Obama Health Care

There have been a number of law suites that states and individuals have filed over the part of the health care provisions that require everyone to have insurance. They claim that it is unconstitutional, Fox News had an article last week that said,

The states claim the health care law is unconstitutional and violates people's rights by forcing them to buy health insurance by 2014 or face penalties.

Government attorneys have said the states do not have standing to challenge the law and want the case dismissed.

Lawsuits have been filed elsewhere. A federal judge in Virginia ruled in December that the insurance-purchase mandate was unconstitutional, though two other federal judges have upheld the requirement. It's expected the Supreme Court will ultimately have to resolve the issue.

However, requiring private citizens to buy health insurance is not new. You can trace back the first time that a law forced people to buy health insurance to 1798. When President Adams one of our Founding Fathers, signed into law the “An Act for the Relief of Sick and Disabled Seamen”. An article in Forbes tilted "Congress Passes Socialized Medicine and Mandates Health Insurance -In 1798" by Rick Ungar said,

In July of 1798, Congress passed – and President John Adams signed - “An Act for the Relief of Sick and Disabled Seamen.” The law authorized the creation of a government operated marine hospital service and mandated that privately employed sailors be required to purchase health care insurance.

Keep in mind that the 5th Congress did not really need to struggle over the intentions of the drafters of the Constitutions in creating this Act as many of its members were the drafters of the Constitution.

And when the Bill came to the desk of President John Adams for signature, I think it’s safe to assume that the man in that chair had a pretty good grasp on what the framers had in mind.
[…]
First, it created the Marine Hospital Service, a series of hospitals built and operated by the federal government to treat injured and ailing privately employed sailors. This government provided healthcare service was to be paid for by a mandatory tax on the maritime sailors (a little more than 1% of a sailor’s wages), the same to be withheld from a sailor’s pay and turned over to the government by the ship’s owner. The payment of this tax for health care was not optional. If a sailor wanted to work, he had to pay up.
[…]
As the nation grew and expanded, the system was also expanded to cover sailors working the private vessels sailing the Mississippi and Ohio rivers.

The program eventually became the Public Health Service, a government operated health service that exists to this day under the supervision of the Surgeon General.
[…]
As for Congress’ understanding of the limits of the Constitution at the time the Act was passed, it is worth noting that Thomas Jefferson was the President of the Senate during the 5th Congress while Jonathan Dayton, the youngest man to sign the United States Constitution, was the Speaker of the House.

Well so much for what the Founding Fathers thought about being forced to pay for private health care.

According the non-partisan Government Accounting Office (GAO) report,

In addition, individuals without health insurance create a public cost because of their higher proportion of hospital emergency room visits. Uninsured adults are 4 times and uninsured children 5 times more likely to use the emergency room, compared with the insured. Costs for the uninsured are often absorbed by providers, passed on to the insured through increased fees and insurance premiums, or underwritten with public funds to support public hospitals and finance public insurance programs.

Who are the people who are most likely to be uninsured? It is the working poor. The report goes on to say,

Although most nonelderly Americans obtain health insurance through employment, three-fourths of all uninsured adults are in fact employed. However, certain types of workers are less likely to have employment based insurance available and thus are more likely to be uninsured. In particular, those working part-time, for small firms, or in certain industries such as agriculture or construction were among the most likely to be uninsured. Not surprisingly, persons with low incomes are most likely to be uninsured, with most uninsured individuals in families earning less than 200 percent of the federal poverty level (which was about $34,000 for a family of four in 1999). Public programs like Medicaid and SCHIP cover many low-income individuals, but significant numbers of low-income children and adults eligible for these programs are not enrolled. Moreover, other low-income individuals (particularly childless adults) are typically not eligible. While low-income individuals are most likely to be uninsured, 8 percent of those earning more than 4 times the federal poverty level are also uninsured. Other populations with a disproportionately high uninsured rate include young adults, Hispanics, and immigrants, in part because of their type of employment, relatively low incomes, or ineligibility for public programs.

When an employed does not cover their employees health costs, they are passing on their business cost on to you and me. And how much is that cost? An article in USA Today said that,

Study: Insured pay 'hidden tax' for uninsured health care
USA TODAY
By Seung Min Kim
5/29/2009

WASHINGTON — The average U.S. family and their employers paid an extra $1,017 in health care premiums last year to compensate for the uninsured, according to a study to be released Thursday by an advocacy group for health care consumers.

Families USA, which supports expanded health care coverage, found that about 37% of health care costs for people without insurance — or a total of $42.7 billion — went unpaid last year. That cost eventually was shifted to the insured through higher premiums, according to the group.

That is right, each and everyone of us who have health care insurance is paying over a $1,000 a year to pay for people without health care insurance.

When people say that government has not right to force them to pay for health insurance, you tell them that they have no right to forcing you to pay for their health care.