Why is mandatory health insurance unconstitutional

This is a requirement for working at their company. The same thing applies here. The U. Constitution is set up to guide state laws so that they can function without interference from the federal government. Constitution is different from your state constitution and your state can legislate driving requirements; which is why insurance laws vary by state.

The bottom line is that driving is not a requirement. The state wants you to know that if you are driving, they expect you to take fiscal responsibility for any damages you cause should you be responsible for an accident.

Anyone who has been hit by an uninsured driver will appreciate this. Most states only require liability insurance and those requirements are minimal. In fact, if you have a serious car accident, it is unlikely that the minimum insurance you are required to carry by your state will cover all of the damages. Believe it or not, one state has made allowances for people and companies who have the means to pay for their own costs should they cause an accident.

Wisconsin changed their laws in June of and now required liability coverage. If you are driving uninsured and cause an accident in New Hampshire, the state may suspend your license until you pay for the damages that you cause. If you carry uninsured motorist coverage and are hit by an uninsured driver, then your insurance company will help pay for damages. Should a state government deem fit, they could make life insurance mandatory for their citizens and it would be very much constitutional.

Forget about what is mandatory and what is not by the law, regardless of who you are, health insurance is mandatory for all. Your health insurance policy can save you from a whole lot of medical emergencies that you will never see coming.

It is not about what the government says is mandatory, health insurance is sure a life-saving approach every one of us must subscribe to. There are times when lack of money could be the difference between life and death. Unseen medical emergencies, financial incapability, access to proper healthcare services, treatments of deadly diseases, and much more can be dealt with when health insurance is in place.

This is past what any government says is mandatory. Lost your password? By Brodrick Emmanuel Ebube Share. Spread the love. Extend this helpful article to a friend: Twitter Facebook.

Brodrick Emmanuel Ebube. He works with other contributors from the ideation of content and down to its execution. Constitution does it say the government can force people to buy health insurance?

For their part, defenders of mandatory insurance haven't engaged very much, in part because courts tend to be so reluctant to strike down federal laws in the first place. Precious few laws are ever erased from the books by the stroke of a judge's pen; lawyers use terms like the "presumption of constitutionality" and "judicial deference to the legislature" to explain this reticence.

Timothy Jost , a professor of Washington and Lee University School of Law who says he prefers a national public plan, has argued the constitutional principles -- saying in a Politico. Probably the most extensive, or at least heavily-footnoted, argument in favor of the proposal's constitutionality comes from Mark Hall , a law professor at Wake Forest University. In a page paper prepared for Georgetown University's O'Neill Institute, Hall acknowledges that the federal government "has limited powers" and a law requiring Americans to "transfer money to a private party for health or economic purposes seems to be unprecedented" because laws tend to prohibit such purchases rather than mandate them.

But after walking through the arguments, Hall concludes that there are no legal objections likely to be sustained by the current Supreme Court: "Either state or federal government may require either individuals or employers to pay for health insurance. States have inherent power to promote health and provide for the general welfare.

The federal government has authority under its power to regulate interstate commerce These major points of constitutional law appear to be firmly established and are not likely to change based on the near-term composition of the Court. So what are the objections? They tend to come from libertarians and conservatives, who agree with Hall that the U.

As recently as , the Supreme Court reiterated the crucial distinction between a penalty and a tax. The individual mandate is a clear example of a penalty, where Congress requires people to purchase health insurance, and then punishes them with a fine if they fail to comply.

If the mandate qualifies as a tax merely because it punishes violators with a fine, then Congress could require Americans to do almost anything on pain of having to pay a fine if they refuse. It could use this power to force citizens to buy virtually any product, including broccoli, General Motors cars, or anything else.

Even if the individual mandate does somehow qualify as a tax, it is not one of the types of taxes that Congress is authorized to impose. No one, including the federal government, claims that the individual mandate is a duty or an impost. Glenshaw Glass Co. The fine imposed by the mandate does not target any accession to wealth or flow of income.

The fact that low-income individuals are exempted does not change this analysis. A fine for jaywalking would not become an income tax if low-income individuals were exempted from it. The same goes for a fine imposed for violation of a law requiring the purchase of health insurance. It is even more implausible to suggest that the mandate is an excise tax. Excise taxes apply to economic transactions or the use of property of some kind. For example, a tax on the sale of alcoholic beverages qualifies as an excise.

The individual mandate does not tax any kind of activity, use of property or economic transaction. It therefore cannot be an excise tax. If the mandate is not a tariff, impost, income tax, or excise tax, it is either a direct tax or no tax at all. And if it is a direct tax, it would be an unconstitutional one, because it is not apportioned among the states in proportion to population as the Constitution requires. The federal government argues that requiring people to purchase health insurance is needed to ensure that people will not wait to buy health insurance until after they get sick, something they may be incentivized to do because the health care bill forbids insurance companies from turning away customers with preexisting conditions.

In cases such as Printz v. United States in , the Court has emphasized that these are two separate requirements imposed by the Clause. Congressional legislation must meet both. If the Clause allows Congress to adopt the individual mandate, the same logic would justify almost any other requirement Congress might impose on individuals, thereby gutting the principle of limited federal power.

After all, such a mandate can always be portrayed as part of a plan to regulate the relevant market. Thus, the broccoli mandate would be upheld as an effort to regulate the market in food, the auto purchase mandate as a regulation of the market in cars, and so on. Lawyers are notorious for inventing imaginative but unrealistic slippery slope arguments. The slippery slope that would result from a decision upholding the individual mandate, however, is all too real.