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The Constitutionality of Mandates to Purchase Health Insurance

Executive Summary

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2021

Mark A. Hall
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Extract

Many proposals to reform health care finance and delivery require individuals or private employers to pay for private health insurance. Senators Ron Wyden and Robert Bennett’s Healthy Americans Act, for instance, would require every adult person who is not covered by a public program to purchase health insurance. Similarly, President Obama’s campaign proposal requires that parents arrange for coverage of their minor children and that all but small employers pay a tax if they do not provide their workers health insurance.

This paper addresses the constitutionality of such proposals. Compulsory health insurance might raise constitutional concerns because there is no existing social legislation that serves as a perfect legal analogy to an individual mandate for private health insurance. Insurance mandates are familiar in other contexts, such as automobile liability, but they present an easier case for constitutionality because they are a condition of exercising a privilege, such as driving a car.

Type
JLME Supplement
Information
Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics , Volume 37 , Issue S2 , Fall 2009 , pp. 38 - 50
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics 2009

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References

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