This new post by Petrie-Flom’s Faculty Director I. Glenn Cohen appears on the Health Affairs Blog as the first entry in a series that will stem from our Fifth Annual Health Law Year in P/Review event to be held at Harvard Law School on Monday, January 23, 2017.
“The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry.” This phrase, adapted from the 1785 Robert Burns Poem “To a Mouse” and made as the source of the title of a Steinbeck novella, may become the mantra for health policy in 2017.
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) was the largest and most ambitious alteration to American health policy in a generation. By the middle of 2016, it appeared to be largely “settling into place,” and the quartet of Supreme Court encounters with the law have by now been largely resolved. The Constitutional commerce and taxation clause challenges of NFIB v. Sebelius have been decided, with the Court weakening Medicaid expansion and causing other problems, albeit not ones that threatened the vitality of the overarching statutory scheme due to preservation of the individual mandate.
The decision in King v. Burwell left funding for the insurance Exchanges intact. Controversy over the contraceptive coverage requirements stemming from the Act remains, with the Court punting on the extent to which its analysis from Burwell v. Hobby Lobby ought to apply to challenges raised by other types of objectors in Zubik v. Burwell, leaving the litigants with a strange “Can’t you guys just work this out on remand?” sort of resolution. […]
Read the full post here!
