Every state has unique requirements and Congress has never superseded them with a national health law.
2) Federal law has in fact controlled many aspects of health insurance plans, particularly employer-sponsored health plans, for decades. The elephant in the room is ERISA, passed 1974, but of course there's also Obamacare.
I don't know the full history about why you cant buy health insurance across state lines, but I think it's a blend of different state's regulations and not wanting to be beholden to interstate commerce clause regulations (ironically, the provision that was used to justify the ACA mandatory insured or penalty as a tax ruling.)
I never have nor will understood how the interstate commerce clause was used to justify the ACA "tax". The mandate is effectively compelling intrastate commerce (I know of know interstate medical insurance available) under the guise of regulation interstate commerce. This seems to fly against the letter and intent of the constitution in regards to interstate commerce.
The Affordable Care Act's requirement that certain individuals pay a financial penalty for not obtaining health insurance may reasonably be characterized as a tax. Because the Constitution permits such a tax, it is not our role to forbid it, or to pass upon its wisdom or fairness.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Federation_of_Indepen...
If you don’t like it, changed it: they’re called amendments.
Yes I know the historical reasons the US is the way it is but it is the 21st century now not the 18th
Saying the Interstate Commerce cases ignore the Constitution is reductive. Many IC-buttresssd laws involve carrots, e.g. highway funds. In other cases, single-state violators are perfectly legal. They just don’t make economy sense in a connection national economy.
You don’t want insurance to be like banking where banks domicile in “friendly” places like Delaware and South Dakota. Health insurance is awful enough.
Republicans want this so that high cost, low benefit plans can be hocked to less sophisticated people. The more right wing folks also like shared responsibility pools where the members are the insurers, and the organizers take overhead. Obamacare put most of these out of business.
Most conservatives are, well just conservative people who have a point of view. They don't call the shots though.
The US has by far the strongest free speech protections of any nation. It’s not really that surprising that the Supreme Court ruled that forming a corporation doesn’t annual free speech rights.
People can still donate their money, but to allow corporations, which are explicitly created to concentrate money and power, to donate money to politicians, that has a massive impact.
The people working for a company can have free speech without the company itself having free speech. In fact, some companies having a tendency to curb free speech through contracts denying people the right to talk about certain things.
And then there's also the issue that corporations get used to dodge personal liability by their owners and employees. If corporations don't share their people's responsibilities, why should they get to share their speech? Corporations are very explicitly a separate entity, and not merely the group of people working for it.
Nope. It is about prohibiting corporations and unions from using their funds to make independent expenditures for speech [1].
> In fact, some companies having a tendency to curb free speech through contracts denying people the right to talk about certain things.
Your example is strange. Such contracts are not imposed by the government.
> corporations get used to dodge personal liability by their owners and employees
You should clarify what you mean by this and how it is relevant to the issue at hand.
My argument is that only people are people. Corporations are explicitly different, and there's no good reason for corporations to automatically have the same rights as people.
The whole problem with Citizens United is that it uses the 1st amendment right of free speech for people to grant corporations the right to make political donations, which makes no sense. Corporations are not people and donations are not speech. It's no wonder that this leads to a political system that represents corporations more than it represents people.
I apologize if I'm rehashing some points covered a million times. What you described sounds prima facie reasonable, but then doesn't it follow that organizations should speak with the voices of people they're grouping together? So using your example, NYT should speak with the voices of its C-suite, or board, or investors - and not with the voices of its 4300 employees[0]! That is, the "voice" should not scale with the company size. Scaling like this sounds like cheating to me, given that companies are mostly made of people who have no say in anything.
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[0] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/192894/number-of-employe...
Usually those kind of generalisations are wrong and short-sighted, and I generally want to give people the benefit of the doubt, but at this point it's getting rather hard to deny.
I'm willing to believe that even the Bush jr. administration honestly believed in what they were doing, but everything that happened since then, from the way they tried to sabotage Obama in every possible way, and then electing Trump and the way they're trying to protect him, it's getting hard to deny that their primary priorities are apparently screwing poor and black people and women, ensuring corporate profits for their backers at any cost, and protecting anyone from their own party and screwing the other party, no matter how much it may hurt the country or the world.
> Insurance firms in each state are protected from interstate competition by the federal McCarran-Ferguson Act (1945)
Basically this is Congress using its interstate commerce power, in this case to prohibit certain types of commerce.
I find your choice of "abdicate" confusing. There is no Constitutional obligation that Congress act in a particular manner on this issue so that word choice just seems out of place to me. It suggests "not doing something" as opposed to "doing the wrong thing".
I think you are advocating that Congress take affirmative action to enable interstate insurance transactions and to preempt state regulations in this area. That seems reasonable to me.
No, I don't think so. The Commerce Clause gives Congress the power to regulate insurance. McCarran-Ferguson is Congress explicitly delegating insurance regulation to the states. Delegating regulation to the states is not a power derived from the Congress clause.
IANAL and I'm not sure exactly what the legal theory underpinning McCarran-Ferguson is. I believe it's probably an implied power.
> that word choice just seems out of place
Maybe abdicate isn't the best word choice, but what I was trying to impart is that when the SCOTUS decided that insurance does indeed fall under the purview of Federal law by way of the Commerce Clause, that Congress had to explicitly say that "Federal law does NOT apply to insurance." That's a sort of abdication to me:
SCOTUS: Hey Congress, it's your job to regulate insurance per the Commerce Clause. That means things like the Sherman Act apply to insurance too.
Congress: Oh, we don't want that. Let's pass McCarran-Ferguson to exempt insurance from Federal law so that the states can regulate it as they see fit.
Why can't health insurance companies sell across state lines right now?