If you’re as confused as I am about the cases currently in front of the Supreme Court that revolve around the Affordable Care Act (ACA), Mary Massaron Ross may be able to guide you.
I talked with her on the phone about the several pending cases that involve the new health care act and she cleared a lot of things up. Massaron Ross, president-elect of the DRI – The Voice of the Defense Bar, isa defense attorney with Plunkett Cooney PC in Detroit and an appellate law expert.
DRI – The Voice of the Defense Bar is a 22,000-member organization that represents businesses and corporations in civil litigation.
As Massaron Ross explains it, there are several issues the Court will decide. The first is a complicated one about taxes and the Anti-Injunction Act and whether the Court should even be hearing these cases. Essentially the question is: does the Court really have any jurisdiction over this?
“The government believes it must go forward and so does the opposing side,” says Massaron Ross. “All agree the Court is allowed to hear this case.”
The Court actually took this case because, as Massaron Ross explains, lower federal courts of appeal “split on whether the Act is constitutional.”
Several appellate courts said yes, one concluded the Court lacked jurisdiction, and another decided that the mandate that all Americans be required to purchase health insurance be struck down from the Act itself, Massaron Ross says. “With all this division, the court felt compelled to take it on.”
Under the Act, all Americans are required, with limited exceptions, to hold health care coverage. Failing to do so could result in a penalty from the IRS. Does Congress have the right to assess this penalty? “That’s what this case is all about,” she says.
Finally, if the minimum coverage provision – the individual mandate – is declared unconstitutional, can it be separated from the rest of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act or will the entire Act be declared unconstitutional?
The insurance mandate has been the part of the Act attacked most often. Says Massaron Ross, “The government takes the position that the individual mandate is constitutional, it’s regulating commerce which it is allowed to do, and what it argues is that the provisions requiring insurance companies to sell to anyone – including those with pre-existing conditions – and its ban on charging higher premiums to those with higher health risks depend on the Act’s guarantee that there will be enough customers to spread around the risk.”
Simply put, if healthy people don’t buy insurance, and only the sickest do, and insurance companies are barred from charging them higher premiums, they may simply go out of business.
“Under the Act, everyone has to buy insurance and that will alleviate the insurance companies’ risk,” says Massaron Ross.
It gets more complicated when you talk about severing this mandate from the Act and whether that makes the whole Act unconstitutional. This issue will be argued March 28.
A final question concerns the expansion of Medicaid eligibility under The Act, “allowing those with an income beyond 133 percent of the federal poverty level to receive assistance,” as it is stated on the DRI – Voice of the Defense Bar’s communication to the public. Is it constitutional to require states to accept this additional cost burden as a condition of continued federal Medicaid funding? This will also be argued March 28
Edited by
Rich Steeves
