Thursday, November 25, 2010

Can't Create Good Models from Bad Ideas

The new health care law requires each state to establish an operating health insurance benefit exchange by January 1, 2014. I have written elsewhere about why the exchanges will never work, unless their purpose is to drag us into single payer health care.

The exchange has created a real political phenomena -- forcing otherwise intelligent, principled people to try to design it so that it will do as little harm as possible. So greatly do these well-meaning people fear the establishment of federally-dictated exchanges that they are working overtime to design state-based models.

Even while doing so, they know the exchange is a bad idea.

Worse, yet, they feel impotent to do anything else. Decades of federal government overreach has convinced these voting citizens that they are at the mercy of Big Government. If Congress passed it, and Obama signed it...well, we have no other recourse but to build it. This idea that we are powerless to resist bad, unconstitutional law is far more worrisome than the law itself.

The Declaration of Independence states that the purpose of government is to protect unalienable rights. Our United States Constitution is a document of enumerated rights, where we the people, in order to preserve our unalienable rights, tell the federal government what it can and cannot do -- not the other way around.

Here is the right strategy concerned unconstitutional laws, such as that which forces states to establish health insurance exchanges: Refuse, and instruct members of Congress to repeal the law. If they don't make them pay.

If we have no power to resist the health insurance exchange, then we have no power to resist any federal mandates about anything: This is not freedom , it is servitude.

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