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Home » Obamacare (Health Insurance) » Appeals Court Strikes Down ACA Indi­vid­ual Mandate—Punts on the Rest of the Law

Appeals Court Strikes Down ACA Indi­vid­ual Mandate—Punts on the Rest of the Law

December 18, 2019 by Shae Irving

A fed­eral appeals court today struck down the ACA indi­vid­ual man­date — that is, the Afford­able Care Act’s require­ment that peo­ple have health insur­ance — call­ing the pro­vi­sion uncon­sti­tu­tional. The court’s deci­sion hinged on Congress’s 2017 tax bill, which reduced the tax penalty for being unin­sured to zero dollars.

Judge Jen­nifer Walker Elrod’s opin­ion declared the ACA indi­vid­ual man­date uncon­sti­tu­tional “because it can no longer be read as a tax, and there is no other con­sti­tu­tional pro­vi­sion that jus­ti­fies this exer­cise of con­gres­sional power.”

What’s Next for the ACA?

Strictly speak­ing, the appel­late court’s deci­sion to get rid of a zero-​dollar tax is inconsequential—but the case isn’t over yet. In its 2 to 1 deci­sion, the appel­late panel punted fur­ther ques­tions about the valid­ity of the Afford­able Care Act. It sent the case back to the lower court—which one year ago said the entire law was uncon­sti­tu­tional—for fur­ther analysis.

Law and pol­icy experts expect this case to even­tu­ally end up in front of the U.S. Supreme Court, which has twice in the past decade declared the ACA con­sti­tu­tional. If a more con­ser­v­a­tive court agrees with the appeals court, how­ever, it could throw our health care sys­tem into chaos.

As noted by Julie Rovener at Kaiser Health News:

Hang­ing in the bal­ance is not only health cov­er­age for the roughly 20 mil­lion Amer­i­cans directly served by the ACA, but also hun­dreds of mil­lions more whose health care and cov­er­age have been affected by the thou­sands of changes to the health care sys­tem enacted in the law. Those include pro­vi­sions as wide-​ranging as changes in Medicare drug copay­ments, require­ments for calo­rie counts on menus, a path­way for approval of generic copies of expen­sive bio­logic drugs and, per­haps most impor­tant polit­i­cally, pro­tec­tions for peo­ple with pre­ex­ist­ing conditions.

The next big deci­sion on the valid­ity of Oba­macare may not come down until after the 2020 elec­tion. Mean­while, the Afford­able Care Act remains in effect. As far as penal­ties go, states may con­tinue to enact their own insur­ance man­dates, backed up by state tax penalties.

More Infor­ma­tion

For a roundup of news sto­ries about today’s appel­late court deci­sion, see the KHN Morn­ing Brief­ing.

Open enroll­ment for 2020 health insur­ance ended early this morn­ing in most states; in oth­ers, it’s not too late to sign up. Learn more about the Afford­able Care Act in your state by vis­it­ing our Oba­macare learn­ing cen­ter.

Filed Under: Obamacare (Health Insurance) Tagged With: aca, affordable care act, individual mandate

About Shae Irving

Shae Irving has been writing for Legal Consumer since 2013, focusing on health care and family law. She was a senior legal editor and editorial project manager at Nolo, where she worked for twenty-two years. Shae has degrees in rhetoric and law from U.C. Berkeley. She lives in Northern California.

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