My Electronic Life

from The Washington Post for iPad Goats: The secret cure to malaria?

ON the second day of oral arguments over the Affordable Care Act, Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr., trying to explain what sets health care apart, told the Supreme Court, “This is a market in which you may be healthy one day and you may be a very unhealthy participant in that market the next day.” Justice Antonin Scalia subsequently expressed skepticism about forcing the young to buy insurance: “When they think they have a substantial risk of incurring high medical bills, they’ll buy insurance, like the rest of us.”

May the justices please meet my sister-in-law. On Feb. 8, she was a healthy 32-year-old, who was seven and a half months pregnant with her first baby. On Feb. 9, she was a quadriplegic, paralyzed from the chest down by a car accident that damaged her spine. Miraculously, the baby, born by emergency C-section, is healthy.