Change The Damn Rules
Health insurance companies are being regulated state to state, they are compelled by definitions of the Constitution and these rulings date back decades. I think it is time to take a closer look at some of these rulings as it pertains to insurance, because they favor the insurance companies and not the American people. If Congress is our mouth piece, I believe I want Obamacare repealed and insurance companies be forced/allowed to do business across state lines. Go get ’em mouth pieces.
Below is a law review I found interesting, worth the read. If you want to read the entire thing – go here.
Steven G. Calabresi, The Right to Buy Health Insurance Across State Lines: Crony Capitalism and the Supreme Court
The health insurance industry is just as much an industry as are General Motors and Ford. Just as the Commerce Clause allows Congress to regulate automobile emissions on cars that are bought and sold, the Commerce Clause also allows Congress to regulate the buying and selling of health insurance.
The holding of Paul v. Virginia that corporations are not citizens under Article IV, Section 2 is a catastrophe from a policy perspective because it allows in-state corporations to use state law to protect themselves from out-of-state competition subject however to the constraints of the Dormant Commerce Clause. In areas like insurance, where Congress has somehow purported to “override” the Dormant Commerce Clause by statute, the costs are immense. It is quite simply absurd to say that corporations have free speech rights and the right to sue in federal court but no right to compete on an even playing field in interstate commerce.
VI. CONCLUSION
When Congress delegates its Commerce Clause power to the States—a power that is almost certainly exclusive in some respects—it violates the text of the Constitution just as surely as it would if it delegated its power to declare war to the states. There are fifty states today, not thirteen as at the founding, and as a result there are countless more external effects of state legislation on other states as well as many more state line crossings. The fifty states simply cannot be trusted to regulate a huge national service industry on which we spend one-sixth of our GDP as a nation if the states have carte blanche to discriminate in licensing against out-of-state health insurers.
By upholding the healthcare mandate, the Supreme Court has ruled that all of us MUST now buy the services of the fifty state health insurance cartels, oligopolies, and monopolies. It is incumbent on the Supreme Court to make sure that American consumers are not turned into the victims of crony capitalism by a weird confluence of its bizarre Dormant Commerce Clause and Privileges and Immunities Clause doctrines. NFIB v. Sebelius obligates the Supreme Court to take a second look in the healthcare context at decisions like Prudential Insurance Co. v. Benjamin; Western & Southern Life Insurance Co. v. California; and even Paul v. Virginia.240 In A Common Law for the Age of Statutes, Judge Guido Calabresi argued for second look judicial review when a set of statutes passed at very different times in our history and coupled with old case law produce a result we doubt Congress would legislate today. It is time for the Supreme Court to put an end to Crony Capitalism in the health insurance industry.
