Supreme Court Upholds Obama Health Law

The decision is a victory for President Obama with the presidential election only four months away. It also affects health care policy for nearly every American from the time they are born.

Health insurance mandate is allowed as a tax

	The health care law requires that everyone have health coverage by 2014 or pay a fine when they file their taxes.

At the heart of the case was a mandate that requires all Americans to buy health insurance. States and conservatives challenged this mandate, saying the U.S. Constitution protects people from being forced to buy something.  

When lawyers were arguing the case in March, one of the nine judges on the court, Justice Antonin Scalia asked: if the government can require everyone to buy health insurance, what's to stop it from making people buy broccoli?  

In the final decision, Justice Roberts wrote that "the Federal Government does not have the power to order people to buy health insurance. [The law] would therefore be unconstitutional if it read as a command. The Federal Government does have the right to impose a tax on people without health insurance.  [The law] is therefore constitutional because it can reasonably be read as a tax."

The Court has spoken, but the fight will continue

	The court's decision means that candidates for the White House and Congress will be talking about healthcare in the November elections and beyond.

As the highest court in the land, the Supreme Court’s role is to hear cases that have progressed through lower courts without a clear decision.

Even before President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law in 2010, a group of 26 states was ready to sue the Federal Government and the case made its way to the Supreme Court.

The mandate was controversial from the beginning, but it was the Democrats' way of spreading out the cost of health insurance.

Making everyone buy insurance means the risk pool - the group of people buying coverage - is more diverse and spreads out health care costs more evenly. For example, the amount it costs a health insurance company to care for a sick 80-year-old is balanced out by what a young, healthy 25-year-old is paying to have coverage that he or she doesn’t use very often.

President Obama and Democrats were worried that if the court overturned the mandate, insurance companies would not be able to expand health care coverage to the millions of Americans who are currently uninsured.

But even with the Supreme Court's decision, the debate will continue through the presidential election this November. The Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, says the Affordable Care Act is too complicated and expensive, and has promised to "start all over again" if elected.