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You may remember that back in January, House and Senate Republicans said they would put forward a bill that would allow North Carolinians to resist any individual health insurance mandates handed down from the federal government. (Click here for that post.)

As framed in the current discussion of the health care bill, U.S. residents would have to carry health insurance or face paying a penalty. The idea is to get more healthy people, those who might not be inclined to carry insurance, into the system so that rates go down for everyone.

Virginia just passed such a bill. From the Washington Post:

Thirty-four other states are weighing similar legislation to block the individual mandate, which is an element of bills that have passed both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. But Virginia is the first state to complete legislative action on such a bill.

Gov. Robert F. McDonnell said Wednesday that he intends to sign the legislation.

The measure had been virtually assured passage since five Democrats crossed party lines last month in the state Senate, which their party controls, and supported the proposal.

Proponents of the measure said the federal government should not force private citizens to enter into private contracts for insurance. The legislation, they said, was a way to send a message to Washington.

Opponents said an individual mandate is an important way to bring young and healthy people into the insurance pool and lessen costs. They said that requiring health insurance would be similar to requiring a driver to have auto insurance, and that federal legislation would preempt a state law.

Click here for the full story.

Slate, a center-left-leaning internet magazine, deconstructs the Virginia law a bit:

Timothy S. Jost, a law professor at Washington and Lee who favors passage of the bill, argues reassuringly in this essay on the New England Journal of Medicine's Web site that such challenges have no legal standing whatsoever. "We fought a war about that," Jost reminded me, "and the states lost." Jost is similarly reassuring about the constitutionality of the individual mandate itself. Like most legal scholars, he finds the argument in its favor "overwhelming" (though he concedes "it is hard to think of a direct precedent").

Click here for the Slate story. And click here for the journal’s story.

The thing I found most interesting from the Slate piece:

"Compliance," Jost concludes,

will therefore be largely voluntary (although the IRS can still make a tax resister's life miserable, whether or not it can ultimately collect). The state [nullification] bills can thus be seen as invitations to civil disobedience that counsel state citizens to "violate the federal law, wave this statute in their face, and dare them to come after you."