".MattB." wrote:
>
> The Supreme Court's Contempt for Congress
>
> It’s well known by now that Donald Verrilli, Jr., the Solicitor
> General, had an off day at the Supreme Court last Tuesday, when he was
> called on to defend the constitutionality of the individual mandate,
> the part of the Affordable Care Act which requires people to buy
> health insurance. Still, it’s worth noting the magnitude of the
> challenge that he was facing. The key issue in the case is whether
> Congress, in passing the law, exceeded its powers under the Commerce
> Clause of the Constitution, which allows the government to regulate
> interstate commerce. Consider, then, this question, posed to Verrilli
> by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy: “Assume for the moment that this”—the
> mandate—“is unprecedented, this is a step beyond what our cases have
> allowed, the affirmative duty to act to go into commerce. If that is
> so, do you not have a heavy burden of justification?” Every premise of
> that question was a misperception. The involvement of the federal
> government in the health-care market is not unprecedented; it dates
> back nearly fifty years, to the passage of Medicare and Medicaid. The
> forty million uninsured Americans whose chances for coverage are
> riding on the outcome of the case are already entered “into commerce,”
> because others are likely to pay their health-care costs
>
> No one expects the Justices to be making health-care policy any more
> than we expect them to be picking Presidents, which, it may be
> remembered, is not exactly their strength, either. ?
>
Why did con-servatives propose the same thing?
http://healthcarereform.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=004182
History of the Individual Health Insurance Mandate, 1989-2010
Republican Origins of Democratic Health Care Provision
The concept of the individual health insurance mandate is considered to have
originated in 1989 at the conservative Heritage Foundation. In 1993,
Republicans twice introduced health care bills that contained an individual
health insurance mandate. Advocates for those bills included prominent
Republicans who today oppose the mandate including Orrin Hatch (R-UT),
Charles Grassley (R-IA), Robert Bennett (R-UT), and Christopher Bond (R-MO).
In 2007, Democrats and Republicans introduced a bi-partisan bill containing
the mandate.
...
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/03/27/republicans-hatched-idea-obamas-health-insurance-mandate/
Republicans Hatched Idea for Obama's Health Insurance Mandate
Republicans were for President Obama's requirement that Americans get
health insurance before they were against it.
The obligation in the new health care law is a Republican idea that's
been around at least two decades. It was once trumpeted as an
alternative to Bill and Hillary Clinton's failed health care overhaul
in the 1990s. These days, Republicans call it government overreach.
Mitt Romney, weighing another run for the Republican presidential
nomination, signed such a requirement into law at the state level as
Massachusetts governor in 2006. At the time, Romney defended it as "a
personal responsibility principle" and Massachusetts' newest
Republican senator, Scott Brown, backed it. Romney now says Obama's
plan is a federal takeover that bears little resemblance to what he
did as governor and should be repealed.
...