editor in chief of reason dot com and the co-author of the declaration of independence how libertarian politics can fix what's wrong with america. i think you're absolutely right this is a huge win for barack obama and it's not necessarily a crushing defeat for the republicans or for mitt romney or for opponents of obamacare but it's not a great day. but for the american people i think you know there are reasons not to go not to be happy about this and the first is you know that the supreme court

essentially said there are no limits to what government can make you do or not do they didn't use the commerce clause as before think about they relied on the taxing power but that's troubling the second thing is is that you know from a financial point of view and you can talk about the politics of and stuff like that but there's no question that obamacare is going to be massively expensive and it's going to be many much more expensive than we were led to believe and then the third reason is that there's a very little reason to believe that despite expanding health insurance to cover you know some thirty million extra people it's not at all clear that this law is actually going to lead to better health outcomes for anybody in america so i think it's you know i think it's a pretty significant loss for the american people what this law does do is it would require everybody to be covered it also covers things that the american people seem to be in agreement and in terms of it being able to be remain on your parents'

insurance until you're twenty six years old preexisting conditions you can't get denied if you have preexisting conditions these seem to be very positive things for people that fear that they won't be able to get the medical care that they need. there's no question that those are very popular whether or not they actually have a lot of effect on the way people and getting health insurance or more properly understood you know what one of the one of the major problems with obamacare throughout it is that it conflates the idea of health insurance with good health coverage or with medical care the net effect i suspect is of obamacare is going to be that health care costs are going to go up and that actual health coverage is going to shrink the only way that obamacare is going to bend the cost curve down and if you remember we used to talk a lot about that in the early days of this legislation is by through government channels reducing the amount that doctors and physicians and hospitals get paid for

performing certain types of services when you do that you're going to have fewer people performing those services this is the problem in medicaid medicaid it's a system by which the government covers poor people they pay doctors so little for service that you have very few doctors you know performing these services so you have you know arguably you have everybody covered but nobody actually seems to get health care but if you look at in terms of medicare a lot of elderly people are saying you know there are depend on that i mean would you be able to tell your grandmother sorry that no no medicaid for you i mean a lot of people depend alderling people depend on this. you know medicare is the flipside medicaid deals with poor people poor people are not politically connected you know nobody really roots for them so they get screwed on one side medicare which is you know covers people sixty five and over these are people who are wealthy who are a little quickly motivated who have

a lot of clout in congress and what you find of medicare is that literally everybody who's in the system gets more than they put into the system that's why it is unsustainable medicare is the main reason which is a single payer system because the government pays the bills medic. there is the reason why health care costs are going up why the federal budget is busted and to the extent that obamacare at all is going to lead people down the road of something on medicare we're just going to explode cost the belief and the short answer in the in the current issue of reason magazine and it's in the dog dry cough michael which is basically saying you know what if you're over sixty five you should not automatically get medicare if you can buy your own health coverage that's wrong it's it's robbing from young or old relatively speaking and giving it to wealthy old people relatively speaking so in fact i would be happy to say to my grandparents or to my parents if you can afford your own health care coverage you should pay for it you should not take money out of the wages of young people and

what not and the reality is that millions of people cannot afford health insurance we have forty five million people in the u.s. today that are not insured and it's increasingly becoming less affordable so that's just the reality here and here to break those numbers down for us often everybody agrees that out of you know out of the uninsured about half of those people could afford it if they chose to they don't buy it for a lot of reasons these are not because it's so expensive no no no but it's also because if you're young and if you're young you buy a large help because you're not going to use it and then gets the you know fifty cents to the virtual for obamacare virtually fifty cents of every health care dollar in the country was already being spent by government sources whether it's medicare or medicaid or other of subsidies and what that always does is that it creates price inflation we know this in medicine we know this in college costs we

know this everywhere in housing prices when you can get free or reduced price money through the government or other sources their markets you know the providers jack up prices to soak up as much of that subsidies possible so one of the one of the very real. why healthcare costs are so expensive is because they're heavily subsidized and then when you have the government saying ok you know what we're going to deal with spiraling costs by subsidizing it more all it does is prices up and it does not actually address the root problem and i'd say the root problem in medical care and medical coverage in health care in america is the absence of free markets this is arguably the most heavily regulated market for goods and services in the country and we need to actually get back to treating health care like a commodity or a service that should be negotiated on free markets open markets as much as possible that's what drives innovation and it draws prices to now and then for the people who are two or two infirm or too sick to be able to afford it we can cover

them with some kind of program or we help them out but that is not the problem the problem is that we don't have enough markets and health care well we are seeing the effects of the health care being treated like a commodity and you hadn't mentioned earlier. it's. the affordability of health care and i wanted to point out this interesting trend we're seeing today people going outside of the u.s. for medical care why because it's cheaper much for you know here is one example take the gull bladder surgery if you want to get surgery here in the u.s. here insurance may or may not cover it it cost you between seven and fifteen thousand dollars that's just for one for a part of it in total it would cost fifty thousand dollars for the procedure from start to finish but you know you can get that same procedure done in india and mexico and coaster reka for a quarter of that cost it so doesn't that show that something is wrong that

people need to go outside of the u.s. to get these procedures done. so if it shows anything at all you know medical tourism is an interesting phenomenon and super online and for instance a lot of people from canada come down to the united states to get operations and procedures that are that they can't get in canada if you go for a long waiting list of one and you pay cash and it's cheaper but you know what what this shows is that we have made a major mistake where we talk about health insurance when we're actually talking about prepayment plans insurance typically covers against the the odds of catastrophic problems if you need to if you need a surgery if you need hospitalization if you have a heart attack but our insurance coverage is always covering things like regular checkups every doctor's this of prescriptions and things like that and if we had if we had health insurance that was more like auto insurance where it doesn't cover your oil changes and it doesn't cover your tuneups but it covers big ticket items

or to phrase the cost of those we would have much more we would have much better health care delivery in this country because doctors and providers would be competing in order to give you the best service at the best price you know realistically there is no reason why you know health care is any different than providing hamburgers for godsake people want to buy them sellers want to sell them if you get the government out of the business of subsidizing in regulating inch kind of straightjacket in markets where you have to do this and not that and and you're not allowed to sell insurance policies out of certain geographic areas and things like that you would see a free market in healthcare that would cover many many more people at much lower cost with much better outcomes i'm not really sure about the hamburger countries and i think they feel usually they want a hamburger health care is something that you need and unfortunately but soviet people around are finding that they need medical care and they can't afford it and it you know what ends up happening is that these people that are uninsured they end

up in the hospital and the hospital can't deny them so who ends up footing the. well tax payer it's so why not have everybody insured and not have to end up in a worse case scenario and end up in the hospital and in the end the taxpayers are footing the bill anyway it's here and here is one of the things first of emergency room care for instance is something like two percent of all health care spending so it's not it's not a huge amount and it's simply a fiction to say that people who are denied regular health insurance don't go to checkups and then they end up with a new emergency room and they have a major problem it's just not that big a problem in terms of the pricing of health care but you know if you say it on the margin say room visits are that people aren't insured but it is but it is overall it's only two percent of all dollars spent on health care in a given year so let's say you get rid of that you've taken things down from one hundred cents to ninety eight cents it's not a big savings us why shouldn't we force everybody to have insurance and there's

a there's a bunch of reasons first off is that you know health care is not something that everybody should be forced to take and if i'm young and i'm relatively healthy and i want to take my chances without being having a major medical plan that covers every aspect of my life i should be free to do that in a free society i don't have a right to make a claim on you when i screw up because of my decision but that's a separate issue but more importantly and we know this is that if you force everybody into insurance then you also have to guarantee certain types of coverage and it drives prices up it does not reduce prices and finally when you you know and then it reduces services we know this. and of you talk about for canada is everybody is covered and there are longer waiting to. see all sorts of all sort of procedures and things like that it's just a fact and it may be that you know enough people want to say you know what i'm willing to put up with less access but you know i think that the waiting lines let's take switzerland for example the waiting lines there are actually shorter

where there is going to brazil healthy. there there is not universal health care in the way that the risen canada for instance a single payer system and it's not government run we are moving inexorably towards that and there is no reason to believe that given the way that americans want health care and we want health care we consume more of health care not simply because our procedures are more expensive but rather we go to the doctor more often and we expect more out of our health systems than other countries do there is no reason to believe that increasing government involvement in a in a field whatever whatever you know economic activity you're talking about there's no way it's going to reduce the cost when i gave a i think it's interesting that you say that of americans that want to go to the doctor more but unfortunately what happens is people get really sick and they can't afford to pay their medical bills and it's one of the reasons primary reasons why people here in the us go bankrupt. that again i you know when we can debate the

actual stats of that that is also that is i think that's over exaggerated and rather it becomes a way by which you decide to declare bankruptcy but the fact of the matter is is that relatively few people are going bankrupt because they don't have health insurance or they can't afford health insurance so if the fact of the matter is and i mean if you take it back to a very core concept which is that we know that when markets are allowed to operate in relatively free fashion you tend to get lower prices and better service it's not you know in them what that means is that in something like health care and something like education and other goods and people really care about you know you can come up with ways to cover the people who can't i covered on their own even in a looser market but the idea that somehow the government is going to come in and this is the same government that delivers horrible horrible health care through medicaid and massively expense of health care through medicare to many people

having senior actually relatively wealthy many of them could afford health care we give it to them for free or reduced prices in any way you know we're we're looking at it's aster that will start and you know that has been unfolding for the past forty years in america as the government's got more and more involved in health care and it's only going to get worse right now we're going to have to leave it off their historic day today at the supreme court it but i have a feeling that this battle is not over republicans are vowing to repeal obamacare so it looks like there is a lot more controversy to come thanks so much for coming on the show that was nick last be editor in chief of reason dot com and co-author of the book the declaration of independence how libertarian politics can fix what's wrong with america well there has been a massive outpouring of emotions from both supporters and opponents of the health care law as you can imagine the twitter verse was abuzz in let's take a look at what some are to reading today k c w says i'm moving to canada obviously

the united states doesn't know what they're doing anymore this used to be a great country pretty sad. and lucas dargah said the supreme court up held obamacare that said i'm moving to canada and he'll be in good company because while he weldon is moving there because he says the united states is entirely too socialist and perhaps put most eloquently von summers said quote scotus holds up free health care for everyone screwed this commie country i'm moving to canada hash tag who's with me. so everybody is entitled to their opinion but perhaps their freedom would be better served in a country that doesn't offer universal health care canada after all does. well looks like us foreign policy is trickling down to us corporate policy a group of iranians are accusing apple of racial profiling this after news broke

out in a small town outside of atlanta that an apple representative refused to sell an i pad to a young woman because she was iranian here's a local news coverage and atlanta. i'm from here and he said i just can't fill these two countries have bad relations i would say he china mind i phone don't owe him anything about iran first that it had a similar experience at the apple store in perimeter mall he was helping a friend buy an i phone that friend was from iran living and studying here on a visa we never talked about him going back to iran or something like that i mean he was just speaking well that story sparked outrage by a recently formed a group of iranians and iranian americans they say they're anti war an anti sanctioned group and they took their message outside an apple store in new york city ok. ok i. was. wrong.

but to talk more about the greater implications of this being most most kofi an organizer for his art joins us now welcome to the show beata so first i want to get your your initial reaction to this incident. you know our national response was that as a group that opposes sanctions and also state repression inside of iran we saw this as an example of how sanctions the way that they read are so broad that a company like apple can in a fact create a chilling effect on all things iranian not allowing any iranian individual because they speak farsi to purchase an i pad or an i phone is just emblematic on the reading of things sions law trickling down to the point where you you have a violation of u.s. federal civil rights law now this happened outside of atlanta is this an isolated

case or to your knowledge has it happened anywhere else. there are recent reports by the national iranian american council that there have been reports of other incidents also in california and i believe virginia so it isn't seen as an isolated incident at all and in fact stepping outside of the united states i know through friends and contacts that i have in the netherlands that as we know the e.u. sanctions are going to go into effect the oil embargo july first and already there the interpretation of those sanctions have led to a suspension of visas for iranian students studying in the netherlands and so you know that your group is and he's saying she and. sanctions ultimately that they're put in place to achieve these foreign policy goals to affect the regime or

to target the regime but would you say in reality they affect ordinary iranians. absolutely i mean my background is an individual that actually opposed to sanctions against iraq and i traveled to iraq before the invasion in two thousand and two and saw the devastation and the toll that this policy had on the country and what we've seen in iran is an escalation of sanctions over the last four years really that in rhetoric of of countries of the p five. u.k. france russia china and germany the p five plus one has been to target and curt iran's nuclear program but in fact sanctions history has shown what what really happens is an economy gets devastated and the people who bear the brunt of that are those who are already bearing the brunt of repression from their

own government like iraq used in iraq and now iranians in iran and what's kind of ironic about this particular case is that they were trying to purchase a i pad and this is something you know i phones i pad these these devices can be used to empower people you know presumably you can access twitter facebook social media and you know in the arab spring we saw how this kind of technology was used to to help spread awareness and spark this movement but in this case the iranians are being deprived of using this technology. that's right liz and the thing is that the u.s. government has in recent years taken a step back and ease sanctions on certain software but the problem again is that the sanctions read so broadly that companies like apple like yahoo and google can take an interpretation quite easily away from the us that they

become weary of any sort of access to software or hardware that they might have to iranians or in this case an iranian american for fear of what might happen to them what sort of sanction they might receive in return return but you're right i mean even in iran what we saw in the aftermath of the disputed two thousand and nine elections was that the u.s. government targeted iranians you know senator clinton secretary of state clinton was even heard of the time as calling a twitter revolution inside of iran but it seems ironic and rather have hypocritical that at the same point in time what we have our policy is that make it more and more difficult for young activists young organizers inside of iran and people just wanting to communicate with each other to have the access to the tools

that they need to do that and iran i want to say very clearly has a media that is completely state run so the peep's of people's access to information and the sharing of information is almost entirely through internet sources. would you go as far as to say this is this incident and incidents like it would you describe it as racial profiling would you go as far as to describe is that. absolutely i mean let's look at what apple did very specifically and if what they did which is what was reported with stop an individual who was speaking a foreign language in this case farsi and say simply because they spoke that language that they were going to deny a sale then that is clearly racial profiling because in a fact their policy reads that sanction countries are the countries in which they can export certain goods and those countries and include cuba they include north

korea they include syria in the sudan so what apple in essence should be doing is literally stopping anybody that they hear spam speaking spanish anybody that they hear speaking korean anybody that they hear speaking arabic and then denying them a sale if if if it's not just racial profiling ok be to tell me a little bit more about this group of our that you are an organizer for what you stand for and i know you're protesting over there in new york ultimately what what is the message that you want to get out. you know we formed. as a way for iranians iranian americans and other allies who who stand against a potential war on iran against sanctions and in solidarity with the iranians struggling against state repression and the reason that we did that is often it's a double edged sword you know on the one hand you have

a policy like sanctions that we do believe and have historically shown to be a collective punishment against a country and pave the way for a possible invasion that we vehemently oppose and on the other you have a regime inside of iran that is extremely repressive that you know has the highest rate of execution in the world that has cracked down on any kind of resistance in the country and what we wanted to show was that we actually stand with the people that regardless of what government is wielding the tools of repression that we oppose that repression wholeheartedly whether it's coming from the iranian government or the u.s. government or anybody in the security council be it france russia china the u.k. we oppose that repression and we we want to fight for policies that don't have the heavy brunt and the collective punishment on ordinary people the way that the policies that we've seen now do i thank you so much for coming on the show and

sharing your experience with us that was be at a most stuffy and organizer for our thanks for having me. all how often have you heard a politician or a member of the mainstream media talk about the dangers the u.s. is facing from a terrorist attack here at home to a cyber attack that would wreak havoc just listen to some of the hype. that the next pearl harbor that we confront could very well be a cyber attack that cripples our our power system certainly our grid this is a matter of national security a cyber attack on america can do as much or more damage today by incapacitating our banks or or our communications or our our finance or transportation as a conventional war detected terror could come not only from a few extremists in suicide vests but from a few keystrokes on the computer. well it sounds like every american should be

preparing for the end of times and hiding under our beds but it turns out all of this talk of terrorists threats and cyber attacks appear to be just that talk last year the number of worldwide terrorist attacks was down twelve percent from two two thousand and ten around the world thirteen thousand two hundred eighty eight people killed last year by terrorists attacks of those deaths only seventeen of them were u.s. citizens and those deaths are without a doubt tragic but does all the hype about all the danger the u.s. is facing seem to fall a little flat if you look at the numbers it seems to be that way there is no doubt that the u.s. is a constant target for terrorist attacks some of it is brought on by our foreign policy and some of it is for the simple reason that we are not liked by some people in the world so the question now is how many more of our civil liberties are we going to see erode in the name of security so the next time you hear the u.s. is facing great.