The decision is actually quite interesting and it didn't come down the way a lot of folks thought it would. 1) The individual mandate is beyond Congress's com

The decision is actually quite interesting and it didn't come down the way a lot of folks thought it would. 1) The individual mandate is beyond Congress's commerce clause authority (5-4) and is only upheld as an income tax like social security (5-4, but only one vote in common with the commerce clause side). I don;t know if this makes the floor unconstitutional, and indeed I would suspect it might. This weakens the law in ways that a lot of people might not expect, and it also deeply constrains Congress's power to do things like this in the future. 2) The states won regarding Medicaid. They got, quite frankly, more than they asked for, even though the court did not invalidate the provision. The court (7-2) said that Congress could require use participation in new programs. This means that states can opt out of the new Medicaid expansion and, arguably other past Medicaid expansions, like SCHIP, and the Federal Government doesn't have a lot they can do about it. I don't like the mandate. I think it's a bad idea, deeply misguided, etc. I don't see anything coming out of Congress that wouldn't make a broken system even worse, regardless of party. But if a decision was going to uphold it, this isn't such a bad one.