June 21, 2012 | 10:53 AM |

No Health Law Ruling Today, But Scotus-Watchers Remain On Edge

FILED UNDER: health law, U.S. Supreme Court

(Scotusblog)

From about 10 am until 10:26 today, I though I might have some kind of bad cardiac event, or maybe even a stroke.

My heart raced, I felt dizzy and slightly nauseous. I couldn’t move. I emailed a colleague citing my rising anxiety level.

I hadn’t just eaten a vat of fried dough, nor was I experiencing a post-strenuous-exercise collapse.

Along with tens of thousands of others (70,000 according to CoverItLive), I was glued to the Scotusblog, the Bloomberg Law-sponsored live blog of the U.S. Supreme Court. Snapping to attention with each new audio type-writer click, we wanted to be right there (or as close to there as possible sitting at home in front of a screen) if the high court ruled on the health law this morning. Of course, they didn’t.

Though we didn’t get the ruling we wanted we did learn some things: about Supreme Court seniority protocol and the FCC and mild profanity.

Oh well, see you all next Monday. I’ll bring the Ativan.

About the author

Blogger, CommonHealth Rachel Zimmerman worked as a staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal for 10 years, most recently covering health and medicine out of the paper’s Boston bureau. Rachel has also written for The New York Times, the (now-defunct) Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the alternative newspaper Willamette Week, in Portland, Ore., among other publications. Rachel co-wrote a book about birth, published by Bantam/Random House, and spent 2008 as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT. Rachel lives in Cambridge with her husband and two daughters. View all posts by Rachel Zimmerman →