The Tough Luck Constitution and the Assault on Healthcare Reform
Andrew Koppelman
Abstract
The legal challenge to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (ACA), and the Supreme Court's decision to uphold the law, is quite possibly the most momentous Supreme Court case on the issue of federal power in our era. Yet, despite the Court's ruling, the issue of health care reform is still an incredibly divisive issue. For the left, the federal government has the power to regulate interstate commerce, and the health insurance industry surely falls under the definition of interstate commerce. For conservatives, the individual mandate is the core of the plan, and it represents ... More
The legal challenge to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (ACA), and the Supreme Court's decision to uphold the law, is quite possibly the most momentous Supreme Court case on the issue of federal power in our era. Yet, despite the Court's ruling, the issue of health care reform is still an incredibly divisive issue. For the left, the federal government has the power to regulate interstate commerce, and the health insurance industry surely falls under the definition of interstate commerce. For conservatives, the individual mandate is the core of the plan, and it represents an egregious erosion of individual rights and liberties. This book suggests that the constitutional arguments against it are spurious, and it explains why. After walking readers through the 125-year modern history of Supreme Court cases dealing with the regulation of commerce, the book tackles the arguments for and against the law. It contends that the New Deal established that the federal government had broad power over interstate commerce. If most commerce in a modern, complex economy like the United States amounts to interstate commerce—as case law currently holds—then surely health care, which constitutes one-sixth of the economy and is dominated by an insurance industry that crosses state lines, is interstate commerce too. The book closes with an analysis of the final decision.
Keywords:
health care reform,
Affordable Care Act,
Supreme Court,
New Deal,
federal government,
interstate commerce,
health insurance,
case law
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2013 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199970025 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: April 2015 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199970025.001.0001 |
