Benefits Think Overheard: Is an individual health coverage mandate unconstitutional?

Yes, according to The Fund for Personal Liberty. The organization is backing a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of mandatory Medicare enrollment, and says it will do the same against a national individual mandate, should such a directive be a result of health care reform legislation.
 
“Any mandate to purchase health insurance is an invalid exercise of the powers granted to Congress by Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution of the United States,” says Kent Masterson Brown, lead counsel for the TFPL, adding that the fund “will promptly challenge the constitutionality of any mandate to purchase health insurance.” 
 
TFPL currently is underwriting and providing legal counsel in Hall v. Sebelius, an October 2008 lawsuit in which five senior citizens are challenging HHS and Social Security Administration policies forcing American citizens to participate in Medicare, Part A, the hospital insurance benefit program, or lose their Social Security benefits.
 
“The government is fighting tooth and nail to force all seniors into the Medicare system in spite of budgetary problems and long term predictions of Medicare’s financial insolvency,” says Brown.  “As it stands now, in order to leave Medicare and regain your freedom to choose any doctor who meets your healthcare needs, you must repay the government for any Social Security and Medicare, Part A benefits you received and forego all future Social Security benefits. Making one’s Social Security benefits dependant upon enrolling in Medicare Part A violates the language of the statutes and is unconstitutional.”
 
One of the plaintiffs, John Kraus of Plymouth Meeting, Pa., for instance, applied for Social Security retirement benefits in 2005 while declining the Medicare, Part A benefits.  He was forced into the Medicare program and has been trying to leave ever since. Although Kraus requested an administrative hearing at his local SSA office, the request lay dormant for more than three years, until after Kraus joined Hall v. Sebelius as a co-plaintiff.
 
Martha de Forest, TFPL executive director asserts: “A one-size-fits-all solution to our health care needs denies us our freedom to individually contract for insurance on terms acceptable to each of us or not at all.  To preserve health freedom, we must keep lawmakers and bureaucrats in check by restoring constitutional constraints that prohibit limits on personal liberty.”