Brad Joondeph, a professor at Santa Clara Law who maintains the indispensable ACA (Affordable Care Act) Litigation Blog, provided a short summary yesterday of the upcoming oral arguments in the numerous challenges to ObamaCare. The schedule indicates it will be a busy and most interesting spring and summer for the fate of the individual mandate:
- Virginia v. Sebelius, one of the first cases filed and one of the most prominent under the guidance of Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, has been combined with a less prominent case, Liberty University v. Geithner, and will be heard before the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals on May 10.
- Thomas More Law Center v. Obama, which lost at the District Court level, will be heard before the Sixth Circuit on June 1.
- Florida v. Health and Human Services, the most popular of the challenges and the one Wyoming joined just before its successful win in the Northern District of Florida, will be heard at the Eleventh Circuit on June 8.
- Finally, Seven-Sky v. Holder, which lost at the District Court, will be heard before the D.C. Circuit sometime in September.
Joondeph points out that, with these cases on the appeals dockets, the remaining court challenges have “virtually ground to a halt,” concluding that since one of these early cases will likely make it to the Supreme Court there is no reason to keep litigating in other circuits.
While the litigation proceeds, the Wyoming Liberty Group is hard at work formulating and promoting alternatives to centralized, paternalist health care. We recently published Regina Meena’s comparison of ACA exchanges and interstate compacts, and will soon publish papers discussing alternative funding models for charitable health care and a new legal framework for medical care and innovation.
A busy season indeed!
