Healthcare is not constitutional

President Franklin Pierce, writing in an 1854 veto statement of a bill to authorize the giving away of federal lands for the creation of state-funded mental hospitals, penned a timeless warning against the unconstitutionality of federal involvement in healthcare:

“I readily and, I trust, feelingly acknowledge the duty incumbent on us all as men and citizens, and as among the highest and holiest of our duties, to provide for those who, in the mysterious order of Providence, are subject to want and to disease of body of mind; but I cannot find any authority in the Constitution for making the Fed...