'Obamacare' upheld by Supreme Court
The Supreme Court today upheld the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, with Chief Justice John Roberts joining the court's liberal wing in a 5-4 vote.
Back in March, I wrote how this whole case hinged on flawed wording in the law when it was written. The authors failed to see how they should have framed this as a tax, not a mandate, and achieved the same result in a more constitutionally friendly way.
Here is how I framed it:
It may be that the Supreme Court sees the simple logic here and votes to uphold the law on this basis. After all, the requirement to buy insurance isn't so much a demand as it is a fee. There are no criminal or civil penalties for not buying insurance under the law. It does impose a fee on non-buyers, but forbids the government from tracking you down to pay it. The government is limited to deducting that fee from any tax refund due to the person not buying insurance.
In other words, it's a tax.
To my surprise, Chief Justice Roberts saw it this way, too, and was the deciding factor for today's decision.
Now, Obamacare moves back into the political realm of the presidential campaign. The irony of this was pointed out in this Tweet:
@jonathanweisman: So fate of HCR will be decided by election btwn a Dem who campaigned against ind mandate and Republican who created it.
When you consider that the main provisions of Obamacare were just a few years ago the basis of the GOP's preferred health care reform plan, it shouldn't seem so surprising that the conservative Roberts switched sides to uphold it.