A sharply divided Supreme Court today ruled to uphold the individual mandate of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
Justices ruled that the mandate is allowed on the grounds that it is a tax.
You can read the opinion here.
Chief Justice John Roberts sided with four of the court's more liberal members to uphold the provision. Roberts wrote the majority opinion. Voting with the majority were: Roberts, Sonia Sotomayor, Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan. Those who dissented were: Anthony Kennedy, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia.
The court did strike down a portion of the law that required states to expand Medicaid coverage.
"Nothing in our opinion precludes Congress from offering funds under the ACA to expand the availability of health care, and requiring that states accepting such funds comply with the conditions on their use," Roberts stated on page 55 of the opinion. "What Congress is not free to do is to penalize States that choose not to participate in that new program by taking away their existing Medicaid funding."
The High Court's ruling comes roughly three months after justices heard oral arguments about whether the act, passed by Congress and signed by President Barack Obama in 2010, is constitutional.
The law, which when approved was more than 2,000 pages long, requires all U.S. citizens and legal residents to have qualifying health insurance and requires all businesses with more than 50 employees to provide health insurance. It also created a health benefit exchange for people with low incomes to buy health insurance and raised the income levels for people to qualify for Medicaid. In addition, the bill extended coverage for young adults who wanted to continue to be covered under their parent's insurance and eliminated the ability for insurance providers to deny coverage to someone because of a pre-existing condition.
The law also included penalties that would be levied on individuals and businesses that do not comply with the act. The law stipulates that those penalties should begin to go into place in 2014.
Jim Thomas, a lawyer with Jackson Kelly PLLC in Charleston, said regardless of how people feel about the law, or the Supreme Court's decision on it, the fact that it has been ruled on gives a bit of closure to a hotly debated issue in the nation. And with the ruling in employers can begin to address how they might meet the requirements of the law and citizens can learn how the law will impact them.
"You can debate the Accountable Care Act, and there are
people a lot smarter than me who can debate whether this is good piece of
legislation or not, but at least there is some certainty now. The question (of the Act's constitutionality) has been resolved," he said.
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