Beware the health insurance police

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By Donald Lambro

A constitutional debate among legal scholars is being waged over a key provision in the Democrats' health care legislation that poses this question about the freedom to be an American: Can the federal government force people to purchase medical insurance or pay a tax if they refuse?

Members of Congress, believing they are a power unto themselves far beyond the constraints of the Constitution, have a history of passing laws infringing upon our freedoms ever since the Alien and Sedition Acts.

The McCain-Feingold campaign finance law trampled our First Amendment right to express ourselves in the political marketplace during an election through our contributions or campaign ads - an abuse of power the courts partly curbed and may eventually deconstruct altogether.

Congress has never before required Americans to buy a product or service under penalty of law. Yet that's precisely what the health care bills pending in the House and Senate would do in the age of Obama, despite compelling arguments that the Constitution gives lawmakers no power to do so.

When President Clinton and first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton proposed health care legislation that made the very same demands, the Congressional Budget Office felt compelled to make this self-evident observation outside its purview as Congress' auditing clerk:

"A mandate requiring all individuals to purchase health insurance would be an unprecedented form of federal action. The government has never required people to buy any good or service as a condition of lawful residence in the United States," CBO wrote in August 1994.

"An individual mandate would have two features that, in combination, would make it unique. First it would impose a duty on individuals as members of society. Second, it would require people to purchase a specific service that would be heavily regulated by the federal government."

Any citizen who dared to refuse Congress' imperious edict would be slapped with a severe fine starting at $200 in 2014 and rising to $750 in 2017. The specter of an all-powerful government enforcing such a law led some concerned Republican lawmakers to point out that willful refusal to pay the so-called "excise tax" penalty to the IRS could lead to further fines and/or imprisonment.

Columbia University health policy professor Sherry Glied, named by President Obama to a top management post in the Department of Health and Human Services, warned that the process of "developing a system to promptly identify and penalize scofflaws ... may require a degree of intrusiveness and bureaucracy that some will find unpalatable."

In other words, lock your doors and pull down your shades because the health insurance police are coming.