Health Care Reform: Survivor

The efforts of the Florida Attorney General to challenge the constitutionality of the individual mandate in the health care reform bill has survived another legal round.  A federal judge in Florida allowed two counts of the lawsuit filed by the Florida and other states to go forward.  One count preserved was the challenge to the individual mandate based on limitations on the federal government in it's use of the commerce clause, as well as possibly violations of the 9th and 10th amendment. 

According to Judge Roger Vinson, the legal challenge by the Obama administration failed the "Alice in Wonderland" test, by calling the mandate to buy insurance either a "penalty" or a "tax," depending on which definition suited them at the time.

“Congress should not be permitted to secure and cast politically difficult votes on controversial legislation by deliberately calling something one thing," then turn around "and argue in court that Congress really meant something else entirely," he wrote.

Prior to this ruling, a federal judge in Michigan ruled the individual mandate was constitutional.