The Obama administration, in its response to a Michigan lawsuit challenging a central element of the president’s health care overhaul, has offered an early glimpse of how it will seek to counter a similar suit in Virginia.
Both the Thomas More Law Center, a conservative nonprofit law firm in Ann Arbor, and Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli are challenging in court the constitutionality of a provision in the new health law requiring all Americans to buy health insurance.
In its response to the Thomas More center, Obama administration lawyers disputed that Congress overextended its authority by passing the insurance mandate, arguing the law is well within the scope of the Commerce Clause, which grants Congress the power to regulate interstate commerce. Those who go without health insurance “substantially affect interstate commerce” by shifting health care costs to others, “increasing financial risks to households and medical providers,” causing bankruptcies, increasing insurance premiums and raising administrative expenses, according to the legal filing.
“These findings are more than sufficient to sustain the act as an exercise of Congress’s Commerce Clause power,” the government attorneys wrote. Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell just announced an initiative to implement health reform before its major provisions take effect in 2014.
The governor projected the overhaul will cost the commonwealth $1.5 billion between 2017 and 2022 by expanding Medicaid rolls. Cuccinelli’s office is examining the response to the Michigan suit, said spokesman Brian Gottstein. While they anticipate the Obama administration’s response to theirs will be similar, they expect differences in issues of whether the plaintiff has the right to sue and whether the law poses a direct, and not just anticipated, threat.
Virginia is unique, Gottstein said, because the attorney general is defending a state law, the Virginia Health Care Freedom Act, which defies the federal mandate. That statute’s passage also has served as Cuccinelli’s justification for not taking part a larger lawsuit filed by Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum and joined by 20 states. The National Federation of Independent Business has signed on to that suit.
