I am not a lawyer, so there is a lot of what I am about to write that I totally do not understand. However, I will try to understand it and get it across.
Yesterday the The Daily Caller posted an article stating that the Obamacare mandate is unconstitutional. The timing of this article is interesting as in Michican on Thursday Judge George Caram Steeh in Detroit said the mandate to get insurance by 2014 and the financial penalty for skipping coverage are legal. He said Congress was trying to lower the overall cost of insurance by requiring participation.
David Kopel at The Daily Caller has a different perspective. He states that:
"The Obama administration's stategy has been to try to delay the legal cases as long as possible. In order to bring a case in federal court, a plaintiff must have "standing"--a personal, concrete legal interest, as opposed to a generalized grievance. The Obama Administration asserted that no individual could have standing to challenge the mandate until 2014."
Judges in Virginia and Florida have already rejected the Obama argument on standing, as did the judge in Detroit.
The article states that the matter of whether Obamacare is constitutional is headed for the Supreme Court. The article then concludes:
"The Supreme Court might choose to invent an "economic decisions" doctrine, and thereby stretch the Constitution beyond its breaking point. Or the Court might decide to keep the Constitution as it exists, with congressional powers over interstate commerce that are very broad, but not unlimited. The Thomas More case makes it clear that the Obamacare mandate to buy something you don't want is constitutional only if the Supreme Court chooses to change the Constitution."
As I said earlier, I don't totally understand the legal issues of Obamacare. I do know that the Massachusetts healthcare reform program that Obamacare was supposedly modeled after has been a disaster for consumers, health insurance providers, and medical care providers. It would nice to see Obamacare stopped before it can do the kind of damage that Massachusetts healthcare reform has done.
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