Title: Affordable Care Act cases | law cases | Britannica
Headings: Affordable Care Act cases
Affordable Care Act cases
law cases
District and appellate decisions

Content: The state plaintiffs additionally alleged that the PPACA’s expansion of Medicaid was an onerous financial burden that they had been forced to accept to continue receiving federal matching funds for Medicaid beneficiaries within their borders. Although state participation in Medicaid is voluntary, the plaintiffs could not realistically opt out of the program, which had become “customary and necessary for citizens throughout the United States, including the Plaintiffs’ respective states.” The Medicaid expansion thus allegedly violated the spending clause of the U.S. Constitution (Article I, Section 8, Clause 1), which does not permit Congress to offer financial inducements to the states that are “so coercive as to pass the point at which pressure turns into compulsion,” as the Supreme Court ruled in South Dakota v. Dole (1987), citing the court’s decision in Steward Machine Co. v. Davis (1937). In his ruling, issued in January 2011, U.S. District Court Judge Roger Vinson agreed with the government that the plaintiffs’ underlying “coercion theory” was unsupported in existing case law, having been rejected in challenges to federal spending laws by “every single federal Court of Appeals.” On the constitutionality of the individual mandate, however, he agreed with the plaintiffs that the commerce clause limits the scope of Congress’s regulatory authority to “activities”; he thus rejected the government’s claims that congressional authority was not so limited and that, in any event, the failure to purchase health insurance should be understood as an activity. Finding in addition that the individual mandate was not severable from the other provisions of the PPACA (many of which, nevertheless, were unrelated to health insurance), he declared the entire law unconstitutional. In August 2011 a three-judge panel of the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals reversed (2–1) Vinson’s decision regarding severability but affirmed it regarding Medicaid and the individual mandate. Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. Subscribe Now
Load Next Page