Is the Health Care Overhaul Constitutional?

Even FactCheck.org was unable to answer that question definitively. I obviously oppose the health care reforms being considered.

The FactCheck.org analysis makes both sides of the issue sound pretty rational and reasonable, with one major exception:

Mark Hall, professor of law and public health at Wake Forest University’s law school, writes that there is no fundamental right to be uninsured. "The liberty in question is purely economic and has none of the strong elements of personal or bodily integrity that invoke constitutional protection," he says.

The sentence in bold is terribly ominous. It is horrifying to me that the right to property ("purely economic" liberty) is considered so easily divisible from the right to life ("personal or bodily integrity"). Bodily integrity is protected, day by day, by such material goods as clothes, shelter, seat belts, etc. These things are in turn provided by money, a purely economic entity. The core purpose of money is that we cannot possibly know every material good we may need in the future, so we have a general, all-purpose good that can be exchanged for whatever object fills whatever needs may arise.

Money is material security. Economics is how people attain material security. Purely economic liberty empowers one to protect one's own personal and bodily integrity. To impose upon economics liberties is a little push toward naked, homeless starvation. You cannot separate economic and personal liberties. Like energy and matter, they are phases of the same thing.

How is health insurance more directly related to personal, bodily integrity than cash money? The major difference I see is the difference between cash money and a food stamps or gift cards: one can be used for anything, while the other is limited. Also, food stamps and health insurance cost radically more to oversee and implement, so you get less out of it than you put into it. The generalized, low-cost version works better.

I'm absolutely convinced that forcing people to be consumers to a particular industry is wrong. I'm strongly confident (though not absolutely) it should be unconstitutional, but I'm a little doubtful that it actually will be declared unconstitutional. I far prefer it simply lose out in Congress, preventing it from consideration in the Supreme Court. But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it'd be better for it to be considered by SCOTUS while it has this kind of chance of being declared unconstitutional rather than in some socialist future where opposition to centralized economic control has collapsed.

Save us from government's good intentions!