Last week’s Supreme Court announcement that it plans to hear arguments and rule on the 2010 health care reform in its upcoming session didn’t bring closure to the debate that’s raged around the controversial law, but it did raise both sides’ expectation that closure may indeed come by next June.
Some who follow the contentious debate seemed surprised that the administration would seek to move the issue before the Court during an election year, but that election year is also the one in which major preparations must be made for the 2014 major rollout of exchanges and other elements of the PPACA. In the meantime, uncertainty about its ultimate future obviously will help no one, as compliance professionals clearly know.
Many court-watchers were surprised, however, at the amount of time the Court set aside to hear arguments. Where normally one hour is allocated for arguments on high court cases, the Court set aside five-and-a-half hours for PPACA. Aside from the well-known issue concerning the constitutionality of the individual mandate, separability, standing of the plaintiffs, and expanding Medicaid eligibility provisions are all on the agenda for the session.
Given the conflicting ways in which lower courts have ruled on the individual mandate, neither its passionate defenders nor its most ardent critics can comfortably “bet the farm” on its outcome when the top court rules. Nor should the lack of a separability clause in the law convince those who hope this omission will necessarily translate into its ultimate demise that the issue is already a done deal.
And those plaintiffs caught off guard by the administration’s argument that the Tax Anti-Injunction Law of 1867 (which many legal scholars had to scramble to dig up) disqualifies them, may have persuasive arguments but be prevented from making them.
So the fact that the Supreme Court will hear and rule on the sweeping health reform law in the first half of next year provides neither a red light nor a green light for those who need to plan for how to proceed. At most, what it provides is a blinking yellow…something many people find to be an ambiguous signal.
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