The Supreme Court announced Monday that it would not hear a legal challenge to a part of Obamacare, one of many lawsuits against the sweeping health care law enacted five years ago.
The Court denied “certiorari” without explanation in Coons v. Lew, which alleges that the law’s Independent Payment Advisory Board is unconstitutional because it has too much power and not enough oversight from Congress.
The board was designed as a safety valve to hold down health care costs by proposing recommendations to reduce Medicare spending growth if it exceeded a certain level. Congress could override the cuts with a two-thirds majority or by enacting a similar level of savings. Because health care costs have been relatively slow in recent years, the board has not taken effect.
The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals threw out the challenge for a lack of jurisdiction after a district court ruled against the challengers on the merits. The appeals court also rejected a part of the lawsuit that challenged the individual mandate, which the Supreme Court upheld in 2012.
The moves by the appeals court and Supreme Court mean the legal challenge could return after IPAB takes effect and once the courts can evaluate the potential injury caused by its proposals.
The case is unrelated to King v. Burwell, which poses a far greater threat to Obamacare and which the Supreme Court is expected to decide by the end of June.
Yes, even though, as the reporter noted, the IPAB can only make recommendations, and that “Congress could override the cuts with a two-thirds majority or by enacting a similar level of savings,” these wingnuts argue that the IPAB “is unconstitutional because it has too much power and not enough oversight from Congress.”
In addition, it’s important to note, as the reporter here has, “Because health care costs have been relatively slow in recent years, the board has not taken effect.”
And as President Obama noted the other day, while healthcare costs have been the main driver of our long-term debt, the ACA is now becoming the main factor in reducing our long-term debt.
Idiots with lawyers.
The United States is not the U.K., which is the size of Virginia and North Carolina. In an area that small, what with the automobile and even a modicum of communicative ability, “sweeping things under the rug” would be quite a logistical undertaking.
The United States is over 3,800,000 square miles, with just the contiguous states spanning four time zones (not many people are wont to just look at a globe and see, proportionately, the distance between Ireland and Maine, juxtaposed with the distance between Maine and California).
Notwithstanding the cyber-revolution, the USA is remarkably provincial…And insular enough (a characteristic cheerfully and effectively exacerbated by FOX and Talk Radio) so that vast sections of the country are, frankly, resistent to knowledge or interest in data apart from propaganda.
The job of the MSM (we have lost an effective Fourth Estate some time ago–in a sense, blogs like this one are the equivalent of Apostles talking to each other) is, simply to tamp down communication which would increase any negative reaction to this TeaBagging United States Supreme Court.
Sahil? “Certiorari” is an actual honest-to-god real word. Putting it in quotes is like putting a term used in another profession, like “appendectomy” “Corinthian order” or “scoop,” in scare quotes.
They bounced it on standing. However, it does give me a little concern because the heart of this case is another go at the Chevron Defense. Makes me wonder if they didn’t refuse cert because they are going to hand down something dealing with the Chevron precedent in King. That has always seemed the most likely reason for Alito and Roberts granting cert in that case to me.
But its just reading tea leaves on my part. They didn’t give much of a reason, so who knows?
They’ve got the one that they want, as dumb and as wrong as it is, it gives them some sort of foundation to work from.