Law Center Takes Health Care Challenge to Supreme Court

The Law Center’s Petition for Writ of Certiorari claims, “Review is necessary to establish a meaningful limitation on congressional power under the Commerce Clause.”  In the Petition, the Law Center warned, “If the Act is understood to fall within Congress’s Commerce Clause authority, the federal government will have absolute and unfettered power to create complex regulatory schemes to fix every perceived problem imaginable and to do so by ordering private citizens to engage in affirmative acts, under penalty of law…”  

Last month, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court’s ruling that the individual coverage mandate in the health care reform bill is constitutional (see Court Upholds Ruling that Health Care Law is Constitutional).  

The lower court found that “far from ‘inactivity, by choosing to forgo insurance, plaintiffs are making an economic decision to try to pay for health-care services later, out of pocket, rather than now through the purchase of insurance, collectively shifting billions of dollars . . . onto other market participants.”   The judge contended that unless young and healthy people are required to purchase coverage, the pool of insured Americans would be skewed toward the sick. That, in turn, would make it impossible for insurers to comply with protections such as the law’s prohibition on discriminating against those with preexisting conditions. 

The Law Center’s announcement said the government will now have 30 days to file a response, and the Law Center will have approximately 10 days to file a reply.  The case will then be submitted to a conference for a decision by the Justices as to whether the petition should be granted.