
Health Care Constitutionality
Note Article I, Section 8, clause 1 powers of the congress:
“The Congress shall
have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the
common defense and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be
uniform throughout the United States;”
Suppose that the national requirement to pay for insurance or contribute to one’s own health care doesn’t
qualify under the constitutional definitions of either a criminal penalty OR a tax? If the ‘mandate’ is
considered an Impost (something that supports an entire structure, in this case the healthcare infrastructure),
it follows that its authority under the constitution is derived from the General Welfare and Common Defence of
clause 1 rather than subordinate clauses such as the interstate commerce OR necessary and proper.
The entire process of health care costs and quality going from $8,000 per person per year to $14,000 removes the
definition of the problem from interstate commerce alone involving taxation or penalty; it is a Common Defense
problem that is ‘uniform throughout the United States’. An ‘Impost’ is generally defined not only as an imposed
‘overhead cost’ but the original Latin defined it as: “ a member at the top of a wall, pier, or column that
supports an arch, from the Latin impositus or placed upon;. The impost was a term that meant it supported a much
larger structure by its existence AND DID NOTHING ELSE.
From a clause 1 standpoint, shouldn’t the insurance mandate be a constitutionally valid ‘Impost’ supporting the health
care infrastructure rather than a tax or a commercial activity that can be distributed without restriction? In that
context, and ONLY that context of Section 8, clause 1 where the Impost cannot be used for any other purpose than
health care, the current Anti-Injunction Arguments and the criminal fine argument are not relevant. The issue then
becomes whether it is constitutional to have a regulatory system such as the IPAB in law that does not use the collected
revenues in a context of a health care Impost ONLY.
Work
in Progress, 2012