FT Alphaville " Affordable Care Act upheld by the Supreme Court The Supreme Court has upheld the constitutionality of Obama's best-known legislative achievement, including that of the individual mandate requiring nearly all American to obtain health insurance. Click here for the opinion. The key reasoning is that the mandate can be considered a tax that Congress is empowered to impose. As usual for the best coverage check SCOTUSblog, which informs us that the key part of the ruling is this: Our precedent demonstrates that Congress had the power to impose the exaction in Section 5000A under the taxing power, and that Section 5000A need not be read to do more than impose a tax. This is sufficient to sustain it. Another part of the law that was being considered by the Court was its expansion of Medicaid. Some states had asked the Court to declare the expansion unconstitutional, invalidating it because the states had been essentially coerced into either accepting the provisions of the law or risk having their Medicaid funds withheld by the federal government. The Court decided that this part of the law was constitutional to the extent that states would only lose additional funds from not complying with the provisions of the law rather than all their Medicaid funds. And here is SCOTUSblog's excellent "plain English" explanation of what just happened: The Affordable Care Act, including its individual mandate that virtually all Americans buy health insurance, is constitutional. There were not five votes to uphold it on the ground that Congress could use its power to regulate commerce between the states to require everyone to buy health insurance. However, five Justices agreed that the penalty that someone must pay if he refuses to buy insurance is a kind of tax that Congress can impose using its taxing power. That is all that matters. Because the mandate survives, the Court did not need to decide what other parts of the statute were constitutional, except for a provision that required states to comply with new eligibility requirements for Medicaid or risk losing their funding. On that question, the Court held that the provision is constitutional as long as states would only lose new funds if they didn't comply with the new requirements, rather than all of their funding. This entry was posted by Cardiff Garcia on Thursday, June 28th, 2012 at 15:43 and is filed under Capital markets. Tagged with aca.