Instead the supreme court ruled it was okay to let people be sick and/or die if they couldn't afford it. You mischaracterize the ruling. What the ruling said w

Instead the supreme court ruled it was okay to let people be sick and/or die if they couldn't afford it. You mischaracterize the ruling. What the ruling said was the the federal government isn't allowed to coerce the states as it was trying to do. Moreover, you're making the mistake of working backwards. You're starting from what you want the outcome to be. With that baseline, you then determine what the court should rule. But surely you took enough classes in school about American history and civics to understand that this isn't how the American government works. There's a system of laws that determines what the government is allowed to do; if what it wants to do isn't permitted in that framework, then it's not allowed to do that. Your desire to see a particular outcome - even if that outcome is agreed on by all to be a morally superior one - does not enable our government to take actions it isn't given the authority to execute. (and apologies for wandering a bit astray into more concrete politics...) A belief that we ought to ignore the legal framework and instead focus on what is sold to us as "a practical view" is the way that we get to such governmental actions as Guantanamo Bay and prisoner torture.