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Politics : Liberalism: Do You Agree We've Had Enough of It?
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To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (81721)4/9/2010 1:52:14 PM
From: TimF1 Recommendation   of 224729
 
the power to impose taxes for the general welfare

Leaving aside the fact that the new law will actually harm the general welfare (since such an issue normally isn't considered as a constitutional issue), imposing taxes, is not the same as imposing purchase requirements, and regulating interstate commerce, doesn't cover regulating intrastate non-commerce.

The penalties for not buying insurance have been structured as a tax

No they have not. The bill imposes a requirement and a penalty. The fact that the IRS collects the penalty is fairly meaningless.

Even if the language of the bill actually phrased it as something like "a tax will be imposed on people without insurance", and didn't mention mandates at all. A court could reasonably decide that the tax is actually imposing a mandate. There is a limit even to the tax power. The federal government can not outlaw anything and everything, under the guise of imposing a large tax on the thing it doesn't like.

The mandates are needed to push enough healthy young people into insurance pools to help subsidize the cost of covering sicker people and make it feasible for insurers to cover people with pre-existing conditions.

That's the idea, but its unlikely to work very well. Covering sicker people and esp. requiring coverage for pre-existing conditions will add to the cost making insurance more expensive. The penalty for violating the mandate is much lower than the cost of insurance in most cases. People who don't choose to get insurance now, will likely still choose not to get insurance in many cases, esp. if the mandate/penalty isn't harshly enforced.
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