Law Commons^™

The Great And Mighty Tax Law: How The Roberts Court Has Reduced Constitutional Scrutiny Of Taxes And Tax Expenditures, Linda Sugin

Faculty Scholarship

This article compares National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius – the Supreme Court’s decision upholding the individual mandate in Obamacare as a tax, with Arizona Christian Schools v. Winn – the Supreme Court’s decision denying standing to taxpayers with an Establishment Clause challenge to a state tax credit. It argues that these cases aggravate a growing tension between the economic and legal analyses of taxation by reducing the legal significance of economic analysis in constitutional cases. It suggests that Arizona Christian Schools was a truly radical decision because it conceptualized tax expenditures as private action immune from constitutional attack, …

The Individual Mandate As Health Care Regulation: What The Obama Administration Should Have Said In Nfib V. Sebelius, Abigail R. Moncrieff

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

There was an argument that the Obama Administration's lawyers could have made—but didn't—in defending Obamacare 's individual mandate against constitutional attack. That argument would have highlighted the role of comprehensive health insurance in steering individuals' healthcare savings and consumption decisions. Because consumer-directed healthcare, which reaches its apex when individuals self-insure, suffers from several known market failures and because comprehensive health insurance policies play an unusually aggressive regulatory role in attempting to correct those failures, the individual mandate could be seen as an attempt to eliminate inefficiencies in the healthcare market that arise from individual decisions to self-insure. This argument would …

Plunging Into Endless Difficulties: Medicaid And Coercion In National Federation Of Independent Business V. Sebelius, Elizabeth Weeks Leonard, Nicole Huberfield, Kevin Outterson

Scholarly Works

Of the four discrete questions before the Court in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, the Medicaid expansion held the greatest potential for destabilization from both a statutory and a constitutional perspective. As authors of an amicus brief supporting the Medicaid expansion, and scholars with expertise in health law who have been cited by the Court, we show in this article why NFIB is likely to fulfill that promise.

For the first time in its history, the Court held federal legislation based upon the spending power to be unconstitutionally coercive. Chief Justice Roberts’ plurality (joined for future voting purposes …

Coercion, Compulsion, And The Medicaid Expansion: A Study In The Doctrine Of Unconstitutional Conditions, Mitchell N. Berman

All Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court’s decision in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius regarding the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act produced three main holdings concerning two critical provisions of the Act. The first two holdings concerned the “individual mandate” that requires most Americans to maintain “minimum essential” health insurance. The third holding concerned “the Medicaid expansion,” which expanded the class of persons to whom the states must provide Medicaid coverage as a condition for receiving federal funds under the Medicaid program. By a vote of 7-2, the Court struck down this provision as an impermissible condition on …