Categories

Tag: Broccoli Mandate

Supreme Court Needn’t Fear Healthcare Law’s Individual Mandate Provision

The Affordable Care Act faced a possibly fatal challenge when the constitutionality of its individual mandate provision was argued in the Supreme Court.

Much of the terrain was easy going. Neither the justices nor the lawyers doubted that the healthcare and healthcare insurance markets involve interstate commerce — insurance and healthcare providers are usually national or at least regional operations, folks who cross state lines get sick and must be cared for away from home regularly, and people are often unable to relocate to another state for fear of losing employer-based coverage. Nor was it disputed that the mandate was sincerely motivated by and closely related to the regulation of these interstate markets. Those two conclusions are usually sufficient to justify the exercise of congressional power under the commerce clause of the Constitution.

But then things got more treacherous. The problem, suggested by numerous questions from the conservative justices on the court, was the slippery slope they saw created by the mandate — the idea that Congress was requiring individuals to buy something. If the feds can require each person to buy health insurance, what can’t they force people to purchase?

Continue reading…

Can’t We Do Better Than State-Sponsored Broccoli?

Legal arguments often rely on analogies.  Indeed, during the first year of law school, students learn to analogize and distinguish cases. “This case is like this one, not that one.” Good lawyers can always conjure up and deploy a good analogy.

So why was it so hard yesterday for some of the most skilled lawyers and judges in the country to identify a good analogy for the individual mandate – the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that almost everyone buy minimum essential health insurance coverage or pay a penalty?

After listening to Tuesday’s historic two-hour oral argument and reading the transcripts, I counted roughly 17 different analogies to the insurance mandate – none of which seem particularly apt.

Here’s a brief rundown of the analogies invoked yesterday (by both the justices and the advocates), and then some thoughts on why they fall flat:

1.  Is mandating health insurance like mandating that people buy cell phones to call 911? (Chief Justice Roberts).

2.  Is the mandate like a requirement that we buy insurance to pay for our own burial services? (A macabre Justice Alito, who’s right: we’re all going to die).

3.  Is the mandate like forcing us to buy broccoli? (Justice Scalia, invoking the dreaded broccoli analogy, which is apparently one of the parade of horribles that logically flows from the health insurance mandate, a canard that David Orentlicher has exposed).

Continue reading…

The Broccoli Mandate

If you’ve been paying attention to the debate over the constitutionality of the health reform law, you’ve probably heard mention of the hypothetical “broccoli mandate.”

The question, if the federal government can make everyone buy health insurance at a particular coverage level and type, can it make everyone buy anything?

For example, could the federal government require everyone to buy a certain amount of broccoli every year, and assess penalties for a failure to do so? After all, like health insurance, broccoli has the potential to improve health, thereby reducing health care spending and perhaps enhancing economic productivity of the workforce. If the argument works for health care, why not for broccoli?

More to the point: What about the real “broccoli mandate” that the administration is already enforcing?

The idea of a broccoli mandate is a whimsical way of making a serious point.

Both as originally written and subsequently amended, the Constitution is structured under the assumption of limited government – the idea that the federal government’s power is limited to those powers specifically designated as such. Anything else a government might do is either given to the states (for example, highway patrol) or prohibited to government entirely (for example, infringing freedom of speech). The point made by raising the prospect of a “broccoli mandate” is to point out that a few of the powers granted to Congress – such as the regulation of interstate commerce – have been interpreted so broadly over the last several decades that the very idea of limited government has been called into question.

Continue reading…