The legal challenges to the Affordable Care Act have been numerous but finally the highest court in the country will be ruling on the healthcare law – right in the middle of the 2012 presidential campaign.
In mid-November, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to review three petitions, all coming from the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, the only court that ruled the ACA’s individual mandate is unconstitutional.
“This economic mandate represents a wholly novel and potentially unbounded assertion of congressional authority: the ability to compel Americans to purchase an expensive health insurance product they have elected not to buy, and to make them re-purchase that insurance product every month for their entire lives,” read the judgment from a three-judge panel of the 11th Circuit Court in Atlanta in a suit brought by 26 states and the National Federation of Independent Business. “We have not found any generally applicable, judicially enforceable limiting principle that would permit us to uphold the mandate without obliterating the boundaries inherent in the system of enumerated congressional powers.”
The Supreme Court is expected to hear arguments in the spring, possibly March, and hand down a decision in late June, before the court recesses for the summer.
The justices will consider four issues and have allotted a rare five and a half hours for oral argument. The justices will address the constitutionality of the individual mandate and whether or not it can be severed from the healthcare law; the constitutionality of the ACA’s provisions for the expansion of Medicaid coverage; and whether or not the Tax Anti-Injunction Act, which says a tax must be paid first before anyone can challenge it in a court, bars the justices from ruling on the case. Per the ACA, a tax penalty will be levied against those who do not carry a minimum level of insurance, but the earliest such a tax would be paid is 2015.
If the justices find that the Tax Anti-Injunction Act applies to the individual mandate – and at least one other court has made that determination – then the Supreme Court justices may not rule on the ACA this year.
Nearly as soon as the Supreme Court announced it would rule on the ACA, national news outlets began reporting that the final ruling may have minimal impact on the march of reforms that are underway.
Some provisions of the ACA are already in place and stakeholders in the healthcare industry are in the process of making huge changes that will transform healthcare in the United States.
Healthcare reform is in motion and it’s not likely to reverse. Given the increasing costs of healthcare and the tough economic climate, healthcare reform is not optional. “If the law is struck down,” Patricia Brown, president of Johns Hopkins HealthCare told the New York Times the day after the Supreme Court announcement, “healthcare reform will have to continue one way or another.”
