Legal Challenges

The liberal Center for American Progress has a synopsis of 22 of the amicus briefs filed with the Supreme Court in defense of the healthcare reform law's individual mandate.

A panel of experts weighs in at Kaiser Health News on the American College of Physicians' call for doctors to provide  "parsimonious care."

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is expanding its effort to test confiscated "bush meat" from Africa for potentially dangerous viruses, The Washington Post reports.

Two dozen Kansas House members endorsed a so-called personhood amendment to the state constitution, the Topeka Capital-Journal reports.

Healthcare law supporters say the states made significant missteps in their brief on Medicaid expansion filed with the Supreme Court.

Seventeen million young Americans would lose promised access to health insurance if the Supreme Court strikes down President Obama's healthcare reform law, the consumer advocacy group Young Invincibles argues in a legal brief filed Thursday.

Some 20 million young adults between the ages of 18 and 34 currently don't have insurance, the group argues. When the full benefits of the law kick in in 2014, about 8 million young adults will qualify for Medicaid and another 9 million will become eligible for federal subsidies to buy private insurance on new state health insurance exchanges.

The group's amicus brief argues that the requirement that everyone have insurance — the crux of the legal challenges against the law — "does not impose a significant burden on young adults."

More than 480 state lawmakers plan to file a brief Thursday urging the Supreme Court to uphold President Obama's healthcare law.

The group includes at least one lawmaker from every state, including the 26 states whose attorneys general are suing to overturn the healthcare law's individual insurance mandate. The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments in March and will likely rule on the law this summer.

The state lawmakers say requiring almost all Americans to buy insurance falls well within Congress's power under the Constitution's Commerce Clause. Echoing the Justice Department's arguments in support of the mandate, the state legislators said the Constitution gives Congress broad authority to regulate interstate commerce.

"The idea that the federal government does not have the power to address a national problem such as the health care crisis has no basis in the Constitution's text and history," the lawmakers' brief says, according to a summary released Thursday.

The brief is a joint effort of the Progressive States Network, the Working Group of State Legislators for Health Reform and the Constitutional Accountability Center.

Critics of the insurance mandate say it goes beyond Congress's ability to regulate economic activity and instead requires a particular activity. The Obama administration says the mandate simply regulates how — and whether — people pay for the healthcare services everyone will eventually use.

The 26 states challenging President Obama’s healthcare law sought to link the law’s Medicaid expansion to its individual insurance mandate in a brief filed with the Supreme Court on Tuesday.

The states say the law’s Medicaid expansion is coercive — that it goes beyond the program’s traditional federal-state partnership and essentially requires states to participate in Medicaid.

No federal court has sided with the states on that point, but the Supreme Court nevertheless agreed to hear the Medicaid challenge along with the states’ suit over the requirement that almost everyone purchase insurance.

“After months of litigation and hearings, not a single judge agreed with the claim that Congress couldn’t expand Medicaid," an administration official said. "We are confident this trend will continue and that the Supreme Court will rule in our favor."

The states tried to link the Medicaid expansion to the mandate in their brief Tuesday.

The Obama administration argues the Supreme Court would have to break with clear precedent to strike down the insurance mandate.

More than 100 congressional Republicans signed a brief Friday urging the Supreme Court to strike down the entire healthcare reform law if it finds the law's individual mandate unconstitutional.

The lawmakers joined an amicus brief filed by the American Center for Law and Justice, a conservative advocacy group. If the Supreme Court strikes down the requirement that almost all Americans purchase health insurance, the brief says, it should toss out all of the Affordable Care Act.

"Congress would not have passed the ACA absent the individual mandate," the brief sates. "Without the individual mandate, the ACA’s remaining provisions cannot function properly. Thus, the unconstitutional individual mandate is not severable from the ACA, and the entire Act must be invalidated."

More than 100 economists, including Nobel laureates, joined a separate brief Friday on the issue of severability. That brief, filed by the American Action Forum, says the cost of the healthcare law would skyrocket without the mandate, making it unlikely that Congress would have passed the law without it.

The Justice Department will file its first brief on the merits of the healthcare law on Friday.

The National Federation of Independent Business wants to add two new plaintiffs to the Supreme Court case over healthcare reform, The Wall Street Journal reports.

John McDonough, a former healthcare aide to Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), wants to know whether Mitt Romney would repeal 50 specific provisions of the new law.

Private insurance companies' profits are coming increasingly from government programs like Medicare, according to The Washington Post.

A new study finds that research on prescription drugs is often suppressed, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports.

Lawmakers who support televised Supreme Court arguments say there’s no reason for the justices to fear cameras in their courtroom.