The individual mandate is a piece of Cake

Thinking about insurance mandates, and the limited and disputed analogy between requiring people to insure their cars and requiring them to insure their bodies (and minds), a lyric argument for the defense came to mind. It's from the group Cake:

So we think that we're important
And we think that we make sense
And we think there's something better on the other side of this fence
And you can soak your bread in gravy
You can soak your bread in soup
But the car that you are driving doesn't really belong to you
So you know you'll always be waiting
Always be waiting
For someone else to call .. (my italics, natch).

According to dream lore, horses stand in for our bodies in dreams, and in this century the family Camry stands in for the old gray mare. We own our cars (nonmetaphorically), and for most purposes, relative at least to other people, we "own" our bodies -- but both can incur costs, willy nilly, that others will have to bear if we are not insured. Failing to insure our mortal coils before we shuffle them off is quite as costly to our fellows as failing to insure our vehicles.

Because all of us are active in the healthcare market, ruled  the U.S. Court of Appeals, 6th Circuit, upholding the individual mandate in Thomas More Law Center v. Obama, "self-insuring" is as much an economic activity as purchasing insurance (the two concurring judges also held that the distinction between activity and inactivity as a focus of Congressional regulation has no Constitutional validity).   Judge Boyce Martin, writing the majority opinion, held: