For SCOTUSblog, the highly respected U.S. Supreme Court news site, June 28, 2012, will go down in history as the legal bloggers’ “Super Bowl,” according to founder and legal analyst Tom Goldstein. As the country waited for the ruling on the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, SCOTUSblog registered more than 500,000 simultaneous readers.
Litigated as one of the most watched cases in Supreme Court history, what is commonly referred to as the Affordable Care Act (or ACA) impacts the healthy as well as the ill, large and small employers, insurance companies, hospitals and other health care providers, and all levels of government.
It also impacts lawyers across practice areas—from general counsels for large industries to sole practitioners advocating for consumers. The original Act weighed in at 2,409 pages, and if that isn’t enough to digest over morning coffee, clarifications and regulations over the past two years have added thousands more.