Court will examine legality, not merits, of health care reform
June 22, 2012
Houston Chronicle Jennifer Bard, professor of law and director of the Health Law Program at Texas Tech University School of Law,adresses the Supreme Court's upcoming decision on the health care reform.
Whatever the Supreme Court decides about the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), one thing is certain: it will not be based on an assessment of the merits of a national health care system. Rather, it will be a ruling about whether there is explicit constitutional authority for the way Congress chose to fund a system to make health insurance affordable and accessible to all Americans. In other words, the decision is about how Congress chose to fund the system it set up, not the system itself.
There is no legal dispute, either in the written opinions of in any of the courts that have reviewed the bill so far, or among anyone else, that Congress has the power to spend the money it collects in any way it believes will promote the nation's best interests. Article 1, Section 8, Clause 1 of the U.S. Constitution gives a lawfully elected Congress the power to tax and spend the money collected in order to promote the "general welfare" of the country. Since then, the Supreme Court has interpreted this clause very broadly and granted Congress nearly unlimited discretion in deciding what does, and does not, promote the general welfare. The dispute here is about whether Congress acted within its authority in how it structured the finances of this law, not about the law's merits.