House Republican leaders got another win in their legal battle over Obamacare, with a judge delaying when the Obama administration can appeal a key ruling.
Federal Judge Rosemary Collyer ruled Monday that the administration couldn’t appeal directly to the Circuit Court of Appeals in a lawsuit over the funding of cost-sharing reductions in Obamacare.
The decision means that the administration will have to wait until Collyer makes a ruling on the merits of the lawsuit.
Related Story: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/article/2574118/
In September, she ruled that the House could sue Obama over the cost-sharing funding. House leadership argued in its suit that money was never fully appropriated in Congress for the cost-sharing reductions, which pays insurers back for reducing the out-of-pocket health costs for low-income residents.
House Speaker John Boehner said the court would hear the merits of the case this fall.
The latest ruling was “another important step towards holding the president accountable for his unconstitutional actions,” he said.
The White House was disappointed with the decision, saying that the House can’t sue the executive branch for actions it disagrees with.
“The House lawsuit undermines centuries of historical practice and the fundamental principles of our system of democratic government,” White House spokeswoman Katie Hill told the Washington Examiner.
She added that the administration is confident the courts will ultimately dismiss the lawsuit as a “political stunt.”
One legal expert was “quite surprised” by the ruling, since the case raises constitutionality concerns about whether the House can sue the executive branch.
“If the appellate court decides later, as it likely will, that Judge Collyer’s court had no jurisdiction to hear this dispute, she has proceeded unconstitutionally in deciding the case on the merits,” said Timothy Jost, legal professor at Washington & Lee University. “Yet she has decided that she alone can decide whether to proceed, without seeking the guidance of the appellate court.”
To be sure, Boehner’s lawsuit has a ways to go, and even if it is successful it would not completely dismantle Obamacare.
It would require Congress to fund only the cost-sharing reductions. But that would be no easy task in a GOP-controlled Congress where opposition to the law remains high.
This year the government plans to pay $5 billion in subsidies, and that number is projected to balloon to $13 billion in the next five years, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
If insurers suddenly don’t receive any subsidies, they may cease to provide marketplace coverage. Those that remain would have to raise rates to maintain solvency, experts have said. And those rate increase could force healthy people to drop out and make the Obamacare insurance markets unsustainable.
But insurers do have other ways of getting the subsidies. They could go before the Court of Claims, which oversees money claims against the federal government.
