Tabular Summary of the various voting blocs in the Supreme Court’s ACA decision

Posted on June 28, 2012 | Comment (1)
Filed under Editor's Comment, Health Insurance, Judiciary, Legal Challenges, Medicaid and CHIP, Tax Policy

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Below find a table summarizing the United States Supreme Court decision regarding the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

	Anti-Injunction Act (AIA)	Minimum coverage requirement—Commerce Clause	Minimum coverage requirement—taxing power	Medicaid expansion
John G. Roberts, Chief Justice	Does not apply	Unconstitutional	Constitutional	Constitutional, but threat to withhold all existing program funds for failure to implement the ACA eligibility expansion is unconstitutional.
Antonin Scalia	Does not apply	Unconstitutional	Does not apply	Strike entire expansion
Clarence Thomas	Does not apply	Unconstitutional	Does not apply	Strike entire expansion
Anthony Kennedy	Does not apply	Unconstitutional	Does not apply	Strike entire expansion
Samuel Alito	Does not apply	Unconstitutional	Does not apply	Strike entire expansion
Elena Kagan	Does not apply	Constitutional	Constitutional	Constitutional, but threat to withhold all existing program funds for failure to implement the ACA eligibility expansion is unconstitutional.
Sonia Sotomayor	Does not apply	Constitutional	Constitutional	Constitutional as is Medicaid’s existing penalty scheme.
Ruth Bader Ginsberg	Does not apply	Constitutional	Constitutional	Constitutional as is Medicaid’s existing penalty scheme.
Stephen Breyer	Does not apply	Constitutional	Constitutional	Constitutional, but threat to withhold all existing program funds for failure to implement the ACA eligibility unconstitutional.
Totals	9-0: AIA does not apply	5-4: individual mandate is unconstitutional under the Commerce Clause	5-4: individual mandate is constitutional under taxing power	Plurality disallows extension of existing Medicaid penalties to states’ failure to implement ACA eligibility expansion.

Comment (1)

We Came to Praise the Affordable Care Act-Not to Bury It | Universal Health Care Foundation of CT says:

July 9, 2012 at 9:41 am

[...] extremely conflicted and may have even changed his mind during the court’s deliberations! This chart shows how deeply divided the court was, and how narrowly the ACA squeaked [...]

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