(Newser)
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The fate of ObamaCare has been decided—and it's very, very good news for President Obama and tens of millions of uninsured Americans. The Supreme Court today upheld the Affordable Care Act with one Medicaid-related exception. SCOTUSblog reports that Chief Justice John Roberts' vote "saved" ObamaCare; he sided with the left in upholding the individual mandate as constitutional. It survived as a tax: Roberts did not agree that Congress' power to regulate commerce between the states means it can require everyone to buy insurance; but he did agree that the penalty for not buying it is a tax that Congress has the ability to impose under its "taxing power."
By giving the individual mandate the go-ahead, the Court had only to rule on the constitutionality of one Medicaid-related provision. It stated that states that refused to expand their Medicaid eligibility would lose their funding; the Court ruled that states that do not participate in the expansion of eligibility can only lose new funding, not the entirety of their funding. Justice Anthony Kennedy dissented: "In our view, the entire Act before us is invalid in its entirety."
