Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act

A few days ago, the Supreme Court ruled on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, more commonly known as 'ObamaCare.' As far as I can tell, the 5-4 vote ruled in favor of most parts of the law, including the most shocking part (to me), which would force uninsured Americans to buy health insurance. However, their reason for upholding that part of the law was unexpected. Their decision stated that, in fact, the federal government can't force people to buy things they don't want under the 'interstate commerce' clause, which is what many liberals and Democrats were planning on. Instead the Court approved it as a part of the federal government's power to tax American citizens. The NY Times puts it this way: "the federal government is not permitted to force individuals not engaged in commercial activities to buy services they do not want. That was a stunning victory for a theory pressed by a small band of conservative and libertarian lawyers."

I'm a fan of that small band of conservative and libertarian lawyers. But I don't like the fact that the Supreme Court found some other reason to let the federal government tell me what to spend my money on. I don't think they should be able to force me to pay for insurance premiums if I don't want to. How is that a tax? A tax is "a compulsory contribution to state revenue, levied by the government on workers' income and business profits." Taxes are meant to allow the federal government to do the following things, according to the U.S. Constitution: print money, declare war, establish an army and navy, enter into treaties with foreign governments, regulate commerce between states and international trade, establish post offices and issue postage, and make laws necessary to enforce the Constitution. It's actually ludicrous and rather comical to argue that the federal government needs to levy a 'tax' in the form of mandatory health insurance for everyone based on the problems with overspending that have been created by the current Medicaid system combined with a lack of affordable health care. I would argue that the federal government has already stepped far over the boundaries prescribed to it in the Constitution by attempting to mandate, orchestrate and subsidize ANY nationwide healthcare system.

Unfortunately in the big picture this ruling was a significant decision in favor of federalism. It reduces the power of individual states to custom fit their policies to their own populations, and I think it undermines the representative and independent nature of American government. The reason why Bill Clinton's Welfare Reform act was so successful and so widely accepted in the 90's was because it returned the power of policy-making and representation (and therefore true democracy) to the state level. Welfare is one of those public goods created by the federal government that can easily become bloated, inefficient, and abused. Allowing individual states to control the size and shape of their own welfare programs is bound to reduce unnecessary spending and keep the program focused.

The bottom line for me is that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is largely unconstitutional. It allows the federal government to infringe on the rights and liberties of individual states AND individual citizens, it contributes to unnecessarily large federal government, and it continues the vicious cycle of excessive government spending which will eventually destroy the U.S. economy.