Buying health care, the individual mandate, and the Constitution

Three separate cases raising constitutional challenges to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) are now under way, and together they present issues of great legal complexity. Yet although difficult legal questions must be resolved, a pivotal issue is whose version of events will serve as the judicial analytic filter. For reasons related to the very basis of Congress\u27s constitutional power to enact health care reform, the fight is over whether the individual mandate to purchase health insurance (or pay a tax) is about regulating individuals\u27 economic conduct or regulating their noneconomic status. Depending on which characterization of the facts prevails, the individual mandate either falls within or lies outside Congress\u27s power to act