Affordable Care Act

Nancy-Ann DeParle, director of the White House Office of Health Reform from 2009 to 2011, answers questions about the Affordable Care Act.

“The Looming Threat of Liability for Accountable Care Organizations and What to Do About It,” a new article by Harvard Law School Assistant Professor I. Glenn Cohen ’03 and Dr. H. Benjamin Harvey ’09, was published recently in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Professor Einer Elhauge ‘86 has released an e-book—titled “Obamacare on Trial” —on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act case decided by the Supreme Court. Elhauge raises points that were not aired in the courtroom, including the fact that the constitutional framers themselves had approved mandates to buy health insurance.

In light of the late-June Supreme Court decision on the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, Harvard Law School Professor Adrian Vermeule '93 recently reviewed Michael J. Gerhardt's "The Power of Precedent" (Oxford University Press) for The New Republic’s online review ‘The Book.’  According to Vermeule, Gerhardt's book is a “learned overview” of the role of past decisions in today's legal system.

Harvard Law School Professor Charles Fried has written a major article analyzing the Supreme Court’s late-June decision on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The article, which is scheduled to appear in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, and also in a volume to be published by Oxford, has been given a rare advance publication by SCOTUSblog, which posted it on August 2.

A decision by the U.S. Supreme Court on whether Congress has the power to mandate individuals to have private insurance coverage isn’t expected until the end of June. But Georgetown University Law Center professor and libertarian legal theorist Randy Barnett ’77 is already claiming victory of sorts for his argument that the mandate is unconstitutional.

In an April 16 article entitled “It’s Not About Broccoli: The False Case Against Health Care” published in The Atlantic, Professor Einer Elhauge ’86 tackles the primary case made against President Obama’s [’91] individual health care mandate.

HLS Professor Charles Fried was counsel of record in an amicus brief filed on Jan. 13 with the Supreme Court on behalf of 104 health law professors supporting the constitutionality of the insurance mandate in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which will be challenged before the Supreme Court in Department of Health and Human Services v. State of Florida in March.

Harvard Law School Assistant Professor of Law I. Glenn Cohen, co-director of HLS’s Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology and Bioethics, is the author of three recently published articles on health law topics.

On Monday, the Supreme Court agreed to hear challenges to the constitutionality of the Health Care Law. In an op-ed and a debate this past week, two HLS faculty members (Professors Einer Elhauge '86 and Laurence Tribe '66) and a prominent alumnus (former Solicitor General Paul Clement '92) shared their opinions on the mandate's constitutionality.

On August 1st, Scotus Blog published an op-ed by Beneficial Professor of Law Charles Fried on the constitutionality of the healthcare mandate. In the piece, Fried argues that the attack against President Obama’s Affordable Care Act is pure politics and ignores established legal principles.

Debating what Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow called “one of the most important public policy issues and one of the most important constitutional issues,” three law professors offered different perspectives on whether the individual mandate portion of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) violates the commerce clause of the Constitution and infringes on personal liberties.

Yesterday, the Senate Judiciary Committee chaired a hearing on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act and the provision that requires, beginning in 2014, every American to maintain health insurance coverage. The law requires all citizens without work-based insurance to purchase plans in the private market.