Court: Congress ability to regulate cannot compel individuals to buy health insurance
Texas Insider Report: AUSTIN Texas In its 304 page decision a divided 3-Judge Panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta ruled in favor of the 26 states that had joined a Florida-based lawsuit arguing the Patient Protection & Affordable Care Act known by many as Obama-Care should be struck down because it relies on an unconstitutional expansion of federal power.
The Friday morning Court of Appeals decision struck down the individual insurance mandate but allowed the rest of the sweeping law to stand.
Although the ruling technically only strikes out the individual mandate legal observers have said that its not clear whether the law is workable from a practical perspective without the provision. Proponents of the law have said the mandate was necessary to offset insurers costs since the reform law also took away their right to turn away sick patients.
The ruling means that the Supreme Court will now have the classic split in the circuit courts that it often relies on when deciding whether to take on a case. The 6th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the law in June and the losers in that case filed for permission last month to have their case heard by the Supreme Court.
Critics said and the 11th Circuit judges agreed that Congress ability to regulate interstate commerce cannot be expanded to include a power to compel private individuals to buy health insurance. Under the law nearly all Americans who cant prove they have health insurance would face a penalty on their income taxes starting in 2014.
What Congress cannot do under the Commerce Clause is mandate that individuals enter into contracts with private insurance companies for the purchase of an expensive product from the time they are born until the time they die" the judges wrote.A dissenting opinion from U.S. Circuit Judge Stanley Marcus said the majority
opinion ignored decades of Supreme Court precedents to expand and define the scope of Commerce Clause powers to include over-arching regulatory schemes.
The individual mandate was designed and intended to regulate quintessentially economic conduct in order to ameliorate two large national problems:
- First the substantial cost shifting that occurs when uninsured individuals consume health care servicesas virtually all of them will and many do each yearfor which they cannot pay; and
- Second the unavailability of health insurance for those who need it most those with pre-existing conditions and lengthy medical histories" Marcus wrote.
