Health Care Law

by Jeremy Leaming

The arguments lodged against the health care law’s minimum coverage provision have been described by constitutional law experts as radically libertarian or terribly misguided. But during oral argument before the Supreme Court, the right-wing bloc, led by Justice Antonin Scalia appeared eager to endorse the challengers’ arguments against an integral provision of the Affordable Care Act. We’ll likely know sometime in June whether the high court’s conservative wing was indeed persuaded by the challengers’ arguments.

In a guest post for Balkinization, Rob Weiner, a partner at Arnold & Porter LLP, provides greater detail to the attacks on the health care law’s minimum coverage provision writing they “reflect an effort to codify nostalgia as legal doctrine.” 

The “most obvious throwback” is the liberty argument, Weiner says. Opponents of the health care law attack the minimum coverage provision as a serious affront to liberty. The minimum coverage provision will require some Americans starting in 2014 to purchase a minimum amount of health care insurance.

The affront to liberty, Weiner writes “is the right not to obtain insurance – by any other name, freedom to contract.”

In the Supreme Court’s 1905 Lochner v New York opinion, the majority held that the freedom to contract was “part of the liberty of the individual protected by the Fourteenth Amendment of the Federal Constitution.” Weiner notes that Lochner thus barred New York from regulating conditions of some workers. And in its 1923 Adkins v. Children’s Hospital opinion, the Court relied on this so-called freedom to contract to protect employers from adhering to the minimum wage law.

by Jeremy Leaming

The Supreme Court has set aside a large chunk of time later this month to hear argument over the constitutionality of the health care law’s integral provision, but the primary argument against the minimum coverage provisions has been loudly and repeatedly bandied about since the law’s enactment.

The law’s minimum coverage provision requires people who can afford it to obtain a minimum coverage of health insurance or pay a penalty when filing their income tax returns. It’s not the only provision being challenged by the states, but it is the one that has largely driven the right-wing argument that if the federal government can force some people to purchase health care insurance, there’s no limit to what Congress will be able to require individuals to purchase. (Maybe Congress will require everyone to purchase a gun, to protect their lives, from predators. While becoming a target of crime is obviously something that does and can happen anywhere in the world, it is not as certain as humans’ need for medical treatment due to many other causes, many natural.)

As noted on ACSblog numerous times, the liberty argument is not only wobbly, but hypocritical. A former U.S. Solicitor General Walter Dellinger noted at last year’s ACS Convention that many of the folks complaining about the minimum coverage provision are also supporters of laws requiring women to undergo sonograms and listen to propaganda from doctors before receiving an abortion.

In a March 7 piece for The Nation, Georgetown University law school professor and constitutional law expert David Cole provides, as usual for the professor, an accessible explanation about why the argument against the minimum coverage provision is unlikely to be invalidated by the high court.

Not only is the argument against the minimum coverage provision on flimsy ground, it’s also not conservative. The argument is, in reality, “radically libertarian,” Cole writes.

Cole states:

We’ve seen this kind of libertarian constitutional argument before. In the early twentieth century, after the Industrial Revolution had concentrated economic power in employers’ hands, Congress and the states passed many laws designed to protect workers from exploitation. Time and again, the Supreme Court invalidated these statutes. It deemed the federal laws beyond Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce because they were said to regulate the terms of production, manufacture or mining, all of which were said to precede interstate commerce. And it invalidated state labor laws as infringements on the “freedom of contract” protected by the due process clause.

After the Depression, however, the court “overruled both lines of precedent it abandoned altogether the due process notion that economic regulation infringes on ‘freedom of contract,’” and “it has never since invalidated any law on that ground. And it ruled that in our integrated national economy, Congress is entitled to regulate on the presumption that all economic activity, not matter how local, affects interstate commerce.”