How Baseball Will Impact the Mandatory Purchase of Health Care Insurance

It is for good reason that baseball is, or at least was until football surpassed it in popularity, the National Pastime.

A Supreme Court ruling in 1922 supporting baseball’s reserve clause will have an impact on the Health Care Bill that makes purchasing health care mandatory.

Supporters of the Health Care Bill claim that Congress has the power to regulate and tax an individual’s decision to participate in interstate commerce.

Those opposed take the position that health insurance does not involve substantial interstate commerce.  Congress had no right to require individuals to enter a marketplace and buy a particular good or service.

If the government can force an individual to purchase health care insurance, then it can force her to purchase a new car in order to help the economy, or to purchase only sugar substitutes to decrease weight or to be forced to be vaccinated against sexually transmitted diseases.

Back to the former national pastime.

In 1922, Supreme Court Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote that baseball did not constitute interstate commerce.  He reasoned that although its teams and players crossed state lines to play games, it was personal effort that was involved. Personal effort is not related to production, which, he reasoned, is not a subject of commerce.

Holmes made a landmark ruling that applies directly to the requirement that everyone must purchase health care insurance. When the New York Yankees go to Massachusetts to play the Boston Red Sox, they are involved in interstate commerce, but Holmes political ruling does not support the truth.

Holmes concluded that since baseball was the subject of interstate personal effort and not interstate commerce, it was not subject to the Sherman Anti Trust Law.

The ruling meant that the reserve clause was not collusion between and among baseball owners.

Those who oppose being forced to purchase health care insurance might think that the 1922 Supreme Court decision will strike down that provision, but they are naïve and unrealistic.

Those in power will act with impunity. To quote Alice from Alice in Wonderland:

"

Nothing would be what it is because everything would be what it isn't. And contrary-wise, what it is it wouldn't be and what it wouldn't be, it would. You see?

"

In 1972, in the Curt Flood suit against the reserve clause, the Supreme Court conceded that baseball was as much interstate commerce as the other professional sports to which the Court had refused to extend the antitrust exemption.

Justice William Douglas stated, “Baseball is today big business that is packaged with beer, with broadcasting, and with other industries. The unbroken silence of Congress should not prevent us from correcting our own mistakes.”

Of course, Curt Flood lost his case. Baseball is still exempt from the Sherman Antitrust Act.