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Supreme Court upholds Obama’s health-care law

By Robert Barnes,June 28, 2012

(Page 2 of 2)

“This is not the country the Framers of our Constitution envisioned,” Roberts wrote.

Joined by the conservatives, he also rejected the argument that requiring health-care coverage was different, because everyone at some point will require medical care.

“The Commerce Clause is not a general license to regulate an individual from cradle to grave, simply because he will predictably engage in particular transactions,” he wrote.

But Roberts said it is the court’s duty to look for ways in which acts of Congress can be upheld, and he found it in Congress’s taxing power, a point pressed during oral arguments by Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr.

Roberts acknowledged that the law refers to the “shared responsibility payment” due on a person’s 2014 tax returns if he or she does not obtain health insurance as a penalty, not a tax. But he noted that it was calculated as a portion of a person’s income and due to the Internal Revenue Service.

And Congress frequently imposes taxes, such as cigarette taxes, to encourage people to quit smoking.

“Upholding the individual mandate under the Taxing Clause thus does not recognize any new federal power,” Roberts wrote. “It determines that Congress has used an existing one.”

Kennedy said Roberts and the justices who joined him rewrote the statute in order to save it.

“The act requires the purchase of health insurance and punishes violation of that mandate with a penalty,” Kennedy said. “But what Congress called a ‘penalty,’ the court calls a tax. What Congress called a ‘requirement,’ the court calls an option. . . . In short, the court imposes a tax when Congress deliberately rejected a tax.”

On Medicaid, Roberts said Congress crossed a line in threatening states with the loss of existing funding if they did not comply with the new requirements, even if the federal government for now was footing the bill.

He said Congress may offer money to entice the states, but may not withdraw funding as a threat.

The conservatives, though, said the solution Roberts offers puts the states in the same coercive place.

“States must choose between expanding Medicaid or paying huge tax sums to the federal fisc for the sole benefit of expanding Medicaid in other states,” Kennedy wrote.

“If this divisive dynamic between and among states can be introduced at all, it should be by conscious congressional choice, not by court-invented interpretation.”

The three cases the Supreme Court considered were National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius; Florida, et al., v. Department of Health and Human Services; and Department of Health and Human Services v. Florida, et al.

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