Senator Casey: “There is no provision in the constitution, but healthcare mandates are still constitutional”

  Senator Bob Casey, Democrat from Pennsylvania, was asked a simple question: “Where does the Constitution give Congress that authority, for an individual health care mandate?” While this should be a simple question it appears to be vexing to most members of congress who have struggled to answer the question correctly.

  We can now add Senator Casey’s name to the list of senators that can not answer this question. His response to the question was, “well, I don’t know if there’s a specific constitutional provision,” but then he made his point that mandating healthcare  coverage was constitutional and cited Medicare and Medicaid as examples of the constitutionality of the mandates. 

  He is using these two government programs as precedent for forcing the American people to buy a service, but there is no precedent for such a move. Here is what the Congressional Budget Office said in 1994– the last time we had to endure this debacle:

The government has never required people to buy any good or service as a condition of lawful residence in the United States,” the CBO analysis said. “An individual mandate would have two features that, in combination, would make it unique. First, it would impose a duty on individuals as members of society. Second, it would require people to purchase a specific service that would be heavily regulated by the federal government

  There have been several senators asked about the question of the constitutionality of healthcare mandates and nobody has been able to give the proper answer. Some have cited the “general welfare” clause, while others have cited the “commerce clause”, and still others have made clauses up out of thin air that are not in the constitution. But none of them have answered the question correctly. Senator Casey may have come the closest to answering the question correctly when he admitted that there is no specific provision in the constitution, but then he failed the test once he claimed the measure was still constitutional. 

  The answer to the question is, there is no provision or clause that gives congress or the president the authority to mandate Americans to buy healthcare coverage.

  See how simple that question was?