by Jeremy Leaming
Regardless of the loads of attention that the Supreme Court oral arguments will continue to draw the remainder of the week, the tone of the justices’ questions and their reaction to answers are unlikely to reveal much about how the challenges to the law will be resolved.
Talking with ACSblog, constitutional law professor, Garrett Epps said there is no way to predict the outcome because “in a case 
of this magnitude, the Court reacts to the emotional and political overtones of the issue. And certainly the state challengers and the private challengers have done their best to raise the emotional tone of these arguments.”
The high court commenced three days of oral argument this morning in the challenges to the Obama administration’s landmark health care reform law, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, or Affordable Care Act (ACA), or Obamacare. Today’s oral argument centered on whether an 1867 law, the Anti-Injunction Act, permits the law to be challenged at this time – a standing issue. Before chatting with ACSblog about the oral arguments, Epps noted that Slate senior editor Dahila Lithwick had recently tweeted, that if the health care law oral arguments “were the Beatles, the Tax Anti Injunction Act would be Ringo.”
Epps, also legal affairs editor for The American Prospect, stuck to what many experts on the law say is its integral part, the minimum coverage provision. That provision requires many, starting in 2014, to purchase a minimum amount of health care coverage or pay a penalty on their income tax filings. The opponents of the ACA have argued the provision is an “unprecedented” governmental regulation.
Indeed, as Epps noted, the state and individual challengers of the law have spent lots of time and energy trying to paint the law as a wild overreach by the federal government.
When the curtain rises on the Affordable Care Act arguments before the United States Supreme Court, the nation will be fully engaged in what is perhaps the most important legal examination in generations regarding Congress’s constitutional powers to tackle issues of unsurpassed social and economic concern. Although Chief Justice Roberts has likened the role of the courts to that of an umpire in a baseball game, one can hope that the Justices will view the case for its broader significance for the health care system as a whole, as well as for the 32 million children and adults whose access to health insurance rests great measure in their hands. A declaration that the Act is unconstitutional will not merely nullify its provisions. Under federal budgeting principles, it will effectively roll the federal health reform spending baseline back to zero. The likelihood that Congress will, anytime soon, find the $1.5 trillion needed to make coverage affordable for nearly all Americans is slim to nil, something that the Act’s opponents frankly are banking on.
In 1975, Indiana lawmakers joined a small but growing group of state legislatures passing aggressive medical malpractice “reforms.” Indiana’s law capped damages that victims of medical malpractice can recover at $500,000 and eliminated damages for pain-and-suffering altogether, Frank Cornelius, a lobbyist for the Insurance Institute of Indiana, played a role in helping pass this legislation. Twenty years later, Cornelius suffered a tragic series of negligent medical errors that left him wheelchair-bound, dependent on a respirator to breathe, and requiring a morphine drip for continuous physical pain. Facing medical expenses and lost wages of $5 million if he lived to retirement age, Cornelius experienced first-hand the effects of his lobbying for the insurance industry: he was forced to settle his claims for the $500,000 limit. In an op-ed in The New York Times several years later, Mr. Cornelius told his story, expressing regret and noting, sadly, if ironically, that the reforms he brought had failed to control health care spending in Indiana.
officials forced retired employees to pay higher health insurance premiums. The state’s high court sent the case back to a trial court to hear retired employees’ argument that county officials had violated a contractual agreement by altering its health insurance benefits.
Today the U.S. Supreme Court confirmed what most of us expected, announcing that it will review the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act. As the justices begin to deliberate, they would be wise to look to a