Title: Affordable Care Act cases | law cases | Britannica
Headings: Affordable Care Act cases
Affordable Care Act cases
law cases
District and appellate decisions

Content: Barack Obama on March 23, 2010. The specific questions that were decided by the court included: ( 1) whether Congress exceeded its enumerated powers in Article I of the U.S. Constitution (including its power to lay taxes and to regulate interstate commerce) by requiring that most Americans obtain health insurance by January 1, 2014, or pay a fine (the minimum-coverage provision, also called the “ individual mandate ”) and (2) whether Congress unduly “coerced” state governments into increasing their contributions to Medicaid —the national health insurance program for the poor, jointly funded by the federal government and the states—by revising eligibility requirements to add up to 17 million beneficiaries to the program by 2022. The court also considered, as a preliminary matter, the question of whether it was barred from hearing challenges to the individual mandate by the Anti-Injunction Act (1867), which generally prohibits the federal courts from hearing lawsuits intended to restrain “the assessment or collection of any tax” before it has gone into effect. For political as well as constitutional reasons, the Affordable Care Act cases were among the most significant to reach the Supreme Court in a generation. The court’s decision was expected to clarify, if not to redefine, the scope of federal regulatory power under the commerce clause, drawing comparisons to the Supreme Court rulings of the 1930s on the constitutionality of Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt ’s New Deal package of economic reforms. It was also likely to affect Obama’s bid for reelection in November 2012 by either upholding or striking down the signature legislative achievement of his first term. Indeed, the cases galvanized Obama’s conservative and libertarian opponents on one side and many of his moderate and liberal supporters on the other, the former group condemning the PPACA (and specifically the individual mandate) as emblematic of the excessive growth of federal power under his administration and the latter group defending the law as a constitutionally sound reform that would guarantee affordable health care to millions of uninsured Americans. In apparent recognition of the cases’ unusual importance and complexity, the court scheduled a total of approximately six hours of oral argument—six times the limit of one hour of argument per decision that the court had observed since 1970.