Many legal challenges to government-run health care may be in the works due to the unprecedented  - and in all likelihood unconstitutional - power Obamacare gives the federal government.

Various issues include the regulation of interstate commerce (probably the most abused power next to taxation); privacy concerns related to doctor-patient relations; and restrictions on the federal government’s authority to levy taxes.

In defining medical care as something to be ‘regulated’ by ‘interstate commerce’, Andrew P. Napolitano, the former New Jersey Superior Court judge and senior judicial analyst at the Fox News Channel, calls ObamaCare “unconstitutional at its core.”

Napolitano wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed: “The practice of medicine consists of the delivery of intimate services to the human body. In almost all instances, the delivery of medical services occurs in one place and does not move across interstate lines. One goes to a physician not to engage in commercial activity, as the Framers of the Constitution understood, but to improve one’s health. And the practice of medicine, much like public school safety, has been regulated by states for the past century.”

David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey, also writing in a Wall Street Journal article, addressed the question of patient-doctor privacy. Those opposing government-run medical care may oddly have Roe v Wade as support for their argument. They write, “If the government cannot proscribe — or even “unduly burden,” to use another of the Supreme Court’s analytical frameworks — access to abortion, how can it proscribe access to other medical procedures, including transplants, corrective or restorative surgeries, chemotherapy treatments, or a myriad of other health services that individuals may need or desire?”

Any government takeover of medicine would, by its design, take away choices from patients and doctors, and transfer decisions to bureaucrats instead. Rivkin and Casey continue: “This type of “burden” analysis will be especially problematic for a national health system because, in the health area, proper care often depends upon an individual’s unique physical and even genetic history and characteristics. One size clearly does not fit all, but that is the very essence of governmental regulation — to impose a regularity (if not uniformity) in the application of governmental power and the dispersal of its largess. Taking key decisions away from patient and physician, or otherwise limiting their available choices, will render any new system constitutionally vulnerable.”

The power to tax is the power to destroy.

In an interview with Newsmax, GOP Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, stated that reform marks “the first time in the 225-year history of our country” that the federal government has ordered its citizens to make a purchase. Citizens who opt not to obtain coverage will pay heavy tax penalties.

No place in the Constitution does it say the government can tax you if you don’t buy health insurance. Politicians say a direct tax on the uninsured is not an income tax, but is being called an “excise” tax.

However, an article at Investors.com explains the problem with this situation:

Sen. Baucus claims that the tax on the uninsured is an “indirect” excise tax - like the federal gasoline tax - that does not have to be apportioned. But Sen. Baucus appears to be in error. An excise tax is a tax on a “thing” (such as a commodity or a license). That is why an excise tax is classified as “indirect.”

People who choose not to buy insurance are not things.

They are people. And the tax is imposed directly on them in exactly the same way as a direct income tax, except that in this instance, the tax amount does not depend on the size of the person’s income.

Hopefully whatever version of Obamacare that eventually passes will be challenged and declared unconstitutional. And in so doing, hopefully Americans will raise questions and legal challenges to other proposals and laws already in existence. Only by The People pressuring politicians to put government back within its constitutional boundaries will we stop the erosion of liberty and help restore those already lost.