greed and death wrote:I find several flaws with the court's ruling.
They fail to differentiate those who can afford and those who can not afford out of pocket care.
Furthermore I find the courts logic, Health care must be mandated because the bill that mandates its care sets conditions requiring it to be mandated, to be circular.
It's fine if you "find several flaws with the court's" reasoning, but the ones you allege aren't really there.
1. The distinction you suggest the court fails to make is irrelevant.
2. That is not the court's logic at all -- although the holding in Gonzalez v. Raich, 545 U.S. 1, 24-25 (2005), quoted by the court would allow something close to such bootstrapping (if necessary).
The District Court's actual analysis is rather straight-forward.
A. Congess has the power to regulate activites that substantially affect interstate Commerce. United States v. Lopez, 514 U.S. 549, 558-59 (1995); Perez v. United States, 402 U.S. 146, 150 (1971). (This is well-established and only disputed by those who are essentially loony.)
B. All that is required by the Commerce Clause is for Congress to have a rational basis for concluding the regulated activities, “taken in the aggregate, substantially affect interstate commerce." Raich, 545 U.S. at 22. The power of Congress pursuant to the Commerce Clause may reach purely local, non-commercial activity, simply because it is an integral part of a broader statutory scheme that permissibly regulates interstate commerce. See, e.g., Raich, 545 U.S. at 26; Wickard v. Filburn, 317 U.S. 111 (1942).
C. Congress clearly has a rational basis for concluding that the activities effected by the health insurance "mandate" substantially affect interstate commerce:
There is a rational basis to conclude that, in the aggregate, decisions to forego insurance coverage in preference to attempting to pay for health care out of pocket drive up the cost of insurance. The costs of caring for the uninsured who prove unable to pay are shifted to health care providers, to the insured population in the form of higher premiums, to governments, and to taxpayers. The decision whether to purchase insurance or to attempt to pay for health care out of pocket, is plainly economic. These decisions, viewed in the aggregate, have clear and direct impacts on health care providers, taxpayers, and the insured population who ultimately pay for the care provided to those who go without insurance. These are the economic effects addressed by Congress in enacting the Act and the minimum coverage provision.
D. Although SCOTUS has said tangential strings of connections between non-economic activity and interstate Commerce are not enough to bring such activity within the Commerce Clause, choosing whether or not to buy health insurance is an economic activity AND the connection to interstate commerce is not tangential.
E. As a wholly independent ground upon which the HCRA's mandate is constitutional, it is within Congress’s power to regulate wholly intrastate, wholly non-economic matters that form “‘an essential part of a larger regulation of economic activity, in which the regulatory scheme could be undercut unless the intrastate activity were regulated.’” Raich, 545 U.S. at 24-25 (quoting United States v. Lopez, 514 U.S. 549, 561 (1995)). Here, the health care industry is undisputably interestate commerce and the HRCA is a larger regulation of that economic activity. The court explains how the mandate is essentially to that legitimate scheme -- even if it were otherwise outside Congress's power. Again, this is a finding of Congress and the President which the District Court is simply saying isn't unreasonable.
