No, No, No, No, No!!!!!

I cannot begin to tell you how insanely angry this makes me. 

Yesterday, judges on the appeals court hearing arguments on the constitutionality of Obamacare questioned the notion of the government’s legal ability to compel private citizens to purchase products under the Commerce Clause.  Here’s how one reporter described the government’s response:

“Katyal argued that healthcare is unique and unlike purchasing other products, like vegetables in a grocery store. “You can walk out of this courtroom and be hit by a bus,” he said. And if such a person has no insurance, a hospital and the taxpayers will have to pay the costs of his emergency care, he said.”

http://hotair.com/archives/2011/06/08/oh-my-federal-appeals-court-highly-skeptical-of-obamacare-in-todays-oral-arguments/

I may have missed it but so far I have never heard the correct and most obvious response to this argument:  Since when do hospitals and the taxpayers “have to” pay the costs for emergency care for people who are uninsured?  Is this requirement written in the Constitution somewhere?  No.  It is a completely false argument built on a completely contrived premise. 

This notion that other people are somehow responsible for services rendered to the uninsured is the culmination of many years of progressive brainwashing to the point where it seems almost everyone accepts this lie as fact.  If someone needs emergency care but has no insurance, the logical plan is that those people should be on the hook for the cost of that care.  This may mean they have to work out a long-term payment plan, but so be it.  That’s the consequence of not having insurance. So for those who complain about irresponsible people who shrug off the need for insurance, I say, “What better incentive could there be to encourage responsible behavior than the looming threat of an emergency room bill that you actually have to pay for yourself.”  Voila, problem solved.

Not only that, but two of the reasons emergency care is so outrageously expensive are tied to this easily fixable behavior.  People use the emergency room for minor illnesses precisely because they have no insurance and know they can’t be turned away.  If, by imposing real consequences, we motivate more people to buy insurance (and we definitely will), this will reduce the demand for emergency services and the cost to everyone else.  Secondly, by forcing people to take responsibility for the cost of their emergency care we would significantly reduce the unpaid costs that are spread to people and insurance companies who actually do pay, and this would further reduce healthcare costs.

So this falsehood that there is some sort of constitutionally imposed mandate for hospitals and taxpayers to pay for the uninsured is a lie of great consequence – purposely so.  It is, as we can see, the intentionally contrived basis for Obamacare.  Therefore we must never let it go unchallenged.