Your points are scattered and hard to follow.

Let me see if I got it right:

1.) Because hospitals have to buy equipment and services from out-of-state, healthcare is therefore interstate commerce and a valid area for federal regulation.

2.) Health care is too expense for the average man, therefore government should pay for it.

I’m not even going to post counter-points.

This isn’t meant as a joke. The Founding fathers knew full well that the world of 1590 was different from that of 1790, and that the world of 1690 was MORE unlike that of 1790 that 1690 was in relation to 1590. For one thing, the very idea of the nation-state had been more or less invented at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.

They could not anticipate, but they apprehended, that progress in medicine would be exponential. In 1790, very little could be done for the gravely ill save making them comfortable with whiskey, the analgesic of the time, and setting the bones of the injured, and the doctor could be paid in kind.

Medicine was trivial commerce at that time. But today, merely to survive, hospitals and doctors must engage in interstate commerce. If they fail as private (for profit or not for profit businesses) then our health care system will regress to that of the erstwhile Third World…while in India and China today, medicine is gradually progressing to First World standards, and many Americans go to India and Thailand for medical care that’s unaffordable in the US.

This means that Americans will die on the streets in front of emergency rooms once the informal understanding that “if you are gravely ill, you will get the best care we can provide and then we’ll talk about your bill” is canceled…once ACA is labeled “unconstitutional” by that clown Scalia and the rest of the conservatives.

A man in constant pain from cancer is NOT a Lockean subject able to make choices. Eventually, you a society made up of sick and addicted zombies. Night of the Living Dead.

In order to balance their books and keep functioning, hospitals are now retaining debt collectors dressed as caregivers who demand payment BEFORE the dying and women in labor are assisted!

THIS IS COMMERCE, PEOPLE. It is INTERSTATE commerce. The hospitals need the money to pay suppliers out of state and abroad.

United States Constitution, Sec I/8: Powers of Congress: “To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes”.

Regulate as in rule according to the Latin root.

Commerce as in maxing out your credit card so your kid isn’t left to die on a gurney.

Regulate as in control. Kick ass. Take names.

Commerce as in paying the out of state bond holders of the hospital. Commerce as in paying doctors to go to Harvard for a residency so they can save lives.

The Chicago hospital has to pay the software firm in Palo Alto. It has to pay the doctor who lives in Wisconsin. It has to pay the Chinese manufacturer of the X ray machine (foreign nations). All commerce today save in the Arcadian fantasies of losers, is global. If you go local your kids die.

Damn your freedom and damn your sniveling Liberty. In 1756, Liberty was the Liberty to serve in a Militia to defend homes in the wilderness against the French and their savage Huron allies. YOU want the freedom to be “left alone” like children who want to snivel and play, singing weak songs of the doomed, until the lights fail.

Whence this childish belief that it’s the government’s job to stay out of the way of white male id? Whence this fear of a government partially consisting of nonwhite and non male authority telling little Antonin Scalia to eat his broccoli?

“Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.”

Who wrote that?

Some French guy?

No, a Founding Father wrote it (Alexander Hamilton, Federalist Papers.)

The Sixties saw the dawn of modern conservatism in which it isn’t fashionable to talk of the passions of certain men and the need to regulate them. Entirely too many white males took away the illusion that they had no unseemly “passions” that needed to be regulated, ruled, by government, and “government was the problem” unless it was using its police and military power to defend white guys against the Other.

Ted Nugent (who I sat next to in high school) is what results: a completely indisciplined man, a pig, who calls for anyone who doesn’t look like him or agree with him to be destroyed because ever since he got thrown out of St Viator, he’s never been able to manage his passions. The very idea that he should do so is anathema to him.

Now we’re supposed to cater to the passions of people who can’t be bothered to get health insurance while they make the black, the brown and the university student jump through hoops to vote with Draconian ID laws passed to ensure a Republican majority in 2012.

The negative passions, the sloth, of people who want to homeschool (some of whom believe that this means parking their kids in front of TV).

Because these clowns have in fact no way to regulate, self-rule, their passions, their favorite argument is the slippery slope: give them an inch, and they will (surely) take a mile (boys). The fallacious use of slippery slope is psychological transfer. It’s the fantasy that if we allow x, all sorts of ys will immediately ensue when in fact it is hard to get new laws passed.

If for some reason, eating broccoli turned out to be the only way to save the Republic, a patriot would eat broccoli, and a patriot would support a law “forcing” people to eat broccoli.

And note that the language of weakness, the idea of being “forced to do” is strange to the Augustan prose of the Founding Fathers. They simply never say that they might be “forced” to do anything like children.

This is because they subscribed to Hobbes’ and Locke’s doctrine of natural right of resistance, a right that cannot be coded. In it, beyond law, as John Rambo, you already have the right to disobey any law you like, but must realize that the Sovereign has a matching right to punish you. Government starts when you abandon the exercise of the natural right, not by being forced to do anything, but by choosing the fetters of constraint.