Individual Mandate Requirement Makes Some Unsafe Assumptions

By Glen Wallace,

Regarding the health insurance mandate there is a couple of problems.  First there is the assumption that health insurance is, and will continue to be, the primary method of payment for healthcare for the vast majority of citizens.  That may be the current fact but there is no assurance that health insurance would continue to be the choice method of payment for the vast majority if there was no mandate in place.  Perhaps the citizenry might decide a whole new methodology for payment, such as barter, would work better.   In issuing the mandate then, congress would be interfering with interstate commerce by acting as an impediment to the organic flow of free market decision making.

But even if we did take as a given that health insurance will remain popular in the future, the mandate does not provide allowance for those that do not want to utilize the modern western medical system.  Some individuals may believe that holistic medicine is the superior method of medical treatment.  Those people may be so successful with that treatment that they never need to utilize the western medical system.  They wouldn't then have ever opted in to the medical market system that is part of interstate commerce but are instead forced into it by the individual mandate.

While the comparison is made to the so-called superior court's decision to forbid farmers from eating their own harvest with the healthcare mandate, in the case of the farmers, while I disagree with that decision by the court, there is an important difference with the farmers insofar as in that case I believe only the farmers that have already opted into the futures market for their crops are the one's who are forbidden the freedom to consume their own crops (at least I hope it is limited to those farmers as I'm not that familiar with this particular court decision).  In the case of the healthcare mandate, on the other hand, all citizens are not afforded the opportunity to decide to opt in, but instead are forced into the insurance market by the government.  The human, then has been turned into a health insurance market commodity, just like soybeans and corn are in the agricultural market, whether that individual human likes it or not.

 While I believe socialism has its place and can be beneficial, especially in the case of medicine, I don't believe crony capitalism ever has a place in
socioeconomic systems.  The healthcare mandate is the ultimate in crony capitalism since the government is requiring that every individual buy a particular
product from a private company.  It seems like with the mandate, human beings are being treated by the government as a commodity for the health insurance industry.  We are being forced to make ourselves available as tradable assets on the health insurance market whether we like it or not.