Healthcare Matters

In what must be considered an election-year victory for President Obama, today the Supreme Court upheld the “individual mandate” provision by ruling that it is Constitutional as a tax.

Justice Roberts was the swing vote.  Surprised?  The announcement will have a major impact on the nation’s health care system, the actions of both federal and state governments, and the course of the November presidential and congressional elections.

What SCOTUS did today was not on anyone’s radar. You gotta hand it to them. It voted to  save a statute that Congress did not write. Those in favor of the mandate sold it as Constitutional on the basis of it being “a requirement with a penalty” instead of “an option subject to a tax.” On the flip side, those in favor of the Act are applauding the Court’s unwillingness to throw the baby out with the bath water.  The Court did not allow a major piece of legislation go down in flames because the arguments made in its favor were flawed.

You have to admit, it’s a rather remarkable position for the Court to have taken, regardless of what side of this debate you find yourself. The Judges who dissented believe their colleagues who prevailed have set a new standard in “judicial overreach.” And frankly, some of the anticipated fall out the dissenters cite is fair:

“It creates a debilitated, inoperable version of health-care regulation that Congress did not enact and the public does not expect. It makes enactment of sensible health-care regulation more difficult, since Congress cannot start afresh but must take as its point of departure a jumble of now senseless provisions, provisions that certain interests favored under the Court’s new design will struggle to retain. And it leaves the public and the States to expend vast sums of money on requirements that may or may not survive the necessary congressional revision. The Court’s disposition, invented and atextual as it is, does not even have the merit of avoiding constitutional difficulties. It creates them. The holding that the Individual Mandate is a tax raises a difficult constitutional question (what is a direct tax?) that the Court resolves with inadequate deliberation.”

Obama is set to comment on the Court’s decision any minute. He will undoubtedly congratulate the court’s wisdom and claim it a victory, as he should, but a victory still rife with a new set of problems his detractors will no doubt rally around.

—Tom Finn