Is Government Health Care Constitutional?

Source: Wall Street Journal

By DAVID B. RIVKIN JR. and LEE A. CASEY

Is a government-dominated health-care system unconstitutional? A strong case can be made for that proposition, based on the same “right to privacy” that underlies such landmark Supreme Court decisions as Roe v. Wade.

The details of this year’s health-care reform bill are still being hammered out. But the end result is sure to be byzantine in complexity. Washington will have immense say over how, when and through whom Americans are treated. Moreover, despite the administration’s public pronouncements about painless cuts in wasteful spending, only the most credulous believe that some form of government-directed health-care rationing can be avoided as a means of controlling costs.

The Supreme Court created the right to privacy in the 1960s and used it to strike down a series of state and federal regulations of personal (mostly sexual) conduct. This line of cases began with Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965 (involving marital birth control), and includes the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion.

The court’s underlying rationale was not abortion-specific. Rather, the justices posited a constitutionally mandated zone of personal privacy that must remain free of government regulation, except in the most exceptional circumstances. As the court explained in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), “these matters, involving the most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime, choices central to personal dignity and autonomy, are central to the liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and the mystery of human life.”

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Simple Healthcare Math

Source: AmericanThinker.com

By Randy Fardal

The Obama media seem to be wringing their hands over the possibility that President Obama’s attempt to nationalize America’s healthcare could go down in flames, despite ABC’s upcoming White House telethon.  Politico reluctantly acknowledged that a trillion dollars does seem like an awfully large number to most voters:

 

That is why Democrats admit that it was a public relations disaster this week when the Congressional Budget Office issued a report this week concluding, from a partial draft of a Senate health committee bill, that the plan would cost $1 trillion over 10 years but only provide coverage for 16 million of the estimated 50 million Americans who are uninsured.

 

The Washington Post reported that the CBO cost estimate for another draft version of the bill is $1.6 trillion.  In the same story, Senator Judd Gregg (R-NH) was quoted as saying the price tag easily could reach $2 trillion.  For sake of argument, let’s assume the middle estimate of $1.6T is valid and it would cover 16 million Americans.

 

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