Health Care | featured news

It's the biggest secret in a city known for not keeping them. The nine Supreme Court justices and more than three dozen other people have kept quiet for more than two months about how the high court is going to rule on the constitutionality of President Barack Obama's health care overhaul. This is information that could move markets, turn economies and greatly affect this fall's national elections, including the presidential contest between Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney. But unlike the Congress and the executive branch, which seem to leak information willy-nilly, the Supreme Court, from the chief justice down to the lowliest clerk, appears to truly value silence when it comes to upcoming court opinions, big and small.

There's a lot of anxiety these days as we wait for the U.S. Supreme Court to issue its decision on President Obama's health care law. Apparently, Senate candidate Richard Mourdock wanted to be ready. The Indiana Republican's campaign yesterday uploaded videos to YouTube of his different reactions to the decision, including cheering the law's demise. The videos were taken down.

Americans overwhelmingly want the president and Congress to get to work on a new bill to change the health care system if the Supreme Court strikes down President Barack Obama's 2010 overhaul as unconstitutional, a new poll finds....

Congressional Republicans intend to seek quick repeal of any parts of the health care law that survive a widely anticipated Supreme Court ruling, but don't plan to push replacement measures until after the fall elections or perhaps 2013.

"If the individual mandate -- requiring the purchase of insurance or the payment of a penalty -- if that is unconstitutional, must the entire act fall?" she said, reports CNN. "Or, may the mandate be chopped, like a head of broccoli, from the rest of the act?"

The expansion of Medicaid in the health care law, if it is upheld, would greatly increase the number of people served — and add to the program’s costs.

In arguments made against the Obama administration’s health care law, a thread that runs through many of them is an analogy between the health care law and broccoli.

Kevin Drum and Ezra Klein make the case that President Obama's insistence on pursuing health care reform in 2009 was not a mistake. Specifically, they claim that there wasn't a real trade-off between the pursuit of reform and helping the economy.

Insurer UnitedHealth Group sees some parts of the health care overhaul as sound medicine and plans to keep them regardless of whether the law survives an upcoming Supreme Court ruling.

It sounds like a silver lining. Even if the Supreme Court overturns President Barack Obama's health care law, employers can keep offering popular coverage for the young adult children of their workers....