"It Ain't Me, Babe."

Law professor Ilya Somin, on the Volokh legal blog, discusses the slippery slope present if you can legally mandate individuals to purchase private health insurance:

The logic of the pro-health care mandate argument can justify virtually any mandate to purchase or do anything. This opens the door to the machinations of a extraordinarily large number of interest groups. It seem very likely that at least a few of them will figure out a way to take advantage of the opportunity. Even if I can’t figure out exactly how to do it, interest group leaders and other professional political strategists probably can.

Indeed, at least one industry interest group already has managed to do it. After all, the health insurance mandate was included in the health care bill in large part because insurance companies support it, and in spite of the fact that President Obama had strongly opposed the idea when Hillary Clinton proposed it during the 2008 presidential campaign. Where the insurance industry leads, others might well follow.

It's wonderful to want to promise people with pre-existing conditions no changes in coverage. Not so honorable to want to treat those under 26 as youth to be covered on their parents policies.*

It's also great to want to revamp the health insurance business, to give them an advantage in covering the country.

But you can't rob from Peter to pay Paul. No fair confiscating from those without pre-existing conditions, who pay for their minimal healthcare needs out-of-pocket and choose to invest their personal health budget for products and services other than private insurance.

I'm not even going to touch the system's inherent unfairness as it stands: if legal rules exclude recognition of some types of families under some types of plans, why should those affected essentially subsidize another recognized family's care? Voluntarily, if you want to opt in to those plans, bully for you.

But if you choose to go it alone -- not costing the system, nor asking for any additional coverage for oneself or unrecognized family -- you can't force the purchase from those being penalized for continuing to maintain good health of their own. The unfairness must end somewhere, and ending the mandate would force the private insurance industry to look internally for legal (Constitutional) solutions to the problems of their own making.

Those without outstanding bills, pre-existing conditions, or demands for more, more, more care did not create this mess, and increasingly we resent our pockets being picked as the only "solution".







*I belong to the "18 and Out" mindset that encourages young people in their prime to get out from under their parents' roof and mindsets, to begin creating their own lives. Whether it be school, jobs, military, or self-financed travel, it's crazy to think that somehow in the past 100 years we've evolved out the adventure and need for independence from people biologically early 20s... My father left his homeland -- eldest of 7; he stood to inherit the land even -- and created a new life for himself. My brother, who didn't attend college, got an efficiency in Chicago, and began working and paying his way the June he turned 18 and graduated high school. Don't tell me it can't be done for those who are not "college material". We've seen what happens too, when those young adults are sheltered in their parents homes for too long, instead of getting out and either making their own way, or being recognized early on for the troubles they have coping in society.