Conflicting reform decisions further confuse constitutionality
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In a two to one decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in State of Florida v. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services declared the individual mandate provision of the PPACA unconstitutional while upholding the constitutionality of the act.
“[T]he individual mandate was enacted as a regulatory penalty, not a revenue-raising tax, and cannot be sustained as an exercise of Congress’s power under the Taxing and Spending Clause,” the court wrote.
The Court found that the Act’s Medicaid expansion is constitutional. “Existing Supreme Court precedent does not establish that Congress’s inducements are unconstitutionally coercive, especially when the federal government will bear nearly all the costs of the program’s amplified enrollments,” the authors concluded.
The Florida suit included 26 states as plaintiffs who questioned the constitutionality of the PPACA.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit upheld the dismissal of Steve Baldwin and Pacific Justice Institute v. Kathleen Sebelius, a suit that also challenged the individual mandate provision. Citing that Baldwin, a former California legislator, and Pacific Justice Institute had not established a “genuine threat of imminent prosecution” nor a “justiciable pre-enforcement challenge to the act” that the court requires.
“In short, neither Baldwin nor the Institute has shown injury in fact, or a genuine threat of prosecution, sufficient to give them standing or make their challenge justiciable,” opinion author Pamela Ann Rymer concluded. Justiciability includes the limits on legal issues over which a court can exercise its judicial authority. It includes, but is not limited to, the legal concept of standing, which is used to determine if a party bringing the suit is appropriate for establishing whether an adverse issue exists.
The 11th Circuit Court's summary can be found here.
The 9th Circuit Court's summary can be found here.