Obama’s health reform: limited progress in protection of the right to health

Authors

  • Irene Sobrino Guijarro

Keywords:

Health care reform in the United States, right to health care, welfare state, federalism, Supreme Court, spending power, commerce clause

Abstract

On March 2010, one of the most important pieces of health care reform legislation in decades was enacted in the U.S. Among its main objectives is the expansion of access to health care for millions of uninsured citizens. While the new legislation is an incremental improvement, it retains many of the previous structural limitations since it does not transform the existing architecture of a fundamentally private health insurance system and preserves the dynamics of a flexible federal framework. After an extraordinary political and constitutional debate, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the reform’s major provisions. However, the restrictive interpretation of both the «commerce clause» and the «spending power» delivered by the majority opinion may erode some of the major achievements of the reform.

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