Source: https://www.theoxfordscientist.com/obamacare.html
Timestamp: 2019-04-22 18:16:37+00:00

Document:
NATIONAL FEDERATION OF INDEPENDENT BUSINESS ET AL. v.
SEBELIUS, SECRETARY OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES, ET AL.
On Monday morning, the 25th of June 2012, the Supreme Court of the United States struck down three of four contested provisions in Arizona's immigration law and left a fourth provision to future court challenges. There were many who thought that the Arizona ruling portended the end of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, it did not.
Everyone will likely participate in the markets for food, clothing, transportation, shelter, or energy; that does not authorize Congress to direct them to purchase particular products in those or other markets today. The Commerce Clause is not a general license to regulate an individual from cradle to grave, simply because he will predictably engage in particular transactions. Any police power toregulate individuals as such, as opposed to their activities, remains vested in the States.
Construing the Commerce Clause to permit Congress to regulate individuals precisely because they are doing nothing would open a new and potentially vast domain to congressional authority. Congress already possesses expansive power to regulate what people do. Upholding the Affordable Care Act under the Commerce Clause would give Congress the same license to regulate what people do not do. The Framers knew the difference between doing something and doing nothing. They gave Congress the power to regulate commerce, not to compel it. Ignoring that distinction would undermine the principle that the Federal Government is a government of limited and enumerated powers. The individual mandate thus cannot be sustained under Congress’s power to "regulate Commerce." Pp. 16–27.
Each of this Court’s prior cases upholding laws under that Clause involved exercises of authority derivative of, and in service to, a granted power. E.g., United States v. Comstock, 560 U. S. ___. The individual mandate, by contrast, vests Congress with the extraordinary ability to create the necessary predicate to the exercise of an enumerated power and draw within its regulatory scope those who would otherwise be outside of it. Even if the individual mandate is "necessary" to the Affordable Care Act’s other reforms, such an expansion of federal power is not a "proper" means for making those reforms effective. Pp. 27–30.
In answering a constitutional question, Chief Justice Roberts writes in his opinion, even if it is necessary to disregard the fact that in the Act the "[s]hared responsibility payment" was called a "penalty," and whereas, that label is fatal to the application of the Anti-Injunction Act. It is true that Congress cannot change whether an exaction is a tax or a penalty for constitutional purposes simply by describing it as one or the other. The functional approach to judicial interpretation suggests that nomenclature alone does not, however, control whether an exaction is within Congress’s power to tax.
The examples of other congressional mandates cited by Justice Ginsburg, post, at 35, n. 10 (opinion concurring in part, concurring in judgment in part, and dissenting in part), are not to the contrary. Each of those mandates—to report for jury duty, to register for the draft, to purchase firearms in anticipation of militia service, to exchange gold currency for paper currency, and to file a tax return—are based on constitutional provisions other than the Commerce Clause. See Art. I, §8, cl. 9 (to "constitute Tribunals inferior to the supreme Court"); id., cl. 12 (to "raise and support Armies"); id., cl. 16 (to "provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia"); id., cl. 5 (to "coin Money"); id., cl. 1 (to "lay and collect Taxes").
We thus ask whether the shared responsibility payment falls within Congress’s taxing power, "[d]isregarding the designation of the exaction, and viewing its substance and application." United States v. Constantine, 296 U. S. 287, 294 (1935); cf. Quill Corp. v. North Dakota, 504 U. S. 298, 310 (1992) ("[M]agic words or labels" should not "disable an otherwise constitutional levy"; Nelson v. Sears Roebuck & Co., 312 U. S. 359, 363 (1941) ("In passing on the constitutionality of a tax law, we are concerned only with its practical operation, not its definition or the precise form of descriptive words which may be applied to it."
* In 2016, for example, individuals making $35,000 a year are expected to owe the IRS about $60 for any month in which they do not have health insurance. Someone with an annual income of $100,000 a year would likely owe about $200 for any month in which they do not have health insurance.
It is estimated that four million people each year will choose to pay the IRS rather than buy insurance. See Congressional Budget Office, supra, at 71. We would expect Congress to be troubled by that prospect if such conduct were unlawful. That Congress apparently regards such extensive failure to comply with the mandate as tolerable suggests that Congress did not think it was creating four million outlaws. It suggests instead that theshared responsibility payment merely imposes a tax citizens may lawfully choose to pay in lieu of buying health insurance.
The payment is also plainly not a tax on the ownership of land or personal property. The shared responsibility payment is thus not a direct tax that must be apportioned among the several States.
Three considerations allay this concern. First, and most importantly, it is abundantly clear the Constitution does not guarantee that individuals may avoid taxation through inactivity. A capitation, after all, is a tax that everyone must pay simply for existing, and capitations are expressly contemplated by the Constitution. The Court today holds that our Constitution protects us from federal regulation under the Commerce Clause so long as we abstain from the regulated activity. But from its creation, the Constitution has made no such promise with respect to taxes. See Letter from Benjamin Franklin to M. Le Roy (Nov. 13, 1789) ("Our new Constitution is now established . . . but in this world nothing can be said to be certain,except death and taxes").
Sustaining the mandate as a tax depends only on whether Congress has properly exercised its taxing power to encourage purchasing health insurance, not whether it can.
for declining to make the shared responsibility payment, see 26 U. S. C. §5000A(g)(2)). But that does not show that the tax restricts the lawful choice whether to undertake or forgo the activity on which the taxis predicated. Those subject to the individual mandate may lawfully forgo health insurance and pay higher taxes, or buy health insurance and pay lower taxes. The only thing they may not lawfully do is not buy health insurance and not pay the resulting tax.
not justify the individual mandate. He also voted with the conservatives to say the Necessary and Proper Clause did not justify the mandate, and to limit the federal government’s power to force states to carry out the planned expansion of Medicaid.
The chief justice broke with the conservatives in finding that the mandate's penalty for not buying health insurance was a - tax -and although that finding is extremely important for the future of the Affordable Care Act, is does not answer any consequential legal questions, as does the court's stance on the Commerce and Necessary and Proper Clause rulings.

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