Obamacare and the individual mandate does not force anyone “to buy a product,” according to the attorney who developed the legal defense of the legislation for President Obama, who also said that Americans oppose the law because they’re “afraid of change.”
“The challengers to the reform say that never before has the government forced people to buy a product,” Neal Katyal, who defended the legislation in appellate courts while serving as Obama’s acting solicitor general, said in an interview with AFP. “We’re not forcing you to buy a product. Health care is something all Americans consume, and you don’t know when you’re going to consume it.” Katyal added that “we are not regulating what people buy, we’re regulating how people finance it.”
Katyal also framed any decision overturning the law as judicial actvism, bordering on tyranny. “If the Supreme Court struck this down, I think that it wouldn’t just be about health care,” he said. “It would be the Supreme Court saying: ‘Look, we’ve got the power to really take decisions, move them off of the table of the American people, even in a democracy.'”
Public opinion polling since the passage of Obamacare suggest that the bill would be repealed by a wide margn if it were ever submitted to a popular vote. “Fifty-six percent [of likely voters] at least somewhat favor repeal of the health care law, including 46 percent who Strongly Favor it,” according to a Rasmussen poll taken last week.
“Whenever you have landmark legislation, people are afraid of change,” Katyal said when asked about the “visceral opposition” to Obamacare, before adding that it is “not appropriate is to take that policy debate and put it in front of the Supreme Court of the United States.”
