by Jeremy Leaming
The arguments lodged against the health care law’s minimum coverage provision have been described by constitutional law experts as radically libertarian or terribly misguided. But during oral argument before the Supreme Court, the right-wing bloc, led by Justice Antonin Scalia appeared eager to en
dorse the challengers’ arguments against an integral provision of the Affordable Care Act. We’ll likely know sometime in June whether the high court’s conservative wing was indeed persuaded by the challengers’ arguments.
In a guest post for Balkinization, Rob Weiner, a partner at Arnold & Porter LLP, provides greater detail to the attacks on the health care law’s minimum coverage provision writing they “reflect an effort to codify nostalgia as legal doctrine.”
The “most obvious throwback” is the liberty argument, Weiner says. Opponents of the health care law attack the minimum coverage provision as a serious affront to liberty. The minimum coverage provision will require some Americans starting in 2014 to purchase a minimum amount of health care insurance.
The affront to liberty, Weiner writes “is the right not to obtain insurance – by any other name, freedom to contract.”
In the Supreme Court’s 1905 Lochner v New York opinion, the majority held that the freedom to contract was “part of the liberty of the individual protected by the Fourteenth Amendment of the Federal Constitution.” Weiner notes that Lochner thus barred New York from regulating conditions of some workers. And in its 1923 Adkins v. Children’s Hospital opinion, the Court relied on this so-called freedom to contract to protect employers from adhering to the minimum wage law.
