Was ObamaCare a big waste of time?

It remains to be seen whether Democrats, by obsessing on the complexities of health care reform, squandered a boatload of political capital during what otherwise could have been their most productive season.

Put another way: Did the Democrats misuse their most precious time in self-imposed allegiance to the social-agenda heritage of their party by insisting on giving the American people something they did not want and will end up never actually getting?

If the courts eventually declare unconstitutional the congressional edict that everyone is individually mandated to get health insurance, which probably will happen in a 5-4 vote of the U.S. Supreme Court within 18 months, then Democrats will be faced with three hard questions:

1. Is their intricate health care reform measure rendered unworkable by the absence of authority to force everyone to buy insurance so that requiring private insurers to cover persons with pre-existing conditions will be feasible and cost-effective?

2. Or, if the loss of the individual mandate does not gut reform, meaning the reforms can work without it, then why in the wide world did Democrats string themselves out on the point, getting themselves drubbed in the next election, called socialists or worse and sued by 26 states?

3. More specifically -- if Democrats can go back to the drawing board and attend to pre-existing conditions and to long-term health care affordability and availability without an individual mandate -- which, I must remind you, was what Barack Obama talked about as a candidate and hotly debated with Hillary Clinton -- then why did they make this issue so unnecessarily hard and so politically untenable the first time?

In any respect, would it not seem apparent that President Obama should have spent 2009 and 2010 emphasizing instead a general economic narrative, meaning the us-against-China story line he introduced in his recent State of the Union address?

Would that not have served far greater practical value than his staying mired month after month in tired congressional-speak about public options and mandates and health care exchanges and budget reconciliation and cuts in payments to providers of Medicare that scared the senior constituency that ought to have been reliably his, but was lost this time?

Perhaps you wonder: Why do I predict a 5-4 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court against the legality of the individual mandate?

It is because there is a reason that Democrats and Republicans fight hardest over judicial appointments. It is that American justice is not blind, but as partisan as your garden-variety political convention, on matters of politics and political ideology.

We now have four regional federal court rulings on the mandate. Two say it is legal; two say it is not.

Those saying it is legal? Democratic nominees, both by Bill Clinton.

Those saying it is not? Republican nominees, one by Ronald Reagan and the other by George W. Bush.

On political fights, legal rulings are less about detached jurisprudence than about judges' own, and very human, partisan and ideological predilections.

The Supreme Court starts 4-4, after which Justice Anthony Kennedy can go either way. It is only a hunch that he will opt against the notion that the federal government, for the first time, can order every citizen to purchase a private product.

Medicare and Social Security are not the same. Those are payroll deductions for government programs into which you are automatically enrolled. The government is not telling the 65-year-old that he is bound by law to go buy something in the private sector, though, actually, as we know, he probably ought to go buy a Medicare supplement.

Here is hoping I am wrong about the eventual outcome. This health care reform measure is not nearly so ominous and is infinitely more workable than opponents say.

Getting health insurance would not be so onerous. Doctors and health care providers can continue to attend profitably to the health care needs of seniors with a few reimbursement reductions in Medicare.

But I grow more doubtful that this reform will ever get the chance to prove itself.

John Brummett is an award-winning columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@ arkansasnews.com.