About the timing of the SCOTUS’s potential decision on the mandate and/or the ACA entire, Keven Drum writes,
This is all still a couple of years away, since it still has to go through the appellate courts and I assume the earliest the Supreme Court could take it up would be in its 2012-13 session, with a decision handed down sometime in 2013. So we have plenty of time to think about it.
The brilliant legislative logicians that dreamed up (or forced) a 2014 start date for the exchanges, Medicaid expansion, many of the health insurance market reforms, and, yes, the mandate, will be very nervous. Could they have made it much harder for the court to rule against the law?
Had the implementation been one to two years sooner, a nullification of the law, or part thereof, would be dramatically more disruptive. The pressure would be enormous for something to be done to prevent that possibility. I gather 2014 was a budgetary necessity. How much harder would it have been to buy another year or year and a half? Was that completely out of the question?
Similarly, is there any means by which this could be delayed in making its way to the SCOTUS? A matter of six months could make a huge difference. No doubt some top-notch legal minds are thinking about this.
