Clement, Tribe Debate Obama's Health Care Law

A pair of prominent appellate law specialists debated the legality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, President Barack Obama's sweeping health care reform law, at the Federalist Society’s annual National Lawyers Convention Saturday.

At a panel discussion moderated by Georgetown University Law Center professor Nicholas Rosenkranz, Bancroft partner Paul Clement remarked on how the law's individual mandate, which compels citizens to purchase health care insurance or pay a penalty, “creates commerce rather than regulate commerce,” and said the American people have a right to not participate in commerce.

“The defenders of the federal health care act will keep telling you that it is all about health care. That is not true. It is involves health care insurance,” Clement said.

While Clement said that the government’s role is not to create commerce, Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe argued there is no philosophical difference between regulating and creating. “This is a policy issue, not a constitutional issue,” he said.

Clement countered that the difference between previous federal policies and Obama's health care act was that people cannot avoid the act.

“If the government can create commerce and force people to buy a certain product, why can’t you force people to buy cars?” Clement said. “What was the point of ‘Cash for Clunckers’ if the government could just force to buy new cars?”

Comments

[Ratkellar]

The comment is incorrect. EMTALA applies only if the hospital accepts federal payments. The vast majority does accept such payments.
Citizenship is irrelevant to EMTALA. The "participating hospital" must take all comers.
Regulating a hospital is a different question than regulating an individual citizen. The Hospital is already participating in commerce AND accepting government payments for such services.

[Protricity]

these rhetorical questions are sooooooo old and sooooooooooo answered years ago.

How can you 'force' a citizen to buy a product he doesn't need?

Answer is SO EASY.
1. Citizen has a legal right to not be turned away from the ER when he has no way of paying for services, no insurance, and even no intent to ever pay (which many of them do not).
2. We all make up for that money with higher premiums and less coverage for ourselves. Thus this isn't some product the customer has no interest in purchasing. This is a DIRECT LIABILITY that citizen has that WE are directly RESPONSIBLE FOR PAYING for him.

So you can either change the law to allow ERs to refuse patience that cannot pay (which I'm sure is what many of you wingnuts want anyway, right?), or you require everyone to have coverage to fix this broken system once and for all. YOU CANT HAVE IT BOTH WAYS. STOP DEFENDING THE STATUS QUO

But you know and understand this question already, don't you. Not gonna stop you from asking it again and again on every forum you can find as if you have some kind of point, will it?

Next question!