Health Care After the Supreme Court Ruling

Excerpt from The New York Times: (click for entire article)

LATER this month, the Supreme Court will rule on the Obama administration’s health care law, the Affordable Care Act, deciding whether to uphold or strike down the entire law, or to keep some provisions.

No matter the decision, the political ramifications in this election year will be big. After all, the presidential contenders are President Obama, the top-ranking promoter of the law, and Mitt Romney, the architect of a 2006 health care overhaul in Massachusetts that was, in pivotal ways, the model for the national law.

But experts on health care policy say the practical effect of the court’s decision will probably be less earth-shattering than some people think. If the court takes what many observers believe will be the most likely route and strikes down the individual mandate — the requirement that virtually everyone purchase insurance — many more currently uninsured people are still likely to receive health coverage, they say.