CRUCIAL CASES
Supreme Court will soon issue rulings that impact same-sex marriage, subsidies for health insurance.
— two landmark WASHINGTON u.s. supreme court rulings, slated for anytime over the next two weeks, deal with fundamental issues of the home: marriage and health care.
ohio has a big stake in both cases, which will determine whether gay couples can legally marry and if more than 16 0,000 people in the state will lose the federal financial help they receive to buy health insurance.
the two cases have emerged as the most crucial of the scores of decisions the justices have handed down in this term. although the same-sex marriage case has attracted the most attention, the health care decision could impact more than 6 million people who
have bought health insurance through the 2010 health law signed by President Barack Obama.
With Justice Anthony Kennedy serving his customary role as the pivotal vote, at least five justices are believed close to striking down a 2004 constitutional amendment approved by voters that prohibits same-sex marriage in Ohio.
“I think the writing is on the wall and most people will agree with that,” said Christopher Walker, a professor of law at Ohio State University, adding if the justices invalidate the Ohio ban, in a matter of hours or days same-sex “couples will be able to go to the court house and asked to be married.”
In the health case, Kennedy and Chief Justice John Roberts are the crucial votes in deciding whether the 2010 law prevents the federal government from offering financial help to people buying insurance in Ohio and the 33 other states that refused to establish their own marketplace, known as exchanges.
“Both of them are equally in play,” said Illya Shapiro, senior fellow in constitutional studies at the libertarian-leaning CATO Institute in Washington and author of a legal brief urging the justices to strike down the subsidies.
If Roberts and Kennedy side with the court’s three most conservative justices — Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Antonin Scalia — then the court could end federal subsidies that flow to 6 .4 million in those 34 states.
The Kaiser Family Foundation has concluded the 16 1,000 people in Ohio who receive federal subsidies would face a 190 percent premium increase to keep comparable health insurance policies.
“We think the practical implications of this case are enormous,” said Mary Rouvelas, senior counsel for the American Cancer Society Action Network and author of a legal brief urging the justices to uphold the subsidies. “We supported the law because it will save lives. There is extremely compelling scientific evidence that access to health insurance saves lives.”
The justices have 11 cases to issue rulings on before they take their summer recess, probably by June 30. They include The Supreme Court will decide whether the 2010 health care law prevents the federal government from offering financial help to people buying insurance in Ohio and the 33 other states that refused to establish their own marketplace. whether Arizona voters in 2000 violated the Constitution when they seized control of designing congressional districts from the state legislature in favor of a five-member independent commission.
Ohio Republicans have opted to wait for the Arizona ruling before designing a plan to create a more bipartisan method to draw up Ohio’s 16 congressional districts, even though legal analysts say the proposals considered by the Ohio House and Senate are very different from Arizona’s system.
Intent at issue in health care case
Of the health care and same-sex marriage cases, the health case is relatively simple: What exactly did Congress mean when it wrote the law? By contrast, the same-sex marriage case is whether the Constitution guarantees the rights of gays to marry.
The 2010 health care law aimed to provide health coverage to 32 million of the more than 46 million Americans without any insurance. It did so in two ways: A family of four earning as much as $32,913 a year could obtain coverage through Medicaid, the joint federal-state program which provides health care for 6 0 million low-income people.
The second was by funneling federal financial assistance to families of four earning anywhere from $23,850 a year to $95,000 a year to help pay for their own insurance. The policies would be available through online insurance marketplaces in each state, set up either by the state or federal government.
Because conservative Republicans in many states, such as Ohio, opposed the new health law, they simply refused to set up state exchanges, forcing people in Ohio to buy their insurance through a federal exchange.
But tucked inside the mammoth law is a section asserting people can only receive federal financial assistance to buy health insurance through marketplaces “established by the state.”
Conservative legal activists seized on those four words to challenge the entire subsidy scheme, contending if a state refused to set up a marketplace, the federal government could not occupy the vacuum and provide financial help to people in those states.
Although the four words have been dismissed by defenders of the law as a drafting error, Shapiro said “it doesn’t matter. If it’s clear, it’s clear and if they didn’t mean to do it they can fix it by legislation,” adding there is not convincing evidence it was a mistake by the law’s authors.
By contrast, Rouvelas said “these four words are being taken out of context.” She repeatedly asked officials at the American Cancer Society whether the law was intended to deny subsidies to people living in states without exchanges and the answer was “at no point did anyone ever even suggest” such a possibility.
But the law also asserts that if a state does not establish an exchange, the secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services “shall establish and operate” such an exchange “within the state.”
The Obama administration has focused on the argument that the law is unclear and under the 1984 Supreme Court ruling — Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council — agencies have broad authority to interpret an unclear law.
“The government only has to show the statute is ambiguous and the court would defer to the agency’s interpretation,” Walker said. “The real debate is whether there is any ambiguity.”
A ruling to kill the subsidies might resonate with Republicans who have adamantly opposed the law since its passage. But a growing number of GOP lawmakers, fearful of a backlash from people losing subsidies, are considering ways to at least temporarily extend the federal assistance.
Even that suggestion is meeting with sharp objections from conservatives such as Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Urbana, who said Republicans “have to show our vision for health care and our vision will bring down premiums without all the mandates and controls from Washington.”
“The American people know Obamacare is bad,” Jordan said. “We have to show how our alternative is better.”
Kennedy key in samesex marriage case
There seems to be less suspense with the samesex marriage case from Ohio. In United States v. Windsor in 2013, Kennedy and four other justices invalidated a 1996 federal law that defined marriage as between a man and a woman.
Concluding that the federal law violated the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, which guarantees that no one can be deprived of liberty without due process of law, Kennedy wrote that the federal law ordered “all federal officials, and indeed all persons with whom same-sex couples interact, including their own children, that their marriage is less worthy than the marriages of others.”
Although Kennedy’s opinion was limited to a federal law, four federal courts of appeals struck down a number of state bans on same-sex marriage. The sole exception was a 2-1 ruling last by the U.S. 6 th Circuit Court of Appeals upholding bans in Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee and Michigan.
The Ohio ban was challenged by James Obergefell of Cincinnati in 2013 along with his spouse, John Arthur. Just a few months later, Arthur died of Lou Gehrig’s disease. But twice last week when the justices were handing down rulings, Obergefell was waiting outside the Supreme Court.