Can Obama even do what he’s doing?

Carson Holloway tackles the question beyond the policy questions of Obama’s health care reform plan in his article, Constitutional Questions About Health Care Reform. Here are some highlights:

– “Debates over health care reform have focused almost exclusively on policy. Few have considered whether Congress even has the constitutional authority to enact its proposed reforms.”

– “One might ask them: if the government cannot compel you to accept health care, how can it compel you to carry health insurance?…For if government cannot compel you to accept even medical care that will certainly prevent your death, why should it be permitted to compel you to purchase health insurance to provide for all manner of uncertain and lesser evils?”

– “It is one thing to accept a limitation on individual liberties when it arises from the exercise of the indisputable reserved right of state governments to regulate individual behavior with a view to the public health, but quite another when they emanate from a very extensive, and therefore very questionable, stretching of a federal power over interstate commerce.”

– “…it is difficult to see how universal health insurance is a reasonably implied responsibility under any of the limited objects with which the federal government has been entrusted.”

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The majority of this article hinges upon the fact that health insurance WILL BE MANDATORY. How will they enact this? By taxing every single person that does not have insurance.” -FactCheck.org

“Claim: Page 167: Any individual who doesn’t have acceptable health care (according to the government) will be taxed 2.5% of income

True. This is the mechanism in the bill to enforce the individual mandate requiring everyone to have insurance. A person who doesn’t have insurance that meets minimum benefit standards (or other acceptable coverage, such as a plan that was grandfathered in) would pay a penalty of 2.5 percent of modified adjusted gross income for the year. The total penalty can’t exceed a national average premium for individual coverage, or family coverage if applicable.”

(This is a complete campaign flip-flop. – PolitiFact)

So, can the federal government force this upon the American people? Does Washington still represent us? This guy certainly does not… “I don’t care what my constituents think.”

UPDATE

How do you enforce a health insurance mandate?

“The IRS will become the authority on “acceptable” insurance policies, which goes far beyond the agency’s expertise and mandate.  What makes a tax-collection agency an expert on health insurance?”