Health insurance mandate struck down

A case every Advocate must watch, it turns on the Commerce Clause and that was used to allow Congress to enact the Adam Walsh Act. If their use is overturned here, who knows what happens to AWA?

8-12-2011 National:

The Eleventh Circuit strikes down the new health insurance purchase mandate, but declines to nullify the entire law. Expansion of Medicaid is upheld. The ruling, if it stands, could assure a Circuit split on the mandate, thus raising the chances of Supreme Court review.

In a massive, 300-plus page opinion, a divided Eleventh Circuit Court on Friday struck down, as beyond Congress’s power, the new federal health care law’s requirement that virtually every American obtain health insurance by the year 2014. The Court, however, did not strike down the entire law, as a federal judge in Florida had done earlier, because the Circuit Court found that the insurance mandate could be lopped off without nullifying all of the sweeping law. It also upheld the law’s expansion of state duties under the Medicaid program for the poor. The opinion is here.

This was the second federal appeals court ruling on the constitutionality of the insurance mandate, and it conflicted directly with the first — by the Sixth Circuit. The Sixth Circuit, while not ruling directly on Congress’s authority to adopt that provision, turned aside a constitutional challenge to it. Even so, the conflicting rulings almost certainly assured that the Supreme Court would step in to resolve the dispute — if the ruling Friday is not successfully challenged in an en banc review by that Circuit. The federal government has the option of seeking review of the three-judge panel decision by the full 11-judge banch of the Circuit.

The Sixth Circuit ruling is already being challenged in the Supreme Court (Thomas More Law Center, et al., v. Obama, et al., docket 11-117).

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