Is the health insurance mandate constitutional?
‘The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.’
____ Tenth Amendment. The US Constitution is clear as crystal.
I know the constitution, you may not; so let me simply explain: Health is not mentioned once and commerce only twice in the entire constitution, and each time it is about regulating commerce… not mandating it.
If the Supreme Court were doing its job, it would have said as much.
Best to recall the words of Benjamin Franklin: “A countryman between two lawyers, is like a fish between two cats.”
…and that, my fellow countrymen, is all there is. The constitution does not compel purchases; nor will it.
The Business Model
I am with with the many who agree that to make money off of sick people is immoral. To profit from sickness is itself sick. You can make a living serving the sick, but not a killing. That is our current format, called the business model. Most counties including the 40 or more that are listed as better than ours in health care results, provide health care on the service model, not the business model. You can seek out this information by searching ‘health care’ and OECD, or WHO.
The Service Model
Providing health care on the service model in contrast to the current business model would cut costs nearly in half. What looks to you and me as cost centers if we are patients, are seen as profit centers, or at least competitive overhead by the health care business. Look at what profit/cost centers would simply go away if we decided to select the service model for our health care: Insurance profit, insurance marketing, large secretarial and legal staff’s to deal with insurance denial/compliance/appeal/judgement and malpractice. The equally huge secretarial offices in every medical clinic. Gone would be pharmaceutical marketing and huge patent premiums that result from the intent to make money more than saving lives. Universities and foundations would still do research. The motive would be to save lives though, not to ‘make a killing’. The main thing that would be removed is the confusion of having all these systems, and the errors bread of that confusion. Getting personal; the time lost from this bureaucratic confusion, harms the patients physically, in my opinion, even worse than the costs which are humungous. These costs are making the US uncompetitive on the world market. Why? Nearly twenty cents of every dollar we spend goes into this grinder. This change would put nearly a dime into your pocket for every dollar spent.
In short, the health mandate is unconstitutional on its face. The business model for health care is uncompetitive and morally corrupting and that expense cannot be ignored for it prices us out of the world market. Thus we ought to put our health care on the service model.
Your Constitution 