Opposition to the health care law is conservative judicial activism

[Mr Khan]

Kasz216 said:

Mr Khan said:

Tired, not drunk, hence the brevity. I was, however, being kept awake by drunk people, so there is an association there.

The difference is that there is a government need to regulate healthcare and that forcing individuals to buy health insurance is pursuant to that need to regulate healthcare. This cannot extend to allowing the government to force us to buy anything and everything because forced purchases would harm material goods markets (by driving prices up unnecessarily) as opposed to the insurance market where more demand actually lowers prices because you have a larger pool of healthy people paying in.

The most this could lead to on any sort of "slippery slope" argument would be the government forcing us to buy different varieties of insurance for the good of the insurance buying public, whereas forcing us to buy brocolli would be bad for the brocolli buying public, driving prices up in the short run and causing markets to shift to the production of unnecessary amounts of brocolli in the long run (lowering prices but creating macro inefficiency). Insurance being a non-tangible good means it can be created limitlessly

If the representation from the Attorney General abandoned that argument, it is simply a failure to think of it in the proper direction. The insurance market is apples-oranges against pretty much every other kind of goods or service.

Except

A) It wouldn't drive up prices, since production would increase too, things would get cheaper in most goods due to the economics of scale.

B) It's clearly NOT needed.  We already regulate healthcare, other countries regulate heatlhcare weithout an indivudal mandate. 

  Even if we accept your specific political premises that forcing everyone into the system would make it cheaper, doing something clearly illegal because it makes your job easier and work better isn't a justification for doing something clearly illegal.  The government could regulate heatlhcare without the indivdual mandate.  It just hasn't.

Essentially your argument boils down to "We can't regulate healthcare this very specific way without this huge expansion in power, therefore we want this huge expansion in power.

Though even that isn't accurate, since you could still pass the law without the individual mandate, it's just insurance would get prohibitly expensive due to dumb regulation.  Additionally, and I know you prefer this, you could provide a national healthcare system.  That would be a regulation that would not require everyone to pay for it.  (directly, constiutionally there is a difference.)

Now congress doesn't want to regulate healthcare that way, though that seems largely irrelevent... constiutional law and precendent shouldn't be upended to appease the distaste of politicians.

 

This is all why it's unconsitutional without even attempting a right wing view on the matter.  Were instead we were to be trying to move from a Europeon style healthcare plan to the Invidiual mandate, this is the kind of arguement you'd be hearing from Ginsberg and the liberal judges.

 

I know prices would revert in the long-run, hence why i added the long-run problem (markets reacting to artificial demand)

The tenth amendment really isn't blocking anything here, whereas precedent stands for the increasing scope of the commerce clause due to increasing complexities in the national market.