Indiana joins lawsuit against health care

Indiana is the 15th state to levy a legal challenge against the federal government for the recently passed health care reform by joining a lawsuit already filed by 13 other states.

Just minutes after President Barack Obama signed the bill into law, 13 attorneys general filed a lawsuit with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida in Pensacola, a historically conservative area. Virginia filed a separate suit.

In the suit, they claim “the Constitution nowhere authorizes the United States to mandate, either directly or under threat of penalty, that all citizens and legal residents have qualifying health care coverage.”

Indiana Attorney General Greg Zoeller joined the lawsuit with the same questions regarding the law’s constitutionality.

“There are significant constitutional questions regarding the federal government’s authority raised by the legislation,” Zoeller said in a statement.

The contention to the law focuses on the question of whether the government can mandate citizens to buy health insurance and if that mandate is a violation of constitutional federalism by exceeding the power of Congress, said Daniel Conkle, IU Maurer School of Law professor.

In February, Zoeller sent a 55-page legal analysis of the Senate version of the bill to Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., in which he called the mandate to buy insurance or face an annual penalty up to $695 “unprecedented.”

“Never before has somebody been required by something as a condition of residing in the United States,” said Bryan Corbin, a spokesman for the Office of the Indiana Attorney General.

Unprecedented as the mandate may be, there’s still a lot of doubt about how far any of these challenges will go in the courts.

“There are arguments both ways under the U.S. Supreme Court’s precedents, but I believe the Act probably is within congressional power,” Conkle said.

If the new law does survive the courts, it will be because of lines in the Constitution that give Congress the power to “lay and collect Taxes” and “regulate Commerce ... among the several States.”

Fines for not purchasing insurance will be collected by the Internal Revenue Service and are arranged as a tax. Wording in the health care law insists that “since most health insurance is sold by national or regional health insurance companies,” it falls under Congress’s power to oversee interstate commerce.

“Our goal by joining (the lawsuit) is ultimately to bring the constitutional questions to the United States Supreme Court for review,” Zoeller said in a statement.

However, because the mandate to purchase health insurance doesn’t take effect until 2014, Conkle said the issue might not reach the High Court any time soon.

Unlike four other attorneys general in the lawsuit who are feeling heat from their governors for the legal challenge, Zoeller will likely be backed by Gov. Mitch Daniels, who has expressed concern about the reform.

Daniels said that because of the law, one in four Hoosiers will be on Medicaid, a program he says is losing a number of participating physicians.

“What you’re already seeing in Medicaid is people who are technically covered but can’t find a doctor,” he said. “It’s not the best health care and will be probably worse than it is now.”