Conservatives and Liberals Agree: Medicare for All Would Be Constitutional

Miles Mogulescu | The Huffington Post | April 3, 2012

Conservatives and liberals may disagree about the constitutionality of the individual mandate requiring all uninsured Americans to buy health insurance from private companies or pay a penalty to the IRS. But there is no debate about whether single-payer Medicare For All would be constitutional. No one -- not even the most hard core, right-wing libertarians -- disputes that the federal government has the constitutional authority to tax all Americans to pay for Medicare-style health insurance for all, as it pays for Medicare for everyone over 65.

Indeed the Republican Attorney General of Louisiana, Buddy Caldwell -- who is one of the attorneys general opposing the Affordable Care Act ("ACA") in the Supreme Court -- is against the Individual Mandate because it props up the private health insurance agency and he prefers single payer. "Insurance companies are the absolute worst people to handle this kind of business," Caldwell said last week outside the Supreme Court. "If you have a hurricane come up the east coast, the first one that's going to leave when they gotta pay too many claims is an insurance company." Caldwell went on to endorse the idea of a government backed single-payer system as "a whole lot better" than mandating private insurance...