The Tough Luck Constitution and the Assault on Health Care Reform

The legal challenge to the Affordable Care Act, and the Supreme Court's decision to uphold the law, is quite possibly the most momentous Supreme Court case on the issue of federal power in our era. Yet, despite the Court's ruling, the issue of health care reform is still an incredibly divisive issue. Andrew Koppelman, a leading constitutional scholar and an expert on the issue, thinks that the constitutional arguments against it are spurious. The Tough Luck Constitution and the Assault on Health Care Reform is an authoritative account of the issue-one that not only carries great implications for the upcoming presidential election, but which also serves as a definitive analysis for years to come.

John Paul Stevens Professor of Law, Northwestern University, and author of Defending American Religious Neutrality (Harvard UP) and A Right to Discriminate? (Yale UP)

Contents
Introduction
Chapter One: The Road to the Mandate
Origins of health insurance
After Medicare and Medicaid
Obama
Chapter Two: Appropriate Constitutional Limits
The enumerated powers
Necessary and Proper
The unhappy story of judicially crafted limits
A Constitution of subsidiarity
Why the mandate is constitutional
Chapter Three: Bad News for Mail Robbers
The invention of the constitutional objection
Barnett's libertarianism
The path to the Supreme Court
The Broccoli Horrible
From court to Court
Chapter Four: What the Court Did
The mandate
Medicaid
Severability
Explaining John Roberts
Chapter Five: Where It Hurts
So what happens to the Medicaid expansion?
Your tough luck
Acknowledgements