The Constitutionality of Mandates to Purchase Health Insurance: A debate of opposing viewpoints as to whether an individual mandate to purchase insurance is constitutional with Louis Michael Seidman, Georgetown University Law Center, and David B. Rivkin, Jr., Baker Hostetler.
Bio
Nan Hunter
After graduating from Georgetown Law, Professor Hunter was a litigator and project director with the ACLU's national legal staff for nine years. She began her teaching career at Brooklyn Law School in 1990, and has been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School and the University of Miami Law School. From 1993 to 1996, she was Deputy General Counsel for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and later served as a member of the President's Advisory Commission on Consumer Protection and Quality in the Health Care Industry. During the Fall 2009 semester, Professor Hunter is the Interim Faculty Director of Georgetown’s O'Neill Institute for Global and National Health Law. Professor Hunter is a Fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine.
Professor Hunter teaches and writes in three areas: health law; state regulation of sexuality and gender; and procedure. Her most recent health law scholarship focuses on the intersection of that field with democratic theory and mechanisms of new governance. Professor Hunter's work in the area of sexuality and gender law has been published in many law journals, including the Michigan Law Review, the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, the Virginia Law Review, and the Georgetown Law Journal; and several of her articles have been selected for reprinting in anthologies. With William Eskridge, she wrote first casebook to conceptualize the field as embodying a dynamic relationship between state regulation, sexual practices, and gender norms. In the field of procedure, Professor Hunter is the author of The Power of Procedure, which has been widely adopted for law school use throughout the United States.
David B. Rivkin Jr.
David B. Rivkin, Jr., is a member of the firm Baker Hostetler, litigation, international and environmental groups. He has in-depth experience with various constitutional issues that are frequently implicated by federal regulatory statutes, including commerce clause-, appointments clause- and due process-related issues, as well as First and Tenth amendment-related matters.
Mr. Rivkin also has practiced in the area of public international law and has extensive experience in international arbitration and policy advocacy on a wide range of international and domestic issues, including treaty implementation, multilateral and unilateral sanctions, corporate law, environmental and energy matters (with an emphasis on policy, regulatory and enforcement issues).
Louis Michael Seidman
After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1971, Professor Seidman served as a law clerk for J. Skelly Wright of the D.C. Circuit and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. He then was a staff attorney with the D.C. Public Defender Service until joining the Georgetown Law Center faculty in 1976.
He teaches a variety of courses in the fields of constitutional and criminal law. He is co-author of a constitutional law casebook and the author of many articles concerning criminal justice and constitutional law. His most recent books are Silence and Freedom (Stanford 2007), Our Unsettled Constitution: A New Defense of Constitutionalism and Judicial Review (Yale 2001) and Equal Protection of the Laws (Foundation 2002).
Neither argument was particularly compelling to this viewer, both were too narrow, too trivial, too removed from the issue at hand. It may just be the nature of modern constitutional interpretation.
It is very difficult to make the case that the founding fathers would be in favor of coercing citizens to participate in any health care scheme. It is, well, unAmerican.
I think we can separate a dysfunctional health care system (65% paid for by government if one includes tax deductions for health insurance) from the mixed US socialist/free market economy in which resides.
Why is the US the only developed country that isn't able to get this right? We seems to have a dysfunctional form of Capitalism that is unable to accomplish what other nations are able to do.
The American/Capitalist tradition... Greed. Do you really believe that the government is looking after your wellbeing? Or that anyone can grow up to be president... or wealthy... let alone speak their minds? Wake up and quit buying into lobbyist rhetoric.
Do the math... it's just like network marketing... it sounds great until it's too late, and you've wasted real opportunities, because most of us are too lazy to do the math up front. Hmmm... isn't that how the Taliban got into power?
Healthcare mandates have already been tried in Massachusetts and costs have spiraled out of control. I fail to see what this is going to do to control costs. There are no price caps from what I read today, so how exactly is this going to make things more affordable. This is cop out by the Congress instead of giving us single payer.
member. 
