A federal judge in Pensacola has ruled the federal health care law unconstitutional in a lawsuit filed by former Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum last year and joined by 25 other states.
U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson said a provision requiring people to buy health insurance by 2014 or face penalties violates the Constitution. A judge in Virginia made a similar ruling last year, but Vinson went further and said the provision can’t be severed from the rest of the legislation and therefore the entire law must be struck down.
Two other federal judges have upheld the insurance requirement in the health care law, so the next step is likely to be the U.S. Supreme Court.
Six more states have joined Florida’s legal challenge to the federal health care law now awaiting a Pensacola federal judge’s preliminary ruling.
Iowa, Ohio, Kansas, Wyoming, Wisconsin and Maine are now among the 26 states, including Florida, challenging the constitutionality of the federal health care law. Virginia has filed a separate lawsuit and Oklahoma is considering its own as well.
Attorney General Pam Bondi filed the papers in Pensacola to add the six states to the lawsuit initiated by her predecessor Bill McCollum.
Meanwhile, the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives are debating a bill that would repeal the law. That measure is expected to go nowhere in the U.S. Senate, where Democrats still have the upper hand.
Gov. Rick Scott‘s characterization of taxes, regulation and litigation as the “axis of unemployment” during his inaugural speech yesterday is destined to become a familiar mantra for fellow Republicans as they embrace his pro-business agenda.
It didn’t take long for Rep. Matt Hudson to latch onto the catchphrase to pitch his latest bill resurrecting legislation vetoed by Gov. Charlie Crist last year.
Hudson, a fellow Republican who hails from Scott’s Naples hometown, filed the bill (HB 119) that would “reduce, streamline and clarify regulations” for providers overseen by the Agency for Health Care Administration, according to a press release issued by Hudson’s office.
“HB 119 will be essential in fighting the axis of unemployment and ensuring that the tax dollars of Florida’s citizens are not being wasted,” Hudson said in the statement.
The Florida Liberty Alliance – a coalition of tea party activists – is pushing Senate President Mike Haridopolos to pass a law similar to Virginia’s that would exempt Floridians from the federal health care law requiring individuals to purchase health insurance or pay a fine.
The group wants Haridopolos and the Florida Legislature to pass something similar to Virginia’s “Health Care Freedom Act” and make it one of the first things they do when they convene in March.
Haridopolos has already sponsored a constitutional amendment by the same name that would allow Florida to opt out of the health care law, now under scrutiny by a federal judge in Pensacola.
But the alliance doesn’t want to wait until the 2012 election when the proposal would go on the ballot.
“We respectfully ask that all expeditious measure be taken to introduce legislation to create Florida law, as was crafted so well in Virginia, to secure these protections by statute for Floridians as one of the very first legislative initiatives in the new session,” wrote a group of tea party activists in a letter to Haridopolos, R-Merritt Island, released today.
“We believe that if Governor Scott, as one of his first acts on taking office, were to sign such legislation into law, the citizens of Florida would see that our elected Representatives not only take their oath of office to protect the Constitution seriously, but it would send a very strong message to Washington and the entire nation,” the letter goes on.
A federal judge in Virginia last week overturned the “individual mandate” portion of the law requiring that individuals and families have health insurance coverage or pay a fine. That case is likely headed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
A federal judge in Pensacola hearing oral arguments in a key lawsuit over the federal health care law this morning repeatedly questioned lawyers about whether the federal government was overreaching its authority by forcing individuals to purchase health insurance or pay a fine.
U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson wanted to know if the health care law set a precedent allowing Congress to pass laws about anything that has an economic impact.
Congress could decide that “everybody needs to eat broccoli” because that would make them healthier and thereby reduce health care costs, Vinson proposed.
“If they decided that everybody needs to eat broccoli because broccoli is healthy they could mandate that everybody has to buy a certain amount of broccoli each week,” he asked David Rivkin, a lawyer for Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum and the 19 other states suing the federal government over the law.
Attorney General Bill McCollum and his successor Pam Bondi are urging fellow Republicans throughout the country to join his lawsuit against the federal government over the new federal health care law.
McCollum and Bondi, who will take over on Jan. 4., sent a letter to 13 Republicans who won election this month as attorneys general or governor hoping to shore up support for the lawsuit now working its way through the federal courts.
“Having a majority of the states litigating our constitutional rights is a powerful message,” they wrote.
Oral argument on the case is set for Dec. 16 in Pensacola.
UPDATE: Haridopolos’ spokesman said the notice announcing the informal meeting was a favor to the media to give the press a heads-up. Look for the list of invited speakers later. Because committees are not yet assigned, the Senate is not required to notice the meetings yet.
Leaders in the Florida Senate will begin Medicaid reform meetings tomorrow while in town for the organizational session/special session to override a smorgasbord of Gov. Charlie Crist’s vetoes.
Sen. Don Gaetz, a Niceville Republican who once owned the state’s first private hospice care chain, will head the day-long meeting.
A press release issued by Senate President-designate Mike Haridopolos (who’ll lose the “designate” shortly after 10 a.m. today) says Senate will “receive testimony and hear presentations from invited speakers and the public on the issue of Medicaid.”
Haridopolos, R-Merritt Island, has made a big deal out of being open and transparent and took down the doors to his office’s inner sanctum inside the president’s suite as a symbolic gesture yesterday to demonstrate his availability to his members.
But there’s no list of tomorrow’s invited speakers in the press release.
When asked, Haridopolos’ spokesman David Bishop said in an e-mail the guests will be “stakeholders.”
After more than two months since GOP gubernatorial candidate Rick Scott defeated him in a brutal primary election, Attorney General Bill McCollum finally came out in support of his one-time foe.
“Florida is facing a critical time. Our state needs conservative leaders who will grow our economy and create jobs. We need merit pay and an end to teacher tenure in our public schools, major litigation reform, smaller government, low taxes and a repeal of Obamacare. With this in mind, I will cast my vote for Rick Scott for Governor. It’s the better choice for Florida,” McCollum’s less-than-enthusiastic statement, released by the Republican Party of Sarasota, read.
McCollum, at one point a shoe-in for the nomination, lost the GOP primary after Scott spent $50 million of his own fortune on campaign ads attacking the former Congressman for being a Washington insider.
McCollum said recently he would not endorse Scott’s Democratic opponent Alex Sink, in part because she supports the federal health care law over which McCollum has sued the federal government.
A federal judge recently allowed McCollum’s lawsuit to proceed.
McCollum was the final holdout among state GOP leaders who at one point pilloried Scott, who was forced out of the hospital chain he founded shortly before Columbia/HCA was forced to pay $1.7 billion in fines to the federal government for Medicare fraud.
House Speaker-designate Dean Cannon essentially gave Gov. Charlie Crist a cease and desist order telling the governor to quit enabling the federal government regarding health care reforms.
Cannon, R-Orlando, accused Crist of “commandeering of state insurance regulatory resources” by allowing executive agencies to begin implementing the federal health care reforms even as the state is suing White House agencies over them.
Cannon’s demands could set up a possible showdown between the executive and legislative branches of government over the health care reforms, which Crist, the independent candidate in the U.S. Senate race, says he supports in part.
Cannon gave Crist until Nov. 15 to tell him how much the state is spending on workers and other resources to comply with the reforms and told him that Crist will need the legislature’s approval before taking any further action.
Cannon complains in the letter to Crist that the Office of Insurance Regulation is jumpstarting new insurance regulations by developing data systems. But that office is overseen by not just Crist. He and the Florida Cabinet – including Attorney General Bill McCollum, who filed the lawsuit over the Patient Protection and Affordable Care act – make up the Financial Services Commission that’s in charge of OIR.
GOP congressional challenger Allen West, left, with House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, this morning at Gun Club Cafe. J. GWENDOLYNNE BERRY/Staff photo
House Minority Leader John Boehner, in line to become speaker if Republicans regain control of the House in the Nov. 2 midterm elections, says the GOP today is different than the model rejected by voters in congressional elections only four years ago.
“I think Republicans learned their lesson. They understood that we were spending too much, government was growing too much,” Boehner, an Ohio Republican, said this morning at a campaign appearance for Republican House candidate Allen West at the Gun Club Cafe in unincorporated West Palm Beach.
Senate President-to-be Mike Haridopolos wrapped up a three-day tour of Florida highlighting one of his priorities when he takes over the chamber in November: a total overhaul of the state Medicaid system, which he calls broken.
Haridopolos toured cities from Miami to Tallahassee by bus, flanked by GOP Senate leaders Don Gaetz of Niceville and Joe Negron of Stuart, as well as Haridopolos’ wife Stephanie, a family practice doctor in their Melbourne hometown.
It’s not unusual for new chamber leaders to travel around the state to pump themselves up before taking the helm.
Former Senate President Ken Pruitt made a sweep of Florida in a little yellow school bus championing the Bright Futures scholarship for two years before taking over the chamber in 2006.
Haridopolos wants the federal government to approve a Medicaid waiver for Florida that would allow the state to place all of the state’s 2.7 million Medicaid recipients into managed care. It’s unlikely that Democratic President Barack Obama’s administration would approve such a maneuver, especially given Haridopolos’ and crew’s repeated bashing of federal health care reforms and their support for Attorney General Bill McCollum’s lawsuit against the White House regarding the new health care law.
Expect a major component of Haridopolos’ Medicaid revamp to include tort reform.
He told reporters today that a major problem for Medicaid providers such as hospitals is the high cost of medical malpractice insurance.
“What we’ve consistently heard during these round table discussions is that doctors who have protections against malpractice lawsuits have the ability to deliver a higher quality of care to their patients,” Haridopolos said.
Democratic Senate hopeful Maurice Ferre talked health care during a visit with The Palm Beach Post editorial board today and said the U.S. should eventually adopt a Medicare-for-all system that includes government price-setting and spending caps based on age and medical condition.
“I would absolutely say that this is the cap on how much is available for you to spend at age 90, 87, with a heart condition of this sort, with diabetes of this sort, two legs missing and, you know, this is how much is available for you to spend. And you spend it any way you want,” said Ferre, who is 75.
Republican Attorney General Bill McCollum holds a 40-to-36 percent lead over Democratic Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink in the Florida governor’s race, according to the latest Quinnipiac University poll.
Floridians disapprove of the new federal health care law by a 48-to-44 percent margin. But they say by a 54-to-40 margin that federal lawsuit by McCollum and other state attorneys general challenging the new law is a “bad idea.”
Florida voters give President Obama a 50-to-45 percent favorable rating — up from January, when the president was viewed favorably by 45 percent and unfavorably by 49 percent. Obama’s seeming openness to more drilling off the Florida coast gets high marks — 64 percent in favor, 28 percent opposed.
The April 8-13 poll of 1,250 voters has a 2.8 percent margin of error.
Former Democratic U.S. Rep. Tim Mahoney, voted out of office in a 2008 sex scandal, says people have suggested he run again for his old seat. He didn’t unequivocally reject the idea in a phone conversation today, but made it sound highly unlikely.
Mahoney said he’s been doing some business consulting and has helped raise campaign money for U.S. Rep. Alcee Hastings, D-Miramar, and other unnamed Democrats from outside Florida. (Mahoney’s predecessor in Congress and in scandal-tarnished exits, Mark Foley, has also reemerged recently as a political fund-raiser.)
Mahoney lost in 2008 to current U.S. Rep. Tom Rooney, R-Tequesta. Democratic hopes of recapturing the seat suffered a major blow last month when St. Lucie County Commissioner Chris Craft dropped his challenge of Rooney. Dems have until April 30 to field a replacement candidate.
At a tea party gathering in Jupiter on Monday night, Republican congressional hopeful Allen West slammed U.S. Rep. Ron Klein, D-Boca Raton, for not holding an in-person town hall meeting to discuss his vote for the sweeping health care overhaul bill.
West told activists they need to “make the fellow scared to come out of his house. That’s the only way that you’re going to win. That’s the only way you’re going to get these people’s attention. You’ve got to put pressure on them and make them understand that you’ve got to come back and live the laws that you establish. Don’t let them be a ruling class elite. You’ve got to let them know that the clock’s ticking.”
Broward County Democratic Chairman Mitch Ceasar replied with a lengthy statement today accusing West of stoking the “violent fringe that threatens our leaders.”
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is circulating Ceasar’s statement as well.
West says Ceasar’s response shows that “the liberals of Broward County are evidencing their fear of the American people, and our campaign, and OUR voices will not be silenced. If Nancy Pelosi’s puppet Congressman Ron Klein will not face his constituents, then yes, he should remain in his gated community home…”
Read the Ceasar and West statements after the jump….
In an AOLNews column, Florida Attorney General and Republican gubernatorial candidate Bill McCollum makes the case for the 13-state federal lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the individual insurance mandate in the new health care bill.
Remember Republican congressional hopeful Ed Lynch’s claim on Fox Business Network last week that he had seen a surge in contributions immediately after the House passed the health care bill?
“We’ve got probably a thousand percent increase since the bill was passed on Sunday (March 21) and then we’ve got about another thousand percent increase when it was finally signed into law (March 23). So it’s been going pretty well…It’s just a national movement that’s gone on,” said Lynch, who’s running in next week’s special election to replace Robert Wexler.
New Federal Election Commission reports, however, tell a less dramatic story….
U.S. Rep. Ron Klein, D-Boca Raton, will discuss the recently passed health care overhaul bill with randomly selected seniors tonight in a “telephone town hall” meeting.
Republican challenger Allen West accuses Klein of using the format to duck a face-to-face meeting with unhappy constituents.
Klein took similar heat last summer when he hosted a teleconference on health care while many of his House colleagues were getting screamed at and YouTubed by angry voters at traditional town hall meetings. But Klein said the estimated 6,460 participants in his August phone event were far more than he would have reached in a flesh-and-blood meeting.
The Senate approved a sweeping overhaul of Medicaid that would require some Medicaid recipients to pay deductibles and co-payments and give vouchers to others for medical care.
Sen. Joe Negron, R-Stuart, introduced what he called the “transformative” change as an amendment to the budget (SB 2700), which drew criticism from Democrats who objected the major changes should have been debated in committees.
The proposal would give state health care officials the authority to develop a new waiver program for Florida’s $18 billion Medicaid program. Federal officials would have to approve the waiver.
Negron said the time is urgent because the federal health care reforms signed into law by President Barack Obama could significantly increase the state’s spending on Medicaid, the health care program for the poor.
“The reason we can’t put money into education into other areas of the budget is because…they just come hand us an invoice, you owe us $1.8 billion more this year.
I don’t know why it should be entitled to preferential treatment over all the other needs of the state,” Negron said. “The time right now is urgent.”
The proposal is “a wholesale change of one of the largest and most important programs in this state,” objected Democrat Nan Rich, vice chairwoman of the Senate Health and Human Services Appropriations Committee.
“This is a huge policy and appropriations issue. It does not belong passed or defeated on this floor today. It needs to go to substantive committees,” said Rich, D-Weston.
Attorney General Bill McCollum’s lawsuit against Democrat-controlled Congress and President Barack Obama’s administration has sparked a political feud not only in the nation’s Capitol but in the state’s as well.
Senate Democratic Leader Al Lawson took offense at Senate President Jeff Atwater’s congratulatory press release lauding McCollum’s legal disparaging of the president’s health care reform.
The president’s office issued an unusually partisan release entitled “Florida Senate Leaders Support AG McCollum’s Legal Challenge to Unprecedented and Unconstitutional Government Health Care Scheme.”
The GOP leaders are “like little boys who are playing marbles and the ones who lost went home,” Lawson, D-Tallahassee said.
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