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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Paul Smith who wrote (152192)	12/13/2010 2:48:22 PM
From: KyrosL	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541763

The government can force people to pay taxes. It forces them to buy into Social Security and Medicare. It can force them to contribute their time by drafting them. This is no different. They either buy insurance or they pay a fine. Paying the fine is no different than paying taxes.

To: Paul Smith who wrote (152192)	12/13/2010 2:55:54 PM
From: research1234	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 541763

And the government (fed, state and local) is not required to provide free medical services to the uninsured, but it does to the tune of $billions upon $billions that we simply cannot continue afford without significant structural reforms. Requiring everyone to purchase insurance is a way to rationalize the delivery of health services, with private health insurers still taking center stage. Ironically, many Reps starting including Romney have argued for this approach forcefully and eloquently. It was only when this became associated with a Democratic health bill that Reps suddenly concluded that it was a bad idea. It will be quite ironic if as a result of this activist court decision, a future Congress concludes that a single payer government-run system is the only way to appropriately distribute costs and benefits in the absence of the ability to require all of us to purchase insurance from private insurers.

To: Paul Smith who wrote (152192)	12/13/2010 3:48:20 PM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541763

The case against the individual mandate is that the government does not have the power in the Constitution to force a citizen to buy anything. Why not force citizens to buy GM cars so that union jobs are saved? Why not force citizens to buy healthier food? Why not force citizens to buy treasury bonds? Since you don't seem interested in the back and forth exchange of conversation, I assume the point of this post was simply to lay a marker. So my reply is not meant for you but to lay a counter marker. The point is wrong. The government has all sorts of individual mandates as I see others point out further down the thread. I suspect the most comparable is social security, in which citizens are "forced" to purchase some old age insurance. But taxes, medicare payments, seat belts for cars, the list could simply go on forever. The point Ezra Klein makes is the telling one, however. The individual mandate was a favorite notion of Republicans over against the notion of a single payer system. But once it's put forward by the Dems, given the wrongheadedness of this incarnation of the Republican party, it becomes something that is so bad it's unconstitutional. Warped thinking. In the extreme.