The public is ready for universal health insurance, but getting any plan through Congress will still be tricky. To get it enacted after January 2009, Democrats need to start building a movement in support of the big and important reforms universal health insurance requires -- and on which they happen to agree.He writes a whole article discussing various details of how such insurance could come to pass but never addresses the issue of the constitutional authority of the Congress to legislate in this area.
Not that he's unusual in this respect. Few do. When Congress feels some gesture is needed for an assertion of new federal authority, they premise it on a bogus expansive reading of the Interstate Commerce clause in Article I, Section 8 or on some other specious grounds. The homage vice pays to virtue.
If the feral government ever banned outdoor barbeques and fireworks on the Fourth of July it's just possible that Americans would wonder if there were constitutional authority for such a move. Short of that, there seems to be little interest in safeguarding the fundamental federal structure of our nation that is one of the fundamental mechanisms the Framers devised to limit government power.
If you can find "health care" anywhere in Section 8 you can be sure that the system as the Founders created is healthy and working per spec. If you have to call a lawyer to ask where Congress got the power to legislate here, probably something unhealthy is going on.
And if your lawyer tells you health care or the lack of it "affect" interstate commerce then just remember that everything affects interstate commerce. You can count on one hand the number of times that the Supreme Court has found that something Congress did did not affect interstate commerce. Thus, just so you know, the protection of federalism is basically gone and we no longer have 50 sovereign states and a federal government. We have The United States.
That means vast numbers of problems are now problems you, as one of about 600,000 other constituents of your very own Congressman, need to take up with that Congressman.
Good luck with that.
Oh, we'll get health insurance coverage of some kind all right. But we'll pay a price for it by giving more power to Washington and leaving less freedom for us. Is being taken care of that important? Only in the last 30 or 40 years have we had this thing "health insurance" to worry about. The entire history of mankind on earth until then involved people living and dying without medical care. Period.
If it is something that important to you, take it up at the state level. Sure, it's a crazy idea but that's what the Framers and Ratifiers of the Constitution expected you to do. It's not an imposition on you. It's you protecting the structure that keeps us free.
"The Road to Universal Coverage." By Robert B. Reich, Wall Street Journal Online (subscription), 1/9/08.
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