Procrustes Stretched
"intuition and imagination and intelligence"
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- #61
As I am.
From an economics standpoint, the only way to rid the system of pre existing condition dilemmas is a public option paid for by the taxpayer....and it will be very costly.....no doubt about it.....but for the life of me, I can not find any other solution that makes sense......with the exception of the madate to buy insurance.....but I can not see that ever making it past the first case brought up to the SCOTUS.
again: addressed in a link and a post earlier:
Is Mandatory Health Insurance Constitutional? - Taking Liberties - CBS News
then there is this: Is Mandatory Health Insurance Constitutional? - - CBS News
Timothy Jost, a professor of Washington and Lee University School of Law who says he prefers a national public plan, has argued the constitutional principles -- ...
Unfortunately for legal prognosticators, the U.S. Supreme Court has provided no exact guidance. In Gonzales v. Raich (2005), a majority concluded that a federal law prohibiting a California woman from growing marijuana for her own medical use is "entitled to a strong presumption of validity" -- and authorized by the Commerce Clause -- even if state law permits the medicinal use of cannabis. On the other hand, in U.S. v. Lopez (1995), the court struck down a gun-related law on the grounds that it lacked "any concrete tie to interstate commerce."
Because Gonzales v. Raich is more recent, it's presumably a better glimpse into what the court thinks. (As Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in a strongly-worded dissent siding with the medical marijuana patient named Angel Raich, "If Congress can regulate this under the Commerce Clause, then it can regulate virtually anything -- and the federal government is no longer one of limited and enumerated powers.")...
Then again, a must-purchase-or-be-fined insurance law remains a recognizably different creature than the medical marijuana case, which dealt with punishing undesirable behavior criminally rather than requiring all Americans to purchase a service from a private company. (Automobile insurance isn't an exact parallel because only Americans who choose to drive must buy it, and the requirement comes from the states, not the Feds.) And it's true that the composition of the court has changed in the years since Gonzales v. Raich.
Still, not even conservative and libertarian scholars who would like to see mandatory health insurance shot down by the courts are betting it will be, although Georgetown's Randy Barnett holds out some hope. Call it the difference between political preference and reality, or the difference between what is and what might be.