On Today’s Ruling on the Affordable Care Act Individual Health Insurance Mandate
Originally published at KRC-PBPC here. Today’s 2-1 decision by a federal appeals court rules the ACA’s requirement that people have health insurance is unconstitutional because Congress has repealed the tax penalty for those who don’t have health insurance. But it steps back from the conclusion reached a year ago by Federal Judge Reed O’Connor that the entire ACA is unconstitutional. Both parts of the decision were expected by reasonable legal scholars. The individual mandate was upheld by the Court in NFIB v. Sibelius in 2012 on the grounds that it was an exercise of Congress’s power to tax individuals. The repeal of the tax undermined this rationale for the individual mandate put forward by Chief Justice Roberts in that case. Judge O’Connor went much further and argued that without the individual mandate, the entire ACA is unconstitutional, even though there was no explicit indication in the law that said the… Continue reading
