Title: Supreme Court Health Care Decision: Individual Mandate Survives | HuffPost
Headings: Supreme Court Health Care Decision: Individual Mandate Survives
Supreme Court Health Care Decision: Individual Mandate Survives
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Content: The federal government may not threaten the states that don’t comply with the loss of their existing funding. Essentially, the Medicaid expansion is now optional for the states. “As for the Medicaid expansion, that portion of the Affordable Care Act violates the Constitution by threatening existing Medicaid funding,” Roberts wrote. “ Congress has no authority to order the States to regulate according to its instructions. Congress may offer the States grants and require the States to comply with accompanying conditions, but the States must have a genuine choice whether to accept the offer. The States are given no such choice in this case: They must either accept a basic change in the nature of Medicaid, or risk losing all Medicaid funding. The remedy for that constitutional violation is to preclude the Federal Government from imposing such a sanction.” For their part, the dissenters were not impressed with Roberts’ parsing of the law. “ The Court regards its strained statutory interpretation as judicial modesty.