Is Individual Mandate In ObamaCare Constitutional?

The requirement that everybody purchase health insurance or pay a fine is the portion of ObamaCare most vulnerable to Constitutional challenge. It is also an essential part of the bill, because without all those extra customers sharing the cost burden, health insurance companies would go out of business trying to meet all the requirements in the new law.

So the question becomes, is the mandate legal? I've been arguing for months that no, the individual mandate is NOT legal, in that it exceeds the power of Congress granted to it by the US Constitution. If they can force us to buy health insurance, then they can force us to buy anything they think we should own. The idea that this is covered under the interstate commerce clause is ludicrous... the fact that the federal government regulates milk prices doesn't mean they can pass a law requiring us to purchase milk.

There ARE limits to the powers of Congress, and the individual mandate exceeds those limits.


Here is a good article on this subject from Reason... I recommend you read the full piece.
http://reason.com/archives/2010/03/24/dont-buy-it

Unlike growing wheat or marijuana, the decision not to buy medical insurance does not produce anything, let alone a commodity traded between states. Maybe so, say ObamaCare’s defenders, but that decision has an impact on the demand for insurance and on the health care market (one-sixth of the economy!), which the federal government is trying to control in the same way that it tries to control the marijuana trade (with similar prospects of success).

This sort of reasoning leaves nothing beyond the reach of Congress, since anything you do (or don't do) can be said to affect interstate commerce. In its 1995 decision overturning a federal ban on possessing guns near schools, the Supreme Court cautioned against the temptation "to pile inference upon inference in a manner that would bid fair to convert congressional authority under the Commerce Clause to a general police power of the sort retained by the States." That kind of analysis, the Court warned, threatens to "obliterate the distinction between what is national and what is local."

In a recent Heritage Foundation paper, Georgetown University law professor Randy Barnett and two co-authors note that the decision upholding wheat quotas does not mean "Congress can require every American to buy boxes of Shredded Wheat cereal on the grounds that, by not buying wheat cereal, non-consumers were adversely affecting the regulated wheat market." Likewise, federal regulation of carmakers does not mean "Congress could constitutionally require every American to buy a new Chevy Impala every year."

Yet this is the logic of the health insurance mandate, an unprecedented attempt to punish people for the offense of living in the United States without buying something the federal government thinks they should have. Don't buy it.

My objections to the individual mandate are three-fold. First, because federal law prohibits us from purchasing health insurance across state lines, then it is NOT INTERSTATE commerce and therefore cannot be regulated by Congress under the interstate commerce clause. Second, even if it WERE regulatable by Congress, NOT buying health insurance isn't commerce of any sort, and therefore purchase of it cannot be mandated. Third, if Congress can mandate the purchase of health insurance, then they can mandate the purchase of any product they think we should own... such as a GM car or low-fat food.

I do not know what the US Supreme Court will eventually decide, but I DO know that if they rule the individual mandate legal then our country has lost the battle to preserve freedom. And that would be a very bad thing to see.