Details
- Written by a top Constitutional scholar with special expertise on the recent health care law debate
- Takes both a historical and analytical look at the Affordable Care Act
- Analyzes the Affordable Care Act outside of the partisan debate, coming to a conclusion fully supported by Constitutional legal interpretation
The legal challenge to the Affordable Care Act, and the Supreme Court's decision to uphold the law, is quite possibly the most momentous Supreme Court case on the issue of federal power in our era. Yet, despite the Court's ruling, the issue of health care reform is still an incredibly divisive issue. For the left, the federal government has the power to regulate interstate commerce, and the health insurance industry surely falls under the definition of interstate commerce. For conservatives, the individual mandate is the core of the plan, and it represents an egregious erosion of individual rights and liberties. Andrew Koppelman, a leading constitutional scholar and an expert on the issue, thinks that the constitutional arguments against it are spurious, and in The Tough Luck Constitution and the Assault on Health Care Reform, explains why. After walking readers through the 125-year modern history of Supreme Court cases dealing with the regulation of commerce, Koppelman tackles the arguments for and against the law. He contends that the New Deal established that that federal government had broad power over interstate commerce. If most commerce in a modern, complex economy like the US amounts to interstate commerce-as case law currently holds—then surely health care, which constitutes one sixth of the economy and is dominated by an insurance industry that crosses state lines, is interstate commerce too. Koppelman's book closes with an analysis of the final decision. The Tough Luck Constitution and the Assault on Health Care Reform is an authoritative account of the issue-one that not only carries great implications for the upcoming presidential election, but which also serves as a definitive analysis for years to come.
Readership: General readers, students, and scholars interested in: health care reform, the Affordable Care Act, legal history, contemporary American law and politics
- Introduction
- Chapter One: The Road to the Mandate
- Origins of health insurance
- After Medicare and Medicaid
- Obama
- Chapter Two: Appropriate Constitutional Limits
- The enumerated powers
- Necessary and Proper
- The unhappy story of judicially crafted limits
- A Constitution of subsidiarity
- Why the mandate is constitutional
- Chapter Three: Bad News for Mail Robbers
- The invention of the constitutional objection
- Barnett's libertarianism
- The path to the Supreme Court
- The Broccoli Horrible
- From court to Court
- Chapter Four: What the Court Did
- The mandate
- Medicaid
- Severability
- Explaining John Roberts
- Chapter Five: Where It Hurts
- So what happens to the Medicaid expansion?
- Your tough luck
- Acknowledgements
Andrew Koppelman, Professor of Law, Northwestern University
John Paul Stevens Professor of Law, Northwestern University, and author of Defending American Religious Neutrality (Harvard UP) and A Right to Discriminate? (Yale UP)
"Andrew Koppelman has magnificently captured the current legal, political and policy-related lay of the land in Washington. His insightful analysis here should be mandatory reading for anyone concerned about the future of health care in America."--Tom Daschle, former Senate Majority Leader
"This book is a tour de force. It offers a compendium of telling facts and provocative arguments concerning the Affordable Care and the legal and political debates surrounding it. Koppelman persuasively unmasks a political and constitutional vision that says 'Tough Luck!' to the disadvantaged and reveals how that vision almost killed the health care act." --Richard Fallon, Harvard Law School
