A federal appeals court on Friday sided with Florida and 25 other states in rejecting a plan that would require almost all American to have health insurance in 2014.
Calling it an “unprecedented exercise of congressional power”, a divided 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta ruled that the mandate is unconstitutional and “…lacks cognizable limits and imperils our federalist structure.”
“This economic mandate represents a wholly novel and potentially unbounded assertion of congressional authority: the ability to compel Americans to purchase an expensive health insurance product they have elected not to buy, and to make them re-purchase that insurance product every month for their entire lives,” Chief Judge Joel Dubina and Judge Frank M. Hull wrote in the 207-page majority opinion.
But Judge Stanley Marcus wrote a stinging dissent, siding with the Obama administration’s argument that the mandate is allowed under the constitution’s Commerce Clause.
“The parade of horribles said to follow ineluctably from upholding the individual mandate includes the federal government’s ability to compel us to purchase and consume broccoli, buy General Motors vehicles and exercise three times a week,” Marcus wrote. “However, acknowledging the constitutionality of the individual mandate portends no such impending doom.”
The U.S. Supreme Court is ultimately expected to decide the constitutionality of the healthcare law.
