Economix Blog: Health Care: Solidarity vs. Rugged Individualism

One of the big right wing talking points of late has been that the individual mandate is not constitutional, because the constitution does not specifically say "the federal government may impose an individual mandate for the purposes of insuring all eligible Americans." Happily, whether things are or are not constitutional is the sort of thing Senate staff check out before putting them in bills, and in a floor statement today, Baucus laid out his staff's findings on the subject. His arguments follow the jump.

Weak arguments presented by "team Obama" lawyers supporting Obama's healthcare legislation took a beating yesterday, and the beating continued even more so today. Please consider Day 3: ObamaCare at the Supreme Court by the Illinois Policy Institute.

Richard Stevenson writes that “What is under way now is the most fundamental reassessment of the size and role of government — of the balance between personal responsibility and private markets on the one hand and public responsibility and social welfare on the other — at least since Ronald Reagan and perhaps since F.D.R.”

Long ago, I'd predicted that if the GOP ever finished off the public option, they'd come at the individual mandate next. To my surprise, it's been some on the left who've launched an attack on the individual mandate. Indeed, last night, an activist friend angrily asked me why I thought I knew how to spend people's money better than they did, which is exactly the attack I'd expected the right to launch. My friend is a supporter of Medicare-for-All.

Chuck Grassley: occasional defender of the Constitution, and of the individual mandate.

Alec MacGillis has a good piece in the Post on the underdiscussed question of what actually happens if you mandate that everyone gets health insurance. After all, we have an “individual mandate” that that teenagers must abstain from beer, but that doesn’t mean you never see drunk teenagers.

Noam Scheiber on political polarization:

The opacity surrounding health care prices and the practice of charging different buyers different prices for identical goods or services contribute mightily to the cost of health care, but at the least the former may be on the way out, an economist writes.