ObamaCare headed to Supreme Court

by Jonathan Ingram There’s good news for those of us who love liberty. Earlier this morning, the Supreme Court announced that it would hear the constitutional challenges to ObamaCare. These are the challenges brought by 26 states and the National Federation of Independent Business. The biggest question, of course, is whether the federal government can force everyone to purchase...

by Jonathan Ingram

There’s good news for those of us who love liberty. Earlier this morning, the Supreme Court announced that it would hear the constitutional challenges to ObamaCare. These are the challenges brought by 26 states and the National Federation of Independent Business. The biggest question, of course, is whether the federal government can force everyone to purchase government-approved health insurance. A federal appeals court found that mandate unconstitutional earlier this year.

As that court explained at the time, upholding the mandate would fundamentally transform the federal government into one of unlimited powers, despite the Constitution’s limited grant of enumerated powers and the requirement that federal powers have judicially enforceable limits. The Supreme Court must also decide whether to strike down the entire law if the individual mandate is ruled unconstitutional. Both sides agree that at least some other provisions — largely pertaining to new, burdensome health insurance regulations — must also fall if the mandate is found unconstitutional.

The Court will also decide whether ObamaCare’s massive expansion of Medicaid is unconstitutional. The states have argued that it coerces them to expand their Medicaid programs and pay a greater share in order to receive the federal funding they were already entitled to receive. In Illinois, this massive expansion is expected to cost the state over $10 billion by the end of the decade, with those costs rising even higher over the next decade.

It is no surprise, then, that ObamaCare remains hugely unpopular among taxpayers. Support for the law hit an all-time low last month and 55 percent of voters favor repeal, a position that has remained relatively constant since the law was first enacted.

ObamaCare’s one-size-fits-all model simply doesn’t work for Illinois. There are better ways to provide cheaper, high-quality health care tailored to the unique needs of Illinois residents. A great start is through providing tax incentives for individual ownership of insurance policies, eliminating unnecessary coverage mandates, and transforming Medicaid’s broken fee-for-service design into a sliding-scale premium assistance program paired with health savings accounts. These reforms would provide quality care and constrain the current system’s complex and burdensome bureaucracy. It’s time we use them.