Florida Court: Individual Mandate is Unconstitutional

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On Wednesday, Lawyers for President Obama appealed the Florida judge’s ruling that declared the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional on the grounds that an individual cannot be required to buy health insurance, a ruling backed by 26 states. The Affordable Care Act requires Americans to buy health insurance by 2014 or pay a fine worth 2.5 percent of their income, which some argue violates Congressional and Constitutional authority to regulate interstate commerce. Neal Katyal, Obama’s senior administration lawyer argues, “We are not saying the Congress can force someone to buy something. Our point is that people are already buying this good.” The individual mandate, which lies at the center of Obama’s healthcare reform, has now been declared unconstitutional by both Florida and Virginia.

One big question is still up in the air: would the healthcare reform be repealed in its entirety if one or more of its parts are declared unconstitutional? Judge Henry Hudson of Virginia ruled the individual mandate unconstitutional in December, but allowed the rest of the law to stand. The recent ruling is more threatening to the administration, both because of the number of states behind it as well as the threat it poses to the entire law. ”Notwithstanding the fact that many of the provisions in the Act can stand independently without the individual mandate (as a technical and practical matter), it is reasonably ‘evident,’ as I have discussed above, that the individual mandate was an essential and indispensable part of the health reform efforts, and that Congress did not believe other parts of the Act could (or it would want them to) survive independently. I must conclude that the individual mandate and the remaining provisions are all inextricably bound together in purpose and must stand or fall as a single unit. The individual mandate cannot be severed,” Florida Judge Roger Vinson wrote in his opinion. This means that because the individual mandate has been ruled unconstitutional, the entire law is now at risk as well. With two federal courts ruling the mandate constitutional and two finding the opposite, the final decision is most likely to be made in the Supreme Court.