The Homa Files

Ken’s Take: I’ve asked before (1) How will mandate evaders get caught?  and (2) What will the Feds do if the evaders have already spent their incomes and are deep in hock? How will the fines be collected? By repo’ing uber-sized big screen TVs?

These guys ask if such mandates are even constitutional.

Talk about shoddy staff work …

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Excerpted from WSJ: Mandatory Insurance Is Unconstitutional, Sept. 18, 2009

Under Sen. Max Baucus’s most recent plan, people who do not maintain health insurance for themselves and their families would be forced to pay an “excise tax” —roughly comparable to the cost of insurance coverage under the new plan.

Beginning in 2013, individuals would be required to have health insurance. Individuals and families who do not have insurance for more than three months in a given year would be subject to an annual excise tax of $750 and $1,500, respectively, if their income is below 300% of the federal poverty line (or $66,150 for a family of four). Tax penalties for individuals and families with incomes above that would be $950 and $3,800. The excise tax would be waived for Native Americans and individuals and families whose health-insurance costs would be more than 10% of their annual income.

The majority of those impacted are young people who forgo insurance precisely because they do not expect to need much medical care. When they do, these uninsured pay full freight, often at premium rates, thereby actually subsidizing insured Americans.

Without the mandate, the entire thrust of the new regulatory scheme—requiring insurance companies to cover pre-existing conditions and to accept standardized premiums—would produce dysfunctional consequences. It would make little sense for anyone, young or old, to buy insurance before he actually got sick.

The mandate’s real justifications are even more cynical and political. Making healthy young adults pay billions of dollars in premiums into the national health-care market is the only way to fund universal coverage without raising substantial new taxes.

In effect, this mandate would be one more giant, cross-generational subsidy—imposed on generations who are already stuck with the bill for the federal government’s prior spending sprees.

But a “tax” that falls exclusively on anyone who is uninsured is a penalty beyond Congress’s authority. If the rule were otherwise, Congress could evade all constitutional limits by “taxing” anyone who doesn’t follow an order of any kind—whether to obtain health-care insurance, or to join a health club, or exercise regularly, or even eat your vegetables.

Full article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204518504574416623109362480.html?mod=djemEditorialPage

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This entry was posted on September 22, 2009 at 7:58 am and is filed under Health Care / Medical Insurance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.