Health care challenge all about politics
Argue all you want that the nation can’t afford the massive health care overhaul that President Obama signed into law Tuesday.
There’s good reason to disbelieve the contention of Obama and the Democrats who pushed the 2,400-page bill through Congress that this new entitlement won’t add to the country’s crippling debt.
The legal arguments, however, being made by Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, Lt. Gov. Phil Bryant and their GOP compatriots at statehouses in at at least a dozen other states is just as hard to swallow.
Barbour and Bryant have said the health care law is unconstitutional because it requires most Americans to carry health insurance starting in 2014. The same argument was made in a lawsuit filed in Florida Tuesday by 13 attorneys general — 12 of them Republicans. Barbour intends for Mississippi to join that challenge.
It’s an odd case for these states to make considering every one of them, including Mississippi, appears to have no constitutional qualms about the mandate it puts on motorists to carry liability auto insurance.
Greenwood Commonwealth
3/14/10
Magnolia Tribune
