One of the challenges facing opponents of Obamacare has been that there is so much wrong with the law, it can be difficult to choose a single target to focus on. But as Yuval Levin and I explain in an article in The Weekly Standard, the individual mandate, one of law’s most important provisions is also one of its most problematic and unpopular.
The law’s champions have always considered the individual mandate to be the indispensable provision. It is what allows them to make the only boast they really care to make, which is that the law—in their estimation—will deliver on the long-sought goal of “universal coverage” (which now appears to mean covering all but 30 million people in our country). And it is what allows them to attempt to transform the purchase of government-sanctioned health insurance from just another consumer choice into a social obligation, if not a legal decree.
Of course, the mandate has already ceased to be the obligation that Obamacare’s architects wanted it to be. In his landmark ruling in NFIB v. Sebelius last summer, Chief Justice John Roberts found that Congress did not have the authority under the commerce clause to make the purchase of health insurance obligatory. The only way the “personal responsibility” requirement was found constitutional was as a tax on the uninsured: Citizens can either purchase insurance or pay that tax. Both options are perfectly permissible under the law. Indeed, the Roberts decision suggests that Congress could never raise the tax very much because that would tip the balance away from providing a genuine choice to imposing a de facto obligation to buy coverage.
The rest of the piece can be read online here.