Regarding the U.S. Supreme Court’s pending decision on ObamaCare, Jim McTague tells us in the latest Barron’s that “conventional wisdom both at the Bar Association and on Wall Street is that the court will uphold the law.” But McTague also explores the alternatives, and he offers a helpful synopsis of the decisions the nine justices must make.
The central question: Can the federal government constitutionally mandate every citizen to buy an approved health-care plan by 2014? Supporters of President Obama’s universal health-care plan say it would prove fiscally unsound without forced participation. Deadbeats and indigents, they claim, would raise costs for paying customers through unpaid visits to hospital emergency rooms, as they do today. Critics say the federal government cannot force citizens to buy a product or to make young, health individuals subsidize older, sickly ones.
The justices also must decide if the law’s expansion of Medicaid — the joint federal/state program for largely non-elderly people — to include some 16 million people under age 65 would unconstitutionally coerce the states, forcing them to raise state taxes to cover the new enrollees. Finally, the high court must determine whether all of the other sections of [the] 2,700-page law stand or fall if it strikes down one or two or the major provisions.
