individual mandate

by Jeremy Leaming

So it appears just based on oral argument action, if you believe pundits, such as CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin that the high court’s conservative justices are ready to trash precedent and accept the simplistic arguments of the challengers that the Affordable Care Act’s minimum coverage provision is a wild overreach by the federal government.

As noted in this ACSblog post, UCLA constitutional law professor Adam Winkler says we shouldn’t be surprised that the high court’s right-wing majority may be leaning this way. It has already proved it has no problem shunning precedent or being out-of-touch, for example see Citizens United v. FEC.

In a piece for The Huffington Post, ACS President Caroline Fredrickson argued against the idea that the minimum coverage provision is “unprecedented,” as its challengers like to call it.

“What is truly radical,” Fredrickson says, “is the economic theory the state and individual challengers are pushing, which calls for a greatly limiting the ability of Congress to address national concerns. It’s an argument that longs for the days when courts actively shut down congressional attempts to solve national problems.”

Geoffrey Stone, a constitutional law expert and a member of the ACS board, explains, also in a Huffington Post article, why the law’s minimum coverage provision, which will require Americans who can afford to do so to starting carrying health care insurance in 2014, is seemingly so unappealing to the high court’s conservative wing. Primarily the conservative wing appears to be obsessed with a slippery slope – if folks can be required to purchase health care insurance then what’s next?

Stone notes that the “slippery slope is a means of reasoning, not a conclusion. Every principle and decision has a slippery slope: The question is whether we can get off the slope before it reaches bad outcomes. In this instance, this is easy. The decisions of millions of individual Americans not to purchase health insurance (even though they can afford it) have a dramatic impact on the cost of health care for everyone else and on interstate commerce. This is clearly an appropriate matter for federal attention under the Commerce Clause.”

by Jeremy Leaming

The Obama administration’s signature domestic achievement, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which requires many people to purchase health care coverage in 2014, is a reasonable and constitutional means to provide millions of uninsured with health care coverage, the Department of Justice argues in a brief lodged today with the Supreme Court.

The brief “arguments track the Obama administration’s arguments before lower courts,” Brian Beutler reports for TPM, which also provides access to the 130-page document.

As Beutler notes, the DOJ explains why the law’s so-called individual mandate is a constitutional means to help millions of Americans afford health insurance. The law bars insurance companies from denying coverage or charging more to people who have pre-existing medical conditions. For that provision of the law to work, however, the law must require individuals who can afford health insurance to obtain minimum coverage or pay a penalty via their annual income tax returns.

The DOJ’s brief argues that the law is a permissible regulation under its constitutional authority to regulate commerce and its taxing power.

The federal government already regulates the health care market – Medicare and Medicaid are examples. However, millions of people, because of a lack of additional regulation have been unable to afford health care insurance or been denied it because of preexisting conditions.

The DOJ argues that the law’s so-called individual mandate will bridge the gap.

“The uninsured shift tens of billions of dollars of costs for the uncompensated care they receive to other market participants annually,” the brief states. “That cost-shifting drives up insurance premiums, which, in turn, makes insurance unaffordable to even more people.”