Yes...? We're not talking about the "private health insurance market", we're talking about purchasing of health insurance by individuals who wouldn't otherwise. The government wants to create that market.
No, it doesn't. You have a fundamental misunderstanding of the issues at play here. The Government isn't creating a market so that it can regulate it; it is regulating a market that already exists, which is surely within the scope of its powers.
The question is, which market? The market ultimately being regulated here is the health
care market, a highly-regulated market that almost
everyone will, at some point, enter, whether they like it or not. And the way in which it is being regulated is by establishing the means by which it will be payed for.
Immediately, one could ask, "By what right?" And the answer is that the health care market almost
certainly represents interstate commerce, if you consider that most people would not buy health insurance knowing that insurance companies couldn't discriminate based on preexisting conditions. If you doubt this, that's fine, though that would put you in very limited company.
Furthermore, the very idea that ERs are required to treat even patients who cannot pay is a government-created market (regardless of whether it's morally right or not).
No, it's the Government doing it's damn job to consider externalities that a private market most likely would not. It isn't
creating a market, it's
regulating a market that already exists, which is within its power to do.
Apparently, 4 Justices found your argument pretty weak last week (we have no idea what Thomas thought). You can't say "everyone already does" participate in the market by virtue of the fact that they eventually will. If that is indeed a legally logical approach, why then cannot the government mandate burial insurance? I thought this was a good argument by Alito. Same with broccoli by Scalia.
It was a
terrible argument by Scalia. It was as though these justices couldn't even be bothered to actually read what they were supposed to be considering. To what extent are they comparable?
The difference isn't in the way the argument is constructed, but rather in the impact of the absence of a mandate. In the case of health insurance, the absence of the mandate has a profound direct impact on commerce between the states, while failure to buy burial insurance or broccoli doesn't.
But in a broader sense, it has less to do with the fact that everyone
will at some time enter the health care market, but rather that they
are entering it. In any given 5-year period, something like 95% of the population is in the market, whether by seeing their doctor for a physical, or picking up a prescription.
To pretend as though the burial insurance or broccoli arguments are somehow comparable is either disingenuous or foolish. I'll let you choose which.