Health insurance and car insurance: Obama's false analogy

There was a lot for people to like in President Obama's health care reform speech to the joint session of Congress last evening, despite the fact that Obama's proposals have not yet been reduced to writing or introduced as a detailed single piece of legislation which could be scored by OMB and CBO to see whether it is really deficit neutral as Obama promised it will be. Why did he have to spoil the moment by arguing for adoption of his proposals based on a false analogy between health insurance and car insurance?

Obama's present proposal, contrary to promises he made earlier in the presidential campaign and in the Congressional health care debate, will include mandates on both individuals and employers forcing them either to provide health insurance coverage or pay steep fines for not doing it. In order to justify this new federal tax on the unwilling, to help pay for the insurance company mandate to eliminate preexisting condition exclusions from health insurance policies, the president compared health insurance to car insurance:

"That's why, under my plan, individuals will be required to carry basic health insurance -- just as most states require you to carry auto insurance. Likewise, businesses will be required to either offer their workers health care, or chip in to help cover the cost of their workers."

A fleeting moment's thought points to the obvious falsehood in President Obama's analogy. In our cities, millions of people live their whole lives without owning cars or even having driver's licenses. They ride the bus or subway to work, walk to the store, bike to church, take taxis when they need to. Consequently, they are not required either to have or to pay for car insurance. Driving is a privilege, not a right, and it is that fact which makes it legal for states to impose the condition of having minimum required insurance coverage in order to exercise the privilege.

Unlike driving, life is a right, not a privilege. America's Declaration of Independence sets it out plainly: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness - ... " How can President Obama and Congress propose to condition a citizen's unalienable right to life on the purchase of a government mandated health insurance policy?

Well, there is no easy answer to that question, and I predict that if a mandate for individual coverage is part of final legislation, then there will be constitutional challenges to the legislation, and the President's precious program will be tied up in the courts for years to come. Does anyone believe the cost of paying government attorneys to defend the constitutionality of health care reform legislation including a mandate for individual coverage will be included in OMB's and CBO's scoring of the legislation?


Source