INDIANAPOLIS —
Indiana is joining 13 other states in challenging the nation’s nearly $1 trillion health care overhaul — a lawsuit the state’s attorney general insisted Monday arose not from politics but a need to answer serious constitutional questions.
Attorney General Greg Zoeller said Indiana will join an amended version of the lawsuit expected to be filed soon in a federal court in Florida, becoming the 14th plaintiff.
The original suit was filed last week by the attorneys general of 13 states minutes after President Barack Obama signed the 10-year $938 billion health care bill into law following a bitter partisan battle in Congress. It contends that the legislation is unconstitutional.
Zoeller, a Republican, said the law, which will extend health coverage to 32 million uninsured Americans, raises several constitutional questions, including whether Congress has the authority to enact the law’s mandate that most Americans purchase health insurance.
He said that issue, as well as new demands he said it would place on state sovereignty, enter “uncharted territory” and need to be answered by the courts. Zoeller said he and the other attorneys general hope the case is taken up by the U.S. Supreme Court.
“This is such a large program that’s almost unprecedented — everybody’s going to need to know the answer to whether this is constitutional or not,” he said. “Even the people who support it have as much interest to know whether it’s going to be upheld by the Supreme Court.”
Aside from insuring millions of uninsured Americans, the law’s provisions include banning insurance companies from denying coverage to people with pre-existing medical conditions.
But Zoeller, a Republican, warned in a February report requested by U.S. Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., that the law would add about half a million more Indiana residents to the Medicaid rolls, increasing Indiana’s Medicaid costs by $2.4 billion over 10 years. That report also said the law would cost Indiana about $750 million by 2019 by diverting drug rebate savings from the states to the federal government and create other unintended consequences.
Indiana Democratic Party Chair Dan Parker called the lawsuit “pure partisan politics” and predicted that it would not be successful based on what he said was wide agreement among legal scholars that the law is constitutional.
He said the law will help more than 820,000 Indiana residents who do not currently have health insurance, while about 76,000 small Indiana businesses will get a tax credit to make premiums more affordable.
“Hoosiers simply can’t afford any more delays or obstruction from Mitch Daniels and Greg Zoeller — they want reform implemented now,” Parker said in a statement.
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