Title: Constitutional challenges to the Affordable Care Act - Wikipedia
Headings: Constitutional challenges to the Affordable Care Act
Constitutional challenges to the Affordable Care Act
Contents
Challenges by states
Reactions from legal experts
Lower federal courts (prior to the Supreme Court's decision)
District Court for the Northern District of Florida and the Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit
District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia and the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit
District Court for the Western District of Virginia
District Court for the District of Columbia
District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan and the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit
Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit
U.S. Supreme Court
Follow-up litigation
See also
References

Content: He also declared the employer mandate constitutional. He rejected two other arguments that government lawyers have made in cases across the country in defending the new law: first, that no one has legal standing to bring challenges at this point to the 2014 mandates, and second that any such challenge is premature. He rejected the challengers' basic argument that Congress had no authority to order someone to give up their own desire not to buy a commercial product and force them into a market they do not want to enter. He said: Regardless of whether one relies on an insurance policy, one's savings, or the backstop of free or reduced-cost emergency room services, one has made a choice regarding the method of payment for the health care services one expects to receive. Far from "inactivity", by choosing to forgo insurance, [individuals] are making an economic decision to try to pay for health care services later, out of pocket, rather than now, through the purchase of insurance ... As Congress found, the total incidence of these economic decisions has a substantial impact on the national market for health care by collectively shifting billions of dollars on to other market participants and driving up the prices of insurance policies. District Court for the District of Columbia
On February 22, 2011, Judge Gladys Kessler of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, rejected a challenge to the law in Mead v. Holder by five individuals who argued, among other things, that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act violated the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and that the individual mandate exceeded Congress's power under the Interstate Commerce Clause. Kessler rejected as "pure semantics" plaintiffs' argument that failing to acquire insurance was the regulation of inactivity, noting that