It has been a big morning for health care policy news with the Supreme Court ruling on the Affordable Care Act. In short, the ACA has been upheld, with the changes to Medicare being narrowly interpreted.
The entire 193 page decision is here, and until a more complete Plain English version is available at the SCOTUSblog, here is a short distillation from Amy Howe on the feed…
In Plain English: The Affordable Care Act, including its individual mandate that virtually all Americans buy health insurance, is constitutional. There were not five votes to uphold it on the ground that Congress could use its power to regulate commerce between the states to require everyone to buy health insurance. However, five Justices agreed that the penalty that someone must pay if he refuses to buy insurance is a kind of tax that Congress can impose using its taxing power. That is all that matters. Because the mandate survives, the Court did not need to decide what other parts of the statute were constitutional, except for a provision that required states to comply with new eligibility requirements for Medicaid or risk losing their funding. On that question, the Court held that the provision is constitutional as long as states would only lose new funds if they didn’t comply with the new requirements, rather than all of their funding.
The live feed at the SCOTUSblog (more about it here) was an excellent resource for following the decision, which played out from there on social media (along with some panic and confusion generated by a fairly serious gaffe at CNN). No doubt there will be tons of analysis on social media in the coming days. For now, why not have a look at this coverage in the NY Times and Kaiser Health News, a story in the Washington Post with an interactive quiz on how the ruling affects you, or Kevin MD’s take?
We now return to our regularly scheduled Thursday afternoon activities.