[Vision2020] Mandatory Health Insurance and Our Founding Fathers

[Tom Hansen]

Courtesy of today's (July 1, 2012) Spokesman-Review.

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Use care when invoking Founding Fathers
BOISE – Idaho U.S. Rep. Raul Labrador reacted to Thursday’s U.S. Supreme Court decision on health care reform by saying the nation’s Founding Fathers would be “appalled.”

He wasn’t the only one invoking the Founding Fathers in the wake of the controversial decision. But David Adler, constitutional scholar and director of the Andrus Center for Public Policy at Boise State University, said a look at history suggests a different conclusion.

“In the 1790s, the Congress on two different occasions passed statutes that imposed health insurance mandates,” Adler said.

The first required the shipping industry to purchase insurance for its sailors to cover prescription drugs and visits to the doctor, Adler said, due to sailors’ frequent injuries and illnesses from scurvy and other causes.

“And then a few years later, because it was clear that that statute didn’t go far enough, Congress passed yet another statute to require ‘seamen,’ or sailors, to purchase hospital insurance. So those are two examples of an individual mandate in the health care industry” back in the 1790s.

The timing is key, because Congress at the time was “filled with people who wrote the Constitution,” Adler said.

Labrador’s statement on the court decision said, “The decision by the Supreme Court of the United States that Obamacare is constitutional undermines the concept of limited government embodied by the Tenth Amendment. Our founding fathers would be appalled that their vision of a limited government no longer exists.”

Adler said, “I think it’s hard to make that assertion.”

The Supreme Court even recognized in 1803 that decisions from early congresses that interpreted the Constitution carried extra weight.

In an 1803 case, Stuart vs. Laird, the high court wrote, “An interpretation of a constitutional provision by a congress contemporaneous with its framing is too strong and obstinate to be controlled.”

“That’s called the Rule of Stuart vs. Laird,” Adler said. “It’s never been overturned. … When an early Congress … interpreted the Constitution, its interpretation of the Constitution carried great weight, precisely because so many of the framers of the Constitution were sitting in Congress.”

Adler, former director of the University of Idaho’s McClure Center and now Cecil Andrus professor of public affairs at BSU, said, “It’s often the case that lots of people make assertions about what the framers intended, and there’s a certain veneration for the framers’ intentions among scholars and others. And that’s a well-held approach provided you can find some support for what the framers said about an issue. But when you engage in a discussion saying that the framers would have been appalled by this or that without any evidence, then it seems to be just an exercise in politics, trying to draw the majesty of the framers into your argument.”

He added, “Scholars wouldn’t do that. … Politicians might.”

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Seeya round town, Moscow.

Tom Hansen
Moscow, Idaho

"If not us, who?
If not now, when?"

- Unknown


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