The Wise Crowds Say Individual Mandate Is Unconstitutional
FantasySCOTUS.net, a project of the Constitution‐educating Harlan Institute (on whose non‐profit board I sit), has been tracking its 12,000+ members’ predictions in the Obamacare case before the Supreme Court. You can read more in‐depth about the current state of the prediction market — with fancy graphs! — but here’s a summary:
- 90.6% predict that the lawsuit can proceed, overcoming the Anti‐Injunction Act;
- 51.7% predict that the Court will strike down the individual mandate;
- 73.5% predict that the Court will then sever the mandate from the rest of the legislation (though this response isn’t very meaningful becuase the severability issue, unlike the others, isn’t a binary up‐down choice for the justices);
- 77.2% predict that the Court will uphold the constitutionality of the Medicaid expansion.
The FantasySCOTUS managers caution that these predictions are still preliminary, particularly because most members don’t offer predictions until after oral arguments. To learn more about FantasySCOTUS and its crowdsourcing techniques (“wisdom of the crowds”), see this recent article from the Northwestern Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property.
And if you want to get in on the predicting, you can sign up here.
