If you’ve been following oral arguments, you know that the government took a beating on day 2. Avik Roy warns opponents of Obamacare not to “Uncork the Supreme Court Champagne Yet.”
Yes, but as Holman Jenkins points out, health insurance as we know it isn’t actually insurance. “With Obamacare, the industry takes another fateful step in surrendering to regulators the job of designing coverage, assessing risk, setting rates and deterring inefficient behavior. Why the Affordable Care Act (as the law is widely known) even keeps insurers around is a bit of a mystery. But keep them it does, collecting a rake-off for administering a system of national health care masquerading as insurance regulation. This is the role the industry has accepted, and it comes with risks—namely congressional underfunding—but stop calling it insurance.”
George Will on Obamacare’s “contract problem.” “The individual mandate is incompatible with centuries of contract law. This is so because a compulsory contract is an oxymoron.”
The Justices are apparently searching for a “limiting principle”: the question is, if the government can make you buy health insurance, what can’t it make you buy or do? Can it make you buy a cell phone? Or exercise? I guess the idea is that these would be patently absurd. But any more absurd than the idea the government can make you buy, oh, I don’t know, health insurance? The fact is there can only be one limiting principle on government: individual rights. We threw that one out long, long ago.
Is it a compromise, weakness, or just ignorance, for why conservatives merely argue about the “constitutionality” of legislation, rather than about whether it does or does not violate the individual rights, as articulated in the declaration of independence. If individual rights were accepted as the “limiting principle”, then wouldn’t it make the constitution a bit redundant? Why do we even need a constitution if the government’s only job is to protect the individual rights?
Rougie, that’s a big question, but the basic issue is that individual rights is a wide abstraction. To implement that principle, you need a constitution to define the government’s specific powers.
2 Comments to “Brain Food: Obamacare Edition 2”
Is it a compromise, weakness, or just ignorance, for why conservatives merely argue about the “constitutionality” of legislation, rather than about whether it does or does not violate the individual rights, as articulated in the declaration of independence. If individual rights were accepted as the “limiting principle”, then wouldn’t it make the constitution a bit redundant? Why do we even need a constitution if the government’s only job is to protect the individual rights?
Rougie, that’s a big question, but the basic issue is that individual rights is a wide abstraction. To implement that principle, you need a constitution to define the government’s specific powers.