Noted Constitutional law scholar Richard A. Epstein says Harry Reid’s ObamaCare bill is unconstitutional.
“The Supreme Court’s basic constitutional requirement is that any firm in a regulated market be allowed to recover a risk-adjusted competitive rate of return on its accumulated capital investment. See Duquesne Light Co. v. Barasch, 488 U.S. 299 (1988).
“The Reid Bill emphatically fails this test by imposing sharp limitations on the ability of health-insurance companies to raise fees or exclude coverage. Moreover, the Reid Bill forces on these regulated firms onerous new obligations that they will not be able to fund from their various revenue sources. The squeeze between the constricted revenue sources allowable under the Reid Bill and the extensive new legal obligations it imposes is likely to result in massive cash crunch that could drive the firms that serve the individual and small-group health-insurance markets into bankruptcy.”
I’m not even remotely enough of a Constitutional Law scholar to know if his argument is correction, but Epstein is certainly one of the heavy-hitters in that field, and his book Takings is is one of the most important works on the subject of the federal government exceeding its constitutional power in the last quarter century. And he actually appears to have read the bill, which probably puts him one up on, oh, more than half the Senators voting on it…