(Reuters) – The Supreme Court will hear arguments next Monday to Wednesday over the fate of President Barack Obama’s healthcare law, a battle with legal, political and financial implications for the U.S. healthcare system’s biggest overhaul in nearly 50 years.
The heart of the arguments will turn on whether Congress exceeded its powers in requiring that Americans obtain insurance by 2014 or pay a penalty, the centerpiece provision in the law revamping the healthcare market, which accounts for nearly 18 percent of the nation’s economy.
Here is a chronology of the key events in the legal battle over the law that seeks to provide health insurance to more than 30 million previously uninsured Americans:
March 23, 2010: Obama signed into law the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which Congress approved after a long, bruising political fight. The law, which comes to some 2,700 pages, imposed new obligations on individuals, insurers, employers and states in restructuring the nation’s $2.6 trillion healthcare system. The law, which seeks to obtain near-universal coverage and slow down soaring healthcare costs, has become Obama’s signature and most controversial domestic policy accomplishment. It has been fiercely opposed by most Republicans. At the White House signing ceremony, Obama said the law embodied “the core principle that everybody should have some basic security when it comes to their health care.”
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