[MozarkDawg]

While one in a theoretical sense can imagine one’s own personal payroll taxes being “banked” for future SS/Medicare benefits to be drawed upon during retirement, in reality your taxes pay for someone else’s benefits. With the individual mandate, you are being forced to pay for your own health insurance even if you believe insurance is a wasteful/inefficient way to purchase medical care. So I don’t think the constitutionality of an individual mandate can be grounded in the same SC logic that led to their upholding the constitutionality of SS.

I'm thinking along your lines as well. Yes, reality is that today's workers pay for today's retirees, who paid for yesterday's retirees, etal, that was the pyramid, but *banked* as you put it. If I am mandated to purchase a government health insurance plan and never use it, never fall ill, never seek a physician's service, then I am most certainly paying for someone else entirely.

Unless Congress will own up and call this a tax, not insurance coverage, which is not under the purview of the U.S. Constitution, I don't see as how it can withstand challenge. Health care is not a right, it is a need, as much as water and food, lower on the priority chain, as it is imperative to survival that the body has water, food before a doctor's care. Insurance is not necessary to obtain that doctor's care, however, it is not a need at all. It is intellectually dishonest and an arrogant power trip that all these politicians are on.

[DrC]

“If I am mandated to purchase a government health insurance plan and never use it, never fall ill, never seek a physician’s service, then I am most certainly paying for someone else entirely.”

Well, this is the other extremely deceptive thing about a mandate. Given the restrictions on premiums based on age (i.e., they can vary by a factor of only 2:1 across age groups even though in reality there’s about a 5:1 or 6:1 ratio when you compare 60-65 yr olds vs. what companies would charge for 20-25 year olds), the mandate essentially is a tax on young people to pay for older people. So even if they use some benefits, the premiums they pay will regularly exceed their expected benefits by quite a lot. This is why actuaries predict that premiums for the young may more than double compared to the premiums they are charged today.

So the individual mandate (and employer mandate, for that matter) ARE taxes (and were scored by CBO as such back in 1994. So in agreeing to a mandate, Obama is flagrantly violating his pledge of no new taxes except on the top 5% of earners. But I think that pledge has long been forgotten (probably because by now anyone paying attention realizes Obama’s pledges are worthless).