Obama's Company Store

By Bonnie Kristian

You load sixteen tons, what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt. Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go -- I owe my soul to the company store. "Sixteen Tons," made popular by Tennessee Ernie Ford

Written about the infamous (though perhaps mostly mythical) truck system of the West Virginia mining industry, "Sixteen Tons" is beginning to sound eerily like American health care, thanks to the upcoming individual mandate to purchase insurance, a prominent feature of Obamacare.


The mandate is income-based, specifically defining those who can afford to buy insurance as "people for whom the minimum policy will not cost more than 8 percent of their monthly income, and who make more than the poverty line." So how is it similar to the world of "Sixteen Tons"? Well, the basis of the truck system was payment of workers in a worthless substitute currency, coupled with compelling them to make artificially expensive purchases from the company store. On a grand scale, that looks rather like the health care racket which will implement the individual mandate in 2014: We are, in fact, required to be paid in a worthless substitute currency, and it's not hard to make the argument that the health care industry -- rife with busy lobbyists, high prices caused by years of government intervention, and support for the Obamacare legislation it undoubtedly helped craft -- has become the company store.
And though there are (at this point) no criminal charges which can be pressed if you buck the mandate, "[i]f this actually leads to a world in which large numbers of people don't buy insurance and tell the IRS to stuff it, you could see that change." I tend to think we will. In the meantime, however, we've been provided with another option to avoid the mandate: Make less money.
Yes, really.
A few days ago, an Obama administration official defended the income-based individual mandate in Obamacare by suggesting that those who objected could simply choose to lower their income. Solicitor General Neal Kumar Katyal made this argument to Sixth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in Cincinnati, where a panel of three judges listened to an appeal against the national health care law. Those who followed Katyal's suggestion, of course, would be left with less money and still no health insurance, thus exacerbating the very problem Obamacare was created to fix -- hardly a legislative triumph.
The inanity of this argument aside, however, there's a more problematic assumption at play, as one of the judges pointed out, honing "in on the word “regulate” in the Commerce Clause, [and] explaining that the word implies you're in a market. ‘You don’t put them in the market to regulate them,’ he said.'" Indeed, through an impressively twisted interpretation of the Commerce Clause, the federal government has grabbed the power to compel you to make a purchase or effectively lower your income if you refuse to make it. As another judge concluded, “I hear your arguments about the power of Congress under the Commerce Clause, and I’m having difficulty seeing how there is any limit to the power as you’re defining it.”
And it's that unlimited power which makes Obamacare's similarities to the company store that much more concerning: Whatever opponents of the truck system claimed, it is at least theoretically possible to escape an abusive employment contract when a private business is the entity involved. When it's the federal government, the situation’s not so simple. The option analogous to heading to another coal mine is expatriation, I suppose, but that has its own set of expenses and inconveniences -- to put it mildly.
Katyal has contended that congressional power is limited by the fact that health care as an industry is “unique,” but the slippery slope in his argument is easy to see: “[I]t just creates an opening for future Congresses to regulate all sorts of things by either a) arguing that a particular market is also special or b) finding a way to tie a given regulation to health care.” With gross distortions of the Commerce Clause like Wickard v. Filburn (1942) already on the books, that second option seems particularly likely. In that case, the Supreme Court ruled that the plan of Roscoe Filburn, a farmer, to grow and consume his own crop of wheat on his own property could be banned by the federal government because of the indirect effect his actions might have on the interstate wheat market, which came under the purview of the Commerce Clause. If such a tortured connection has been considered legal in the past, it is not difficult or unreasonable to imagine many new “health care-related” mandates appearing in years to come.
Fortunately, it’s not yet 2014 -- which means the mandate is not yet in play. As Mr. Filburn could no doubt tell you, the time to fight Obamacare’s mandate is now, not when it has already gone into effect and begun to set an unconstitutional precedent. The End the Mandate Act would do exactly that, and you can easily sign and share a petition to support it. Don’t let January 1, 2014, find your soul -- or 8% of your income -- owed to the company store.