Obamacare Insurance Mandate is Constitutional, Court Rules

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled 2-1 in favor of Obamacare’s individual mandate, which requires that Americans purchase health insurance and that pro-life groups opposed Obamacare because the mandated insurance could fund abortions, not provide protection for pro-life medical workersand may promote rationing. “The Government concedes the novelty of the mandate and the lack of any doctrinal limiting principles; indeed, at oral argument, the Government could not identify any mandate to purchase a product or service in interstate commerce that would be unconstitutional, at least under the Commerce Clause,” the ruling says. However, court continues, the U.S. government “does stress that the health care market is factually unique; there are few other markets, it says, where participation is a virtual certainty, or where declining to buy a product disproportionately causes a national economic problem.” The ruling also includes an acknowledgement of “some discomfort with the government’s failure to advance any clear doctrinal principles limiting congressional mandates that any American purchase any product or service in interstate commerce. But to tell the truth, those limits are not apparent to us, either because the power to require the entry into commerce is symmetrical with the power to prohibit or condition commercial behavior, or because we have not yet perceived a qualitative limitation.”