Professor Says Obamacare Not Unconstitutional

By John Ostapkovich

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) – One of the major issues of the Presidential campaign has been Federal Health Care Reform, with Republicans vowing to repeal it, even though the Supreme Court upheld a major, controversial tenet.

One scholar says the Justices got it right.

Harvard Law Professor Einer Elhauge, author of Obamacare on Trial, considers the massive reform unwarranted without making the current system more efficient first, but he says the requirement that people buy health insurance was something that that Framers of the Constitution themselves did twice in the 1790's.

Elhauge also says this argument affects Social Security reform.

"The theory under which they tried to hold Obamacare unconstitutional would have raised constitutional problems for that whole array of mixed public-private sorts of reforms, and you know, I think some of them may be good policy, some of them bad policy, but they're not unconstitutional," Elhauge explains.

He says interpretation of the Commerce clause has grown along with the very nature of commerce.