Mental Health Blogs

On Monday, President Barack Obama did an interview with ABC News’ Jake Tapper wherein he was pressed on the penalties contained in the House health care reform bill, which passed the House 220 to 215 on Saturday night. The bill contains financial fines and even jail time for Americans without health insurance who refuse to get insurance. It’s not clear to me if this business will be incorporated in the Senate’s version of health care reform or if it will be in whatever eventual House-Senate bill is agreed to in conference.

It’s a controversial measure of the House bill, but it’s something President Obama defended to Tapper, arguing as he has before that forcing people to have health insurance is just like when the several states force car owners to have auto insurance. Specifically, the President said:

“What I think is appropriate is that in the same way that everybody has to get auto insurance and if you don’t, you’re subject to some penalty, that in this situation if you have the ability to buy insurance, it’s affordable and you choose not to do so, forcing you and me and everyone else to subsidize you, you know, there’s a thousand dollar hidden tax that families all across America are–are burdened by because of the fact that people don’t have health insurance, you know, there’s nothing wrong with a penalty.”

I’ve never heard him make that $1,000 claim before and it strikes me as a stretch. But his larger claim that forcing people to have health insurance just like states force them to have auto insurance is a surprising one coming from a former Constitutional law professor. I was going to write about this back in September when he used the auto insurance analogy in an address to Congress, but things were so heated in the wake of that speech that I decided to wait.

Anyway, as I understand the law, driving a car on public roadways is not a Constitutional right but a privilege controlled by the states. Each state can determine its own conditions for extending that privilege to its citizens, and 49 states do require auto insurance for car owners.

But health insurance mandated by the Feds is not a power enumerated to either the Congress or the President under the Constitution. What’s more, the Feds would be forcing you and I to buy a service that affects our bodies and minds and thus crashes right into our rights to personal liberty and privacy. I know there are Constitutional scholars out there who agree and disagree with me on this point (the LA Times has a round up of opinions here) and I know the insurance mandate will get tested in a court somewhere in 2013 or so, but I keep coming back to the language of Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion in the US.

In it, the Supreme Court found the (I’m using the Wikipedia entry for Roe v. Wade):

“‘[R]ight of privacy, whether it be founded in the Fourteenth Amendment’s concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action, as we feel it is, or, as the District Court determined, in the Ninth Amendment’s reservation of rights to the people, is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.’”

If Constitutional guarantees of personal liberty and privacy are broad enough to protect citizens from governmental interference in terminating a pregnancy, then I think those same rights are broad enough to trump the government’s ability to force you and I into buying health insurance. But that’s just my opinion.

Either way, I wish the President would ditch the auto insurance analogy since it flat out doesn’t work. It’s interesting to me that the mainstream media–aside from Fox News–hasn’t called the President out on this. I wonder why.

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2. President Obama’s Poor Salesmanship Of Health Care Reform
3. Health Care Questions President Obama Should Address
4. The House Dems, Pres. Obama Have Lost Me On Health Care Reform
5. House Health Care Bill Mandates Study Of Mental Health Outcomes of Abortion, Adoption