For all the drama surrounding the Commerce Clause challenge to the individual mandate provision of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act ("PPACA"), the doctrinal question presented is simple. Under existing doctrine, the provision is as valid as can be. To be sure, the Supreme Court could alter existing doctrine, and many interesting things could be written about the dynamics that sometimes prompt judges to strike out in new directions under the pressures of cases like this one. But it is not my intention to pursue that possibility here. My own suspicion, for what it is worth, is that the Supreme Court will abide by its previously announced doctrines and uphold the individual mandate. So I mean to engage U.S. Department of Health and Human Services v. Florida as the easy case it is and to explore an underappreciated feature of how it came to be so easy. 

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 ("ACA") raises numerous policy and legal issues, but none have attracted as much attention from lawyers as Section 1501. This provision, titled "Maintenance of Minimum Essential Coverage," but better known as the "individual mandate," requires most Americans to obtain health insurance for themselves and their dependents by 2014. We are dismayed that the narrow issue of the mandate and the narrower issue of free riding have garnered so much attention when our nation's health-care system suffers from countless problems. By improving quality, controlling costs, and extending coverage to the uninsured, the ACA means to address many of those problems. And it's about time. The United States has lower insurance coverage rates and lower life expectancy than most developed countries, and our system does poorly on several dimensions of quality. Worse still, we spend much more on health care than any other country-$2.5 trillion, or 17.6 percent of gross domestic product, in 2009. These measures of total spending mask grave distributional concerns: 52 million people went without insurance during some part of 2010.