Health Care and the Spirit of the Constitution

Yesterday I posted a schematic version of the argument that the Obama health law is constitutional. I want to fill that out today by seeing how it fits in with the original spirit of the Constitution.

A big part of the framers’ motivation for writing a Constitution was to prevent destructive competition among the states. Congress was given the exclusive power to regulate interstate and foreign commerce so that states could not try to gain advantage by taxing imports from other states, or by imposing what today we would call non-tariff barriers: e.g., regulations that only goods from your own state will meet.

In the course of time, Congress decided that the regulation of interstate commerce should extend to such things as child labor, the health of workers, wages and hours generally, and later to protecting the environment. The argument for each was the same: if these matters were left solely to individual states, the latter would have an incentive to compete for business through a race to the bottom.

Consider child labor, for example. Young children were employed in factories (and for long days, 12-14 hours) because they were cheaper than adults. Individual states always had the power to regulate child labor – but doing so would make goods from that state more expensive than competing goods from other states where child labor was permitted. So Congress adopted a national child labor law, and the Supreme Court ultimately accepted it as constitutional.

Today, that is the situation with health care. The cost of health care is a major obstacle to doing business; and states cannot really afford to take it on. Massachusetts is trying – but it’s questionable if it would succeed in the long run if the federal government did not step in in 2014. So providing a national health care plan is a legitimate exercis of the commerce power.

Conservatives who are railing against the health care plan – and other federal regulation – are really not basing themselves on the Constitution. They are using the arguments made against the Constitution by the Antifederalists. That battle was lost in 1787.