Supreme Court Dismisses Case Against Affordable Care Act

The case against the Affordable Care Act has come to a close and the law remains unscathed, according to the Supreme Court which dismissed the case against the law by a vote of seven to two.

There were three major questions at stake in this court case: whether the parties had standing, whether the individual mandate was constitutional, and whether the entire law is constitutional.

The Court determined that the plaintiffs did not have standing to challenge the minimum essential coverage provision.

“We proceed no further than standing,” the opinion delivered by Justice Stephen Breyer stated. “Neither the individual nor the state plaintiffs have shown that the injury they will suffer or have suffered is ‘fairly traceable’ to the ‘allegedly unlawful conduct’ of which they complain.”

In order to have standing, a party must demonstrate a personal injury that is the fault of the defendant’s unlawful action. It must also be able to be remedied by the action which the plaintiff requests.

In this case, the state of Texas and its supporting states were the plaintiffs along with two individual plaintiffs who argued that the individual mandate in the Affordable Care Act which requires individuals to sustain minimum essential health benefits was harmful to them.

The court found that the cases against the Affordable Care Act which the individual plaintiffs used to support their position were all related to the provision while it was enforceable. The fine applied to the individual mandate, however, was zeroed out making it unenforceable.

Since it is not presently enforceable, the individual plaintiffs would have to have been able to prove that the law would very likely become enforceable in the future. However, as the law currently stands, the tax is zero and unless Congress amends the provision it will remain at zero.

Furthermore, the court found that the monetary relief which the individual plaintiffs sought was not justifiable. The most justifiable relief would be an injunction stating that the individual mandate was unconstitutional.

The state plaintiffs’ standing was also indefensible, the court stated.

“Unsurprisingly, the States have not demonstrated that an unenforceable mandate will cause their residents to enroll in valuable benefits programs that they would otherwise forgo,” the court stated. “It would require far stronger evidence than the States have offered here to support their counterintuitive theory of standing, which rests on a ‘highly attenuated chain of possibilities.’”

The court, therefore, reversed the Fifth Circuit’s judgment. The Supreme Court instructed the lower court to dismiss the case.