Quote:
Originally Posted by spence
It matters because if people are going to use health care they are going to participate in interstate commerce regardless if they're paying for it or not. If everybody is participating then there's no real argument that someone can really opt out.
Jim, I actually read the entire transcript from yesterday...have you?
-spence
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No, most health CARE is not interstate. Some products that are used may have crossed state borders and such products can be "regulated"--whatever that means. But the actual care, unless the hospital is straddling a border, is usually intrastate, not interstate. A great deal of health care is only consultative with no products being used or exchanged. In any event, the B R O A D, expansive, "interpretation" of "commerce," "regulate,." and "interstate," is not justified in the text of the Constitution, neither was it intended according to the extant documents of ratification and explanations given in letters and statements later by the founders. But that is, apparently, not important to you. Valid arguments about what such broad interpretation and the power it grants to the Central Government, and the fundamental change in the relation between the citizen and the government also seem to be of no importance to you. What seems to matter only is a solution to a problem regardless of what precedence that solution gives to government to "regulate" every aspect of our lives. No matter even that much of the problem is created by government in the first place--the same government that presumes to fix it. Nor does it seem to matter to you that the solution, along with the train of solutions over the past 70 years, destroys the foundation, the structure of limited, representative government built specifically to ensure individual lilberty, and replaces the structure with an amorphous, unlimited administrative apparatus. An apparatus that will replace individual sovereignty and more "efficiently" solve all our "collective" problems. I ask again, of what use are 50 different State governments and an unadhered to Constitution to such an apparatus?