Health Insurance and You!

The individual health insurance mandate, a key provision of last year’s health reform law, received a surprise vote of confidence on Tuesday in the multi-state court case debating whether or not it is constitutional. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia was the second conservative-leaning court that has ruled in favor of the law in the past year, writes Noam Levey in an article for the Los Angeles Times. However, the decision doesn’t have much practical effect, since the case is already set to go before the Supreme Court in the next few months.

Including this decision, three federal appeals courts have ruled in favor of the individual mandate so far, and just one has found it unconstitutional. While the mandate is unprecedented, the D.C. court rejected the argument that government cannot force people to buy a service or product. Mr. Levey quotes from the majority opinion by Judge Laurence H. Silberman, “The right to be free from federal regulation is not absolute and yields to the imperative that Congress be free to forge national solutions to national problems.”

In other words, Congress has the freedom to find a national-level solution to the challenge of the uninsured. Unlike other markets, Judge Silberman explains, almost everyone enters or otherwise affects the health insurance market, whether insured or not. And so, he argues, Congress has the authority to broadly regulate the industry. Time will tell whether the Supreme Court, scheduled to hear the case early next year and issue a decision around June, will agree.

For more details on Tuesday’s decision, its background, and what it may mean for those involved in the case, read this article by Tom Schoenberg and Andrew Harris of Bloomberg.