Harvard Law & Policy Review

affordable care act

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The Moral Foundations of the Insurance Mandate

By Tina Rulli* Republicans’ new plan to replace the Affordable Care Act ditches the health insurance mandate, the requirement for individuals to purchase health insurance or pay a penalty. Instead, their American Health Care Act favors tax credits to incentivize people to purchase insurance. There are many vantage points from which to assess the health insurance law, including legal, economic, and public health perspectives. My focus is on the moral foundations of the individual mandate, …

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The ACA is working – and there is no replacement

By Jonathan Gruber, MIT* One of the most contentious public policy issues of the early days of the Trump Administration is the future of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). President Trump and congressional Republicans decry the law as a failure and say that it must be repealed and replaced with something better. This line of argument is problematic in two different ways. First, the claim that the ACA is a failure is wrong. Second, there is no replacement that does not significantly worsen the …

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Solicitor General Don Verrilli: What We Stand For

I was fortunate to be a part of many great moments, in and out of the Supreme Court’s chambers, during my tenure as Solicitor General in the administration of President Obama. But of all the great moments, the one that means the most to me occurred at the end of a grueling three days of oral argument in the historic Health Care Case, when I spoke these words: The Medicaid expansion that we are talking about this afternoon and the provisions we talked about yesterday, we have been talking about …

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Technology Development Needs a Culture of Adaptation

By Sam King* Bad technology is pervasive, but it doesn't have to be. Healthcare.gov's initial problems threatened to derail the Affordable Care Act and took a tremendous effort to fix. The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has 98,000 disability claims that have been in a backlog for over 125 days, partly because the technology wasn't adapting to changing needs. The Mars Climate Orbiter crashed because NASA used metric units and Lockheed Martin used English units. Because of many issues like …

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King v. Burwell: Following the Law

By Professor Erwin Chemerinsky* If not for the deep ideological divisions surrounding the Affordable Care Act, there would be no doubt that those who purchase insurance on exchanges created by the federal government should receive tax credits.   In King v. Burwell, Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Kennedy transcended the partisanship surrounding the law and joined Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan in following Congress’s clear intent:  those who qualify economically may receive …

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Case Comment: Burwell v. Hobby Lobby

Third in the HLPR Case Comment series, “Least Restrictive Means”: Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, by Noah Marks! Noah examines a strange leap in the Supreme Court's reasoning in Hobby Lobby that has left the way open for further restrictions on access to contraceptives. …

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