Supreme Court to hear dispute on health care law

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court announced Monday that it will hear a dispute testing the constitutionality of the Obama-sponsored health care overhaul, a move that opens the most important chapter in the legal battle over the law.

The leading question before the justices is whether in requiring most Americans to buy insurance, Congress exceeded its power to regulate interstate commerce.

The case is on track to be heard by March, and a ruling would come by the end of June, just before the Republican and Democratic conventions for the 2012 presidential election. The law known as the Affordable Care Act, intended to extend medical care nationwide, is the centerpiece of the Obama domestic agenda, and all major GOP presidential candidates oppose it.

The legal challengers, including a group of 26 states, say the law went beyond federal power and, if allowed to stand, would hurt small businesses and compromise individual choices on medical care.

"This is going to be the most heavily covered Supreme Court case in history, even more so than Bush v. Gore, because that was so compressed," says Washington lawyer Thomas Goldstein, who argues regularly at the court, referring to the 2000 presidential election dispute that lasted just over a month. "This will run from today until the summer."

Goldstein, who oversees the popular "scotusblog" that tracks the court's actions, calls the health care dispute "the perfect storm of a pocketbook issue that's also part of an ideological war between the parties in an election year."

The cases the court agreed to hear Monday test the constitutional merits of the law, but the court said it would also address an important threshold question about the timing of claims. The question is whether the provision requiring the purchase of insurance cannot be challenged until someone actually has been penalized in 2014, or later, for not complying with the mandate.

The health care overhaul, signed by President Obama in March 2010, extends insurance coverage to more than 30 million Americans. Among its most controversial provisions are those that require most people to purchase insurance by 2014 or face a tax penalty and that expand Medicaid, the federal-state program for the poor.

The group of states, National Federation of Independent Business and individual challengers who want to avoid paying for insurance say that if the law stands, it will mean costly new burdens for states and businesses. They have urged the justices to resolve the dispute quickly because of uncertainty about future business costs.

The U.S. Department of Justice, defending the law, urged the court to resolve the controversy, so agencies can begin preparing for the health care overhaul that the White House compares to such landmarks as the Social Security Act of 1935 and Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Four U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeals have ruled on the law. Two (the Cincinnati-based 6th Circuit and the Washington Circuit) declared it constitutional. One (the Atlanta-based 11th Circuit) deemed it unconstitutional. And one (the Richmond-based 4th Circuit) said no challenge could be brought until a person was forced to pay the tax penalty.

When the 11th Circuit struck down the insurance mandate on Aug. 12, it said Congress' requirement that people buy insurance from private companies was an "unprecedented" exercise in federal power that imperiled the balance between federal and state authority.

The high court said it would take up that ruling, as well as the 11th Circuit's decision that upheld the law's expansion of Medicaid eligibility, and said the invalid individual-insurance mandate could be severed from the rest of the law.

Challengers say the flawed insurance-mandate dooms the entire law.

The cases, all from the 11th Circuit dispute, are National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius; Florida v. Department of Health and Human Services; and Department of Health and Human Services v. Florida.

The court's order Monday allotted five and a half hours for arguments. Usually, a dispute gets one hour.