The Supreme Court Upholds the Affordable Care Act

The opinion is available here. The vote was 5-4, with Chief Justices John Roberts "deliver[ing] the opinion of the Court with respect to Part III–C, concluding that the individual mandate may be upheld as within Congress’s power under the Taxing Clause". Anthony Kennedy was a part of the dissent, along with Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito. Amy Howe of SCOTUSblog writes:

In Plain English: 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.

I am quite taken by the fact that Roberts was the deciding vote of affirmation. A pet theory that was bouncing around on Intrade just before the ruling was that Justice Roberts would be, at the very least, cognizant of the historic nature of the ruling, and how it might influence historical evaluations of the Roberts Court. I think historical concerns or not, the Court has affirmed a quite clearly constitutional law, and today's ruling is a positive step towards keeping the United States on the right track to controlling healthcare costs and improving national heath outcomes.