Healthcare Reform Hangs in the Balance

In this timely new briefing, Professor Lawrence O. Gostin, University Professor and Faculty Director, O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law, Georgetown University writes: Prior to Tuesday’s arguments, I believed that the Supreme Court would uphold the health insurance purchase mandate by a comfortable margin. But now I believe that health care reform hangs in the balance. Here are the key arguments on which the future of President Obama’s health care reform depends: a greater freedom, cost-shifting, the health care market, acts versus omissions, limiting principles, the population-base approach, and what is necessary and proper. If the Court strikes down the individual mandate, everyone’s premiums for health insurance could rise inexorably. Is that what a decent society would want or accept