Virginia, the First State to Challenge the Health Care Law in Court
Effective 2014, as part of the new health care law, most U.S. citizens will be required to obtain some type of health care insurance or be hit with a tax penalty. This federal mandate is part of an effort by the Obama administration to use the penalty (or tax) to prevent uninsured Americans from shifting their $43 billion in healthcare costs to others.
However, this mandate did not sit well with some states, as many have filed suits seeking to invalidate the law. Virginia was the first to butt heads with the federal government in court. In a two-hour hearing, the federal government and Virginia both made their arguments before U.S. District Judge Henry E. Hudson.
The NY Times reports that Judge Hudson, “who was appointed by the first President George Bush, questioned both sides aggressively and said he would rule within 30 days. The judge predicted that the challenges to the health care law ‘will at some point in time define the outer boundaries’ of federal regulatory power.”
Although the hearing primarily concerned the issue of whether Virginia had legal standing to bring this claim, part of that analysis requires the court to look at the likliehood of the party seeking standing to have the injury alleged redressed. The requirements for standing are nicely stated in “The ‘Lectric Law Library“:
Standing. The legal right to initiate a lawsuit. To do so, a person must be sufficiently affected by the matter at hand, and there must be a case or controversy that can be resolved by legal action.There are three requirements for Article III standing: (1) injury in fact, which means an invasion of a legally protected interest that is (a) concrete and particularized, and (b) actual or imminent, not conjectural or hypothetical; (2) a causal relationship between the injury and the challenged conduct, which means that the injury fairly can be traced to the challenged action of the defendant, and has not resulted from the independent action of some third party not before the court; and (3) a likelihood that the injury will be redressed by a favorable decision, which means that the prospect of obtaining relief from the injury as a result of a favorable ruling is not too speculative. Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, 112 S. Ct. 2130, 2136 (1992) (Lujan). The party invoking federal jurisdiction bears the burden of establishing each of these elements. Id.
The state here would seem to bear the burden of showing, among other things, that any harm that may or may not be experienced by its individual citizens is a concrete and particularized harm to the state itself. As for the crux of the issues beyond standing, The NY Times reports:
[States'] central argument is that the Commerce Clause of the Constitution cannot be interpreted to allow government penalties on Americans for refusing to buy a product, or as Virginia’s lawsuit puts it for “an absence of commerce.”
“We’re saying you can’t draft someone into activity so you can regulate him,” Virginia’s solicitor general, E. Duncan Getchell Jr., told Judge Hudson.
Mr. Getchell said the Justice Department’s defense of the law “evinces hostility to federalism.” He called the law “a radical, radical claim of power” that, if upheld, would allow the federal government to require citizens to buy most any commercial product in the name of advancing the national interest.
Ian H. Gershengorn, a deputy assistant United States attorney general, countered that the insurance requirement fitted well within the Supreme Court’s parameters for Congressional regulation of interstate commerce. A choice not to obtain coverage, he said, is not inactivity, as Virginia and the other state plaintiffs claim, but an active decision to pay for future medical care out of pocket. Because many Americans cannot afford the cost of surgeries and hospitalization, their choice to go uninsured shifts the uncompensated cost of their care to hospitals, taxpayers and commercial policyholders.
Despite Virginia’s efforts to protect the interest of the state and its citizens, not everyone in Virginia is pleased with the state’s action to nullify the new health care law. Some citizens of Virginia seemed more concerned about affordable health care than state’s rights. As one small business owner puts it, “…seems to me that our attorney general and our current administration are putting politics first and are not taking care of the citizens of the commonwealth of Virginia.”
The Attorney General of Virginia, Ken Cucinelli “said at a news conference after the hearing that the state has “a better than even chance of prevailing” at each step along the way to the lawsuit’s ultimate destination: the U.S. Supreme Court.”
Judge Hudson’s comment, that “the health care law ‘will at some point in time define the outer boundaries’ of federal regulatory power,” is interesting in this context. It seems to denote a question, even if not answered at this time, as to where the line lay.
Professor Mark Hall, in posts here at HRW and later picked up by the Washington Post and New York Times, would beg to differ with Mr. Cucinelli (and perhaps Judge Hudson). Professor Hall’s posts appear below:
Is it Unconstitutional to Mandate Health Insurance?
Are The Attorneys General’s Constitutional Claims Bogus?
Posts from Health Reform Watch have been cited by media sources throughout the country, including The New York Times, Washington Post, L.A. Times, Kaiser Health News, The Health Care Blog, NPR's Planet Money Blog, Duke Univ. Med. Center News, American Health Line Alerts, BusinessWeek.com, Concurring Opinions, Balkinization, The New England Journal of Medicine, Harvard's Nieman Foundation for Journalism, Las Vegas Sun, Maggie Mahar, Ezra Klein, Tom Geoghegan, and the official homepage of the Office of the Democratic Majority Leader of the House of Representatives, Steny Hoyer.
