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February 2, 2011

SECOND DISTRICT COURT FINDS INDIVIDUAL MANDATE UNCONSTITUTIONAL

On January 31, 2011, federal Judge Roger Vinson of the Northern District of Florida issued his widely anticipated ruling
http://info.akingump.com/rs/ct.aspx?ct=24F76C19D1E00AEDC1D180ADDA2E941DDDBE4F8CF0A
in the litigation brought by the attorneys general or governors of 26 states, along with other plaintiffs, challenging the 2010 health care reform legislation. Judge Vinson held unconstitutional the individual mandate provision. That provision, section 1501 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, requires everyone (with limited exceptions) to purchase federally approved health insurance, or pay a monetary penalty, beginning in 2014.

Judge Vinson’s ruling brings to two the number of district courts that have held the individual mandate unconstitutional. (Two other district courts have held the law constitutional). Unlike Judge Henry E. Hudson of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, however, whose decision invalidating the individual mandate
http://www.oag.state.va.us/press_releases/Cuccinelli/Health%2520Care%2520Memorandum%2520Opinion.pdf
was issued on December 13, 2010, Judge Vinson found that the individual mandate could not be severed from the Act’s remaining provisions and, thus, declared the entire health care reform law unconstitutional. Judge Vinson reasoned that there are “simply too many moving parts in the Act and too many provisions dependent (directly and indirectly) on the individual mandate ... for me to try and dissect out the proper from the improper, and the able-to-stand-alone from the unable-to-stand-alone.”[1] To attempt such a task would be “tantamount to rewriting a statute in an attempt to salvage it;”[2] better to leave to “the watchmaker” the task of redesigning and reconstructing the “defectively designed watch.”[3] Thus, although Judge Vinson upheld the Act’s expansions of the Medicaid program against constitutional challenge by the states, in the end his opinion holds that those provisions must fall—along with the entire Act—because, in the court’s view, they are not severable from the individual mandate.

[1] Slip op., at 73-74.
[2] Slip op., at 73.
[3] Slip op., at 74.

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