| There are such precedents. Right wing lawyers and bloggers tend to deny that such precedents exist, and left wing lawyers and bloggers tend to say that they have more meaning than they probably do—but there are precedents. Probably the best example in Linda Greenhouse's essay for the NYT (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/21/never-before...) is the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (it prevents hospitals from refusing care to uninsured patients; this coerces hospitals into commerce. (That a law had to be passed to make this the standard is IMO disgusting. Obviously the Hippocratic oath applies only to doctors and not to hospital bean counters.) It's worth noting (a few paragraphs later) that EMTLA has a knock-on effect, too: you or your employer pays for all of this uninsured/underinsured treatment through higher premiums. Greenhouse: "The uninsured don’t exist apart from commerce. To the contrary, their medical care results in some $43 billion of uncovered health care costs annually and, through cost-shifting, adds $1,000 a year to the average cost of a family insurance policy. People who don’t want to buy broccoli or a new car can eat brussels sprouts or take the bus, but those without health insurance are in commerce whether they like it or not." This 1986 law actually makes your insurance more expensive, forcing you into commerce that you may not be interested in. The flaw with Obamacare—and the only way it could have been passed because of the complete and total insanity of American politics today—is that it doesn't actually establish universal healthcare. If the individual mandate had been instead cast as a tax which is then used by the individual to select their insurer (IIRC a key feature of the Clinton healthcare plan that was scuttled), then it would have been no different than Social Security (which has whiners saying "but I will have a better retirement plan, so why should I be paying this?"—tell that to the people living large on their Enron 401(k)) or school taxes (which has childless and empty-nest whiners saying that they don't get benefit from schools) or anything else where there's a mandate that you pay something for a benefit that you may or may not use in a particular year. Better yet, look at the houses that burned uncontrolled in the Tennessee county for want of a $75 annual fee (http://streeteasy.com/nyc/talk/discussion/22973-free-market-...). Sorry. I'm completely baffled by what's happened to American politics in the last decade. I was disgusted enough with what was going on during the Clinton years that it was an easy choice for me to emigrate to Canada (not perfect, and some of our politicians are emulating American belligerence a little too much, especially the local moronic mayor), but now I don't even recognize the country in which I was born. It saddens me. |