So, what’s worse about this — that they’re getting wealthy off of inside info, or that its potential effects on their portfolio is influencing their legislative decisions?

…isn’t just that it’s unconstitutional:

The key problem is the overall concept —- which begins from the premise that our system of health-care financing will only keep costs under control if the government becomes an even greater force in the health sector than it is now and proceeds to create a system that will cause premiums to rise rapidly in the individual market and create major dislocation in the employer market, driving people into vastly overregulated exchanges that would push premiums higher still, and then initiate a program of subsidies whose only real answer to the mounting costs of coverage will be to pay them with public dollars and so inflate them further. It aims to spend a trillion dollars on subsidies to large insurance companies and the expansion of an unreformed Medicaid system, to micromanage the insurance industry in ways likely to make it even less efficient, to cut Medicare benefits without using the money to shore up the program or reduce the deficit, and to raise taxes on employment, investment, and medical research. CBO does not expect it to make a real dent in the inflation of health-care costs or to avert the fiscal implosion of Medicare. Instead, it will double down on price controls and centralized administration and make a real reform of our system much more difficult.

But other than that, it’s great.

…has been sick for a lot longer than the nation’s and looks likely to remain so. Because its electorate is nuts.

Want to be depressed? Check out these charts.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Today’s chart that suggests just how doomed we are.