The Cheat Sheet

Take a breath and read this slowly. It helped us. 

In Plain English: The Affordable Care Act, including its individual mandate that virtually all Americans buy health insurance, is constitutional. There were not five votes to uphold it on the ground that Congress could use its power to regulate commerce between the states to require everyone to buy health insurance. However, five Justices agreed that the penalty that someone must pay if he refuses to buy insurance is a kind of tax that Congress can impose using its taxing power. That is all that matters. Because the mandate survives, the Court did not need to decide what other parts of the statute were constitutional, except for a provision that required states to comply with new eligibility requirements for Medicaid or risk losing their funding. On that question, the Court held that the provision is constitutional as long as states would only lose new funds if they didn’t comply with the new requirements, rather than all of their funding.

(via SCOTUSblog)

newsweek:

We’ve got MIT economist Jonathan Gruber stopping by for a live chat on the site today at 1 pm ET. He’s the guy who helped Mitt Romney draft Romneycare in Massachusetts, so should be a pretty good opportunity to figure out what the heck has been going on at the high court these last two days. Chat here at 1pm ET.

Excited! Here’s some pre-reading for your lunch hour: Jonathan Cohn’s story of how the legislation was passed, which cites Gruber.