Unsure how the Supreme Court’s Affordable Care Act decision will affect you? Send us your questions.
The Supreme Court is expected to deliver its decision this Thursday on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act. Do you know how the decision will affect you? Give us your questions, and we’ll try to answer them in our reporting.
The Supreme Court is expected to deliver its decision this Thursday on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, President Obama’s health care overhaul derided by his opponents as “Obamacare.”
Somewhere underlying the roar of protests and the echoes of partisan shouting matches is a real human need for health care and some assurance that an illness or injury completely outside of someone’s control won’t be the financial ruin of themselves or their family.
If the health care law is upheld, or if all or part of it is struck down, do you know how it would affect you, for better or worse?
What questions do you have?Tell us in the comments below.
Are you a small-business owner wondering about payroll implications?
Are you the parents of a 20-something who needs to piggyback on your insurance to get coverage?
Are you worried about not being able to afford insurance with a pre-existing condition?
If the law is allowed to stand without the so-called individual mandate, are you worried about rising costs of insurance as companies are forced to raise their rates to cover greater risk?
NPR has a good refresher on the questions facing the court.
The first question is whether it can even decide the health care law’s constitutionality now or not. The law’s tax penalty for individuals who do not buy insurance won’t be in place until 2015, and there is some precedent to suggest that the law may not be challenged before it has a chance to be implemented and enforced.
The second stumbling block is implied in the first: Is that requirement to buy health insurance constitutional? And if it isn’t, can that discrete part of the law be struck down, or must the whole law be scrapped?
Finally, some states are challenging the law’s expansion of Medicaid to cover 17 million additional poor and disabled people, in effect forcing states to participate or lose federal funding for the program. Is the provision unconstitutionally coercive of states?
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