Health-care mandate ruled unconstitutional

President Barack Obama's health-care reform law's provision requiring individuals obtain coverage “exceeds Congress's commerce power” and is unconstitutional, a U.S. appeals court ruled Friday, affirming a federal judge's January decision to invalidate that portion of the act in a lawsuit brought by 26 states.

The Atlanta-based appellate court today upheld portions of U.S. District Judge C. Roger Vinson's ruling that Congress exceeded its power in requiring that almost every American obtain insurance starting in 2014.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was signed into law on March 23, 2010. Then-Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum filed suit the same day on behalf of his state and a dozen others. Thirteen more states signed on later.

The health-care act bars insurers from denying coverage to people who are sick and from imposing lifetime limits on costs. It requires almost all Americans 18 and over to obtain coverage.

The U.S. has called the mandatory-coverage provision the linchpin of the statute because it will add younger and healthier people to the pool of the insured population, making the program viable for insurers.

Vinson on Jan. 31 ruled that Congress exceeded its powers under the U.S. Constitution's commerce clause when it created the requirement. Concluding that the mandate was integral to the rest of the legislation, he invalidated the entire act.

Vinson's Ruling Appealed

The Obama administration appealed Vinson's ruling to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Atlanta. The three- judge panel, comprising two judges nominated by Republican President Ronald Reagan and one picked by Democratic President Bill Clinton, heard argument on June 8.

“The most difficult issue in the case is the individual mandate,” Atlanta Chief Judge Joel Dubina, first nominated to the federal bench by Reagan in 1986, said at the start of the June 8 session. Reagan named U.S. Circuit Judge Stanley Marcus in 1985. U.S. Circuit Judge Frank M. Hull was a 1994 Clinton nominee.

“The question you have before you is that everyone is consuming the goods; it's about failure to pay,” Acting U.S. Solicitor General Neal Katyal told the panel during the oral argument. The solicitor general is the Justice Department's top courtroom attorney.

‘Commerce Clause'

“The Commerce Clause only gives Congress the power to regulate, not to compel,” states' attorney Paul D. Clement, a solicitor general under President George W. Bush, told the court later.

The Cincinnati-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, in a 2-1 ruling on June 29, became the first appellate panel to rule in favor of the law. The court affirmed a Detroit federal judge's decision last year to throw out a challenge by the Ann Arbor, Michigan-based Thomas More Law Center, a Christian-based public interest law firm.

“Not every intrusive law is an unconstitutionally intrusive law,” Jeffrey Sutton, the first Republican-appointed judge to back the law in litigation across the country, said in his majority opinion.

Thomas More Law Center attorney Robert Muise has said he will ask the U.S. Supreme Court to review the Cincinnati ruling.

Lower-court rulings have broken entirely along party lines, with federal judges appointed by Republican presidents invalidating the mandate and those appointed by Democrats upholding it.

Fourth Circuit

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Richmond, Virginia, on May 10 heard the Obama administration's challenge to a lower court ruling that sided with Virginia attorney general Kenneth Cuccinelli, who filed a separate lawsuit on the same day as McCollum.

U.S. District Judge Henry Hudson, a Bush nominee, had struck down the individual mandate as unconstitutional while leaving the rest of the act standing.

The Richmond panel also heard an appeal by Lynchburg, Virginia-based Liberty University, which sought to reverse the another judge's dismissal of its challenge to the law. That ruling was by Judge Norman K. Moon, who was selected by Clinton.

The appellate panel hasn't yet rendered a decision.