The American Debate: Look who just backed the health-care law

As scintillating as the Joe Paterno and Herman Cain stories may be, I prefer to note the stunning federal appeals court ruling released in Washington on Tuesday.

Don't snore. This story may lack the heat of scandal, but it's about your health insurance - and the new federal reform law that requires you to buy some. It's about how a Ronald Reagan appointee used ironclad, fact-based logic to uphold President Obama's signature achievement.

I bet I have your attention now.

Yes, folks, for the second time in five months a respected federal appeals judge with a long conservative pedigree has exercised his swing vote to rule that the reform law, particularly its requirement that people buy health coverage, is well within the framework of the U.S. Constitution. So says Laurence Silberman, whom Obama-hating conservatives have long hailed as a top judicial intellect.

They figured he would strike down "Obamacare" (as they call it), and thus influence the five Republican appointees on the U.S. Supreme Court, which may well rule on the reform laws in the middle of the 2012 presidential campaign. They figured a thumbs-down verdict from Silberman would carry extra weight, since he is the senior judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, arguably the most prestigious of all the federal benches.

But Silberman refused to buy the conservative argument that people should have the "freedom" to forgo health coverage and to run up medical bills on the public dime when they do get sick.

Instead, Silberman articulated the obvious: The U.S. Constitution gives Congress the right to regulate interstate commerce, health care is interstate commerce, and the uninsured adversely affect interstate commerce by shifting their costs to everyone else. Therefore, he ruled, the government has the right to compel the uninsured to get with the program.

Writing the court's 2-1 opinion, he said:

"[T]he health insurance market is a rather unique one, both because virtually everyone will enter or affect it, and because the uninsured inflict a disproportionate harm on the rest of the market as a result of their later consumption of health care services."

Therefore, "The right to be free from federal regulation is not absolute, and yields to the imperative that Congress be free to forge national solutions to national problems."