In weighing the constitutionality of the health care law’s individual mandate, and possibly in deciding what to do with the rest of the law if they strike that provision, Supreme Court justices will have to confront key questions of health policy: What purpose does the mandate serve? How connected is it to other measures in the law? If those other measures must fall, too, what’s left? And is that new, diminished law the sort of policy that Congress might have passed if the mandate had proved politically infeasible in the first place?
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=100117