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The Role of the Supreme Court in Shaping the Affordable Care Act

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The Affordable Care Act as a National Experiment
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Abstract

Numerous actions have been taken in federal courts since 2010 to challenge the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Continued litigation over various parts of the law and its regulations has been a distinctive feature of the law during its first decade. The US Constitution established the federal judicial system (federal courts and Supreme Court) as a check on the power of the legislative and executive branches of government. This chapter reviews some of the key actions challenging the constitutionality of the ACA that have reached the Supreme Court (the final arbiter of the Constitution), and a pending challenge that was heard by the Court in 2020 and will be issued an opinion in 2021.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The National Federation of Independent Business, a business lobbying group, and 26 states were the plaintiffs in the case, and Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius, as the holder of the cabinet post whose responsibilities lay at the heart of the new law, was the nominal defendant.

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Correspondence to Shawn Maree Bishop .

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Bishop, S.M. (2021). The Role of the Supreme Court in Shaping the Affordable Care Act. In: Selker, H.P. (eds) The Affordable Care Act as a National Experiment. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66726-9_8

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