Does the Constitution Allow Health Care Reform?

Okay, maybe the question posed in the title is a little dramatic. Certainly the constitution allows the federal government to do some things in regard to health care reform. However, what about certain specific proposals that have been key parts of the presidents plan? If the federal government doesn’t have the authority to implement these proposals why waste our time even discussing them unless it is in the form of proposing constitutional amendments to authorize the government to follow through with them.

In particular I’m talking about the president’s proposal to mandate that everyone buy health insurance. David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey authored a piece in the Saturday, August 22 edition of the Washington Post claiming this is not within the authority of the US government and they go on to give very compelling reasons why that is so. Basically, if the constitution allowed for the authority for the federal government to mandate the purchase of health insurance it could also mandate the purchase of iPods. The article cites several Supreme Court decisions that they believe supports their assertion. I won’t bother to repeat them here.

Reading that article started me thinking about how health insurance is currently regulated. It’s regulated by the states, not the federal government. Insurance policies are state specific and even when, say, a Massachussets company writes a policy to insure someone in, say, Georgia, as is my case, it is a Georgia policy that it is selling. While this is interstate commerce we are talking about the federal government taking over a responsibility that has been that of the states since the inception of health insurance.

Maybe insurance reform needs to be booted back to the states. Maybe the governors ought to look into standardizing insurance regulations between the states. Maybe that is the level this discussion should be taking place because that seems to be where the problem is.