Richard Ralston: Obamacare contorts the Constitution OCRegister
The writers of the U.S. Constitution were very much aware of the need to set firm and specific limits on the powers of government. Hundreds of years of the British monarchy, and study of the failures of republican forms of government as far back as ancient Greece and Rome, informed their mature understanding of the perils of government power.
They were convinced that, unless government was restricted to only those few functions that government alone can perform, its powers would inexorably grow until it controlled everything in America. They were right.
In the recent debates that led to the passage of Obamacare, there was almost no reference to the existence of the Constitution, including the Bill of Rights. One exception was in the claim of constitutional authorization by reversing the clear meaning of promoting the "general welfare." The usual method of this reversal was to quote that one clause while ignoring the context of the rest of the document. Thusly, a nonexistent constitutional "right" to health care was asserted, which destroys the evident rights of physicians to manage their own practices, of patients to make their own health care and insurance decisions and of individuals to preserve or spend their own money.
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