Interesting what you can find in the footnotes.
30 On this point, it should be emphasized that while the individual mandate was clearly “necessary and essential” to the Act as drafted, it is not “necessary and essential” to health care reform in general. It is undisputed that there arevarious other (Constitutional) ways to accomplish what Congress wanted to do.Indeed, I note that in 2008, then-Senator Obama supported a health care reform proposal that did not include an individual mandate because he was at that time strongly opposed to the idea, stating that "if a mandate was the solution, we can try that to solve homelessness by mandating everybody to buy a house.” See Interview on CNN’s American Morning, Feb. 5, 2008, transcript available at:http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0802/05/ltm.02.html. In fact, he pointed to the similar individual mandate in Massachusetts --- which was imposed under the state’s police power, a power the federal government does not have --- and opined that the mandate there left some residents “worse off” than they had been before.See Christopher Lee, Simple Question Defines Complex Health Debate, Washington Post, Feb. 24, 2008, at A10 (quoting Senator Obama as saying: "In some cases,there are people [in Massachusetts] who are paying fines and still can't afford[health insurance], so now they're worse off than they were . . . They don't have health insurance, and they're paying a fine . . .”).
No comments:
Post a Comment