At Reason.com, Peter Suderman quotes Erwin Chemerinsky:

Therefore, even though it appears that some people are abstaining, in fact everyone is already making an “affirmative” active economic choice to purchase health insurance or to self-insure. The Affordable Care Act regulates this economic activity by imposing a penalty on those who choose to self-insure in order to create a system in which all can have access to the healthcare system.

► Will partisanship shape the healthcare ruling?

What Chemerinsky is saying is that self-insuring has become a criminal act under ObamaCare. Another way of looking at that is offered by Reason.com commenter Robert Arvanitis:

I may choose to buy a car for cash, or borrow, or lease…

Likewise, I may buy healthcare for cash as and when the need arises, or else I may level out the cost for a fixed premium PLUS the cost of my risk aversion. And if I do insure, I insist the cost reflect my own risks, and are not a mere scheme to hide subsidies.

Of course no one supporting ObamaCare has made any bones about this—it’s always been about nothing less than declaring intolerable the act of paying for your own health care as you make use of it. Other people not only have a “right” to health care, they also have a right to loot your paycheck to get it—and the authority to make that happen is “obviously” in the Constitution.

Any politician who supports such a system, whether at the federal level or state, must be removed from whatever office he now holds, and prevented from holding any office in the future—down to and including speed bump. Nor are there degrees of acceptability, making a politician who opposes it as a federal program but claims credit for one exactly like it enacted while he was a state governor, more acceptable than one who has pushed it on the federal level. The difference in hazard between the two is insufficient to justify making a distinction.

The Supreme Court must strike down ObamaCare’s individual mandate at the very least, and preferably all of it. With prejudice. The legitimacy of the federal government derives solely and directly from its adherence to the processes set forth in the Constitution. Failure to reassert limits on the power of Congress in this matter would leave the American people with no reason to pretend there is even a shred of legitimacy left.
 

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