Did the Founding Fathers support the idea of government-run healthcare? The question seems to answer itself. The Founders had just thrown off the shackles of big government, putting in its place a limited federal government with explicitly defined powers, none of which involved medical care.

However, some ObamaCare supporters have recently seized upon a heretofore obscure 1798 act of Congress to argue that the men who shaped the Constitution and served in the nascent federal government would indeed have favored some form of universal health insurance. That law, “An Act for the Relief of Sick and Disabled Seamen,” required ships’ captains to garnish a small portion of the wages of their sailors and remit those taxes to the customs collector upon entering a U.S. port. That revenue was then to be used “to provide for the temporary relief and maintenance of sick, or disabled seamen.” The act created the Marine Hospital Fund to operate this network of medical facilities.

Rick Ungar, blogging at Forbes, makes much of this, arguing that it disproves the notion advanced by ObamaCare opponents that the Constitution does not authorize the government to mandate that individuals purchase health insurance:

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