[Today’s run: 2 miles]
A snippet from today’s arguments about the constitutionality of the Obamacare legislation:
Justice Breyer: …And then the question is when you
are born and you don’t have insurance and you will in
fact get sick and you will in fact impose costs, have
you perhaps involuntarily — perhaps simply because you
are a human being — entered this particular market,
which is a market for health care?
MR. CARVIN: If being born is entering the
market, then I can’t think of a more plenary power
Congress can have, because that literally means they can
regulate every human activity from cradle to grave.
They were talking about the “individual mandate”, the part of Obamacare that requires everyone to buy a minimim-package insurance policy. Carvin is against Obamacare. He says that the government is trying to make people enter the insurance market whether they want to or not. Breyer was trying to make the point that everyone already is in the market just by virtue of being born. And you see Carvin’s reply.
The other part I found particularly interesting was this sharp legal argument:
JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: Do you think that
there’s — what percentage of the American people who
took their son or daughter to an emergency room and that
child was turned away because the parent didn’t have
insurance — do you think there’s a large percentage of
the American population who would stand for the death of
that child -
Do they teach “Arguments from Emotional Appeal – Strawman 101” in Supreme Court Justice school? Of course the answer to that was no such situation applies. The Congress could easily pass a law which paid unfunded emergency room expenditures from the general fund and then raised taxes to cover the expense. But instead, they require providers to take all comers and eat the costs which then get passed along to paying customers (or so the liberal Justices frequently repeated). And to keep the insurance industry afloat they then have to make everyone buy insurance.