Supreme Court The announcement was made on Friday That will hear it Becerra v. Braidwood ManagementThe Affordable Care Act is the latest in a long line of lawsuits seeking to undermine the landmark health reform law signed by President Barack Obama in 2010.
Unlike some previous anti-Obamacare cases, Braidwood Management Not an existential threat to the entire law. The Supreme Court would buy the plaintiffs’ argument in this case, however, as it would give health insurers more leeway to refuse to cover certain treatments. Such a decision would give employers more power to offer health plans that deny coverage for those treatments.
There’s also a decent chance the court will reject the challenge, despite a 6-3 Republican supermajority. Judiciary A strong argument for maintaining stability. Appellate courts that hear these cases are often overturned by the Supreme Court. And Braidwood Management Plaintiffs have struggled to convince even sympathetic judges with some of their arguments.
when Braidwood Management What began as a sweeping challenge to three agencies within the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that may require health insurers to cover various treatments has narrowed in scope as it has progressed through the courts.
The plaintiffs, who object to HHS’s decision to require insurers to cover an anti-HIV drug, have mounted a broad legal challenge to the three agencies. At the trial stage, their case was also assigned to Judge Reed O’Connor, a former Republican Capitol Hill staffer best known for his failed 2018 effort to repeal the entire Affordable Care Act. After O’Connor handed these plaintiffs a partial victory, his decision was appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, the most right-wing appeals court in the federal system.
And yet, despite the case being heard by mostly sympathetic judges, those judges accepted only a few. Braidwood Management Plaintiffs’ argument.
Basically, the lawsuit targets three separate companies. The US Preventive Services Task Force (PSTF) — whose fate is now before the Supreme Court — has fairly broad authority to require insurers to cover preventive health treatments like cancer screenings.
Meanwhile, two other agencies decide which vaccines insurers must cover and which women’s health and pediatric treatments must be covered. O’Connor, however, did not hit these two bodies. And The Fifth Circuit essentially avoided the question What should happen to these organizations is up to a future date. That means, at least for now, only the fate of the PSTF is before the Supreme Court.
All that said, the stakes in this case remain quite high. The Justice Department, in its petition, asked the judges to hear the case, currently PSTF Insurers have to cover more than 50 preventive services “including screening to detect lung, cervical, and colorectal cancer”; screening to detect diabetes; statin drugs to reduce the risk of heart disease and stroke; Medicines to prevent HIV; physical therapy for older adults to prevent falls; and eye ointment for newborns to prevent blindness-causing infections.”
If the PSTF falls through, insurers will be able to deny coverage for these treatments. And employers will likely be able to offer health plans that don’t cover them.
So what is the specific legal issue before the court? Braidwood Management?
O’Connor and the Fifth Circuit ruled that the PSTF violates a vague provision of the Constitution governing how top government officials are appointed.
The Constitution requires certain high-ranking federal officials, who “United States officials,” will be assigned to their jobs using specific procedures. Although the Constitution does not define the term “officers of the United States,” the Supreme Court has held that most officers who practiceSubstantial authority under lawQualify as an officer.
There is also These officers are of two types. Among the “principal” officers are top-level officials such as cabinet secretaries who usually answer directly to the president. These officers must be nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate before taking office. Meanwhile, “inferior” officials can be appointed by the president alone, by the courts, or by “department heads”.
The Constitution also does not define who is a chief, as opposed to an inferior, officer. But in the Supreme Court Edmund v. United States (1997) that “the term ‘inferior’ refers to a relationship with some higher official or officials below the president,” because “whether someone is an ‘inferior’ official depends on whether he has a superior.”
Accordingly, principal officers (who must be confirmed by the Senate) generally mean department heads and other very high-ranking officials who answer directly to the president. In contrast, inferior officers are United States officers who report to a superior officer.
Members of the PSTF are not Senate-confirmed officials—they are typically appointed by an agency head within HHS, who serves Pursuant to the authority of the Secretary of HHS – and thus did not qualify as a principal officer. Even the Fifth Circuit has recognized that “The HHS secretary may remove members of the task force at will“So they certainly look like they’re inferior officers, because they can be fired by the HHS secretary (a principal official) if the HHS secretary disapproves of their performance or disagrees with their decisions.
Nevertheless, the Fifth Circuit concluded that members of the PSTF are not ultimately responsible to the Secretary (and thus must be Senate-confirmed), because the Fifth Circuit believed that no statute actually gives the Secretary direct authority to override one. Decision of PSTF. Instead, if the Secretary disagrees with a PSTF decision, the Secretary must either threaten to fire PSTF members unless they change course, or actually fire them and replace them with people who will implement the Secretary’s preferred policy.
This isn’t a particularly persuasive argument – most people would rightly think of someone as their boss if that person had the power to hire and fire them. And it is not even clear that the Secretary does not have the legal power to override the PSTF without firing a member.
As the Justice Department noted in its petition to the justices, the PSTF is part of the federal public health service, which, by law, “shall be administered by the Assistant Secretary for Health. Under the supervision and direction of the Secretary“Federal law empowers the Secretary to exercise “All functions of public health services” — including, potentially, overturning PSTF decisions.
The Judiciary, in other words, has strong legal arguments against the position of the two lower courts in this case. Whether that will be enough to persuade a GOP-controlled court, however, remains to be seen.
