Excerpted from NY Times: Virginia Advances Legislation Against Insurance Requirement, February 10, 2010 and TheHill: Virginia moves to block federal insurance mandate, Feb.10, 2010
Virginia may become one of the first states to shield its residents from a proposed federal requirement that they purchase health insurance.
Virginia took another step on Tuesday toward becoming the first state to enact legislation to exempt its residents from a central feature of President Obama’s health care plan: a requirement that everyone buy health insurance or pay a penalty.
The measure is expected to be signed into law shortly by Gov. Bob McDonnell.
About two thirds of the states have some form of this legislation in the works, many of them constitutional amendments.
All seek to foil any attempt by the federal government — and the insurance industry — to make everyone buy insurance, a measure known as the individual mandate.
The mandate has proven exceptionally unpopular to healthcare critics on both the left and right. Liberals feel the mandate functions as a gift to private insurers, who would profit from an insurance requirement not linked to a public healthcare plan. Meanwhile, conservatives stress such a requirement is beyond federal lawmakers’ constitutional powers.
Supporters say the individual mandate is essential to making insurance affordable because it would expand the risk pool to include healthy people who don’t have insurance now.
- Ken’s Translation: Mandate makes healthy people who consume few healthcare resources (mostly twenty-somethings) to buy expensive insurance in order to subsidize people who consume mucho healthcare resources(mostly old people).
The law is murky because the United States Constitution establishes the supremacy of national law over state law.
Nonetheless, an individual mandate may be vulnerable in part because there is no precedent for such a requirement. Such a mandate may be impossible to enforce and that these state measures may only encourage citizens in their efforts to resist compliance.
Opponents of an individual mandate argue that is an overreach of federal authority and unconstitutional.
Robert Marshall, the delegate in Virginia who introduced the measure, quoted from the Federalist Papers and denounced the mandate as tyrannical.
“In 220 years, Congress has never tried to compel people to purchase any good or service,” he told his colleagues, according to a report in The Virginian-Pilot. “You are the sentinels of the lives, liberty and property of your constituents. I urge you to protect them against the usurpers in Washington, D.C.”
The Homa Files 
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