Standing
One sunny day in 2018, I was walking home from class at UC Berkeley when I received a notification on my phone that almost made me trip on the sidewalk in surprise: it was a news article announcing that a federal judge had decided that the entirety of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (often shortened to just "the Affordable Care Act" or "ACA" or "Obamacare") was unconstitutional. How could this have happened? The Supreme Court of the United States had previously upheld the constitutionality of the ACA in 2012 in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sibelius , 567 U.S. 519 (often abbreviated to NFIB ), so it was unthinkable to me that some federal district judge six years later could decide otherwise. I was wrong. The Affordable Care Act is a complex piece of legislation that includes a plethora of different healthcare reforms. In my view, there are three key elements of the Act: Firstly, it required individual insuran...