PENSACOLA, Fla. — Twenty states, including Colorado, and the nation’s most influential small-business lobby said Friday that a federal court in Florida must hear their challenge to President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul because they face imminent harm from its mandates.
The Justice Department in June asked a federal judge to dismiss the lawsuit, saying the U.S. District Court in Pensacola lacks subject-matter jurisdiction over some of the lawsuit’s claims. It also said other parts of the lawsuit failed to state claims upon which relief can be granted.
The states’ attorneys general, the National Federation of Independent Business and several individual taxpayers filed their response Friday in Pensacola federal court.
A key issue raised by their lawsuit is whether the federal government can require individuals to purchase health insurance and fine those who don’t.
“If Congress can regulate the failure to have health care insurance coverage, it can equally regulate the ‘failure’ to meet any other requirement it chooses to impose,” Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum wrote in the response.
Though the health care mandate does not take effect until 2014, the states will suffer now from spending more resources on an expanding Medicaid enrollment and from losing sovereignty “to enact statutes or state constitutional provisions to protect their state citizens from compulsion in their health care choices,” McCollum wrote.
An attorney for the Justice Department referred calls to an agency spokesman, who did not immediately return a phone message.
U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson has set a Sept. 14 hearing to consider arguments on the motion to dismiss.
