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PDFFrom NYT:
The justices agreed to hear a challenge to the 2010 health care overhaul law, setting the stage for a ruling in the midst of the 2012 presidential race.
ThinkProgress has a nice round-up on the legal basis/constitutionality of the PPACA:
[The Constitution] provides that the United States may “regulate commerce…among the several states.”
Modern judges do not need to speculate what the founding generation understood these words to mean when they were written into the text of the Constitution. Chief Justice John Marshall — himself one of the ratifiers of the Constitution — told us what they mean in the 1824 case of Gibbons v. Ogden. Marshall wrote that there is “no sort of trade” that the words “regulate Commerce” does not apply to. He said that the power to “regulate” something “implies in its nature full power over the thing to be regulated.” And he told us that Congress’ power to regulate commerce “among the several states” applies to all trade that “concern[] more states than one.”
So when Congress passes a nationwide law regulating the entire national health care market, there is simply no question that the law is constitutional. The law regulates a form of trade — trade for health services — and it regulates a health services market that is both pervasive and nationwide. The Affordable Care Act cases are some of the easiest cases to cross the Supreme Court’s bench in a generation, and it is nothing less than shocking that even a handful of judges have struck the law down.
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