Health law legal challenges draw analysis, predictions

In analyzing the recent Florida decision that overturned the health law, one state senate's legislative counsel determined that only a decision by the Supreme Court is binding beyond the circuit in which it is issued. Meanwhile, another legal expert offered a prediction on how Justice Roberts would vote on the measure's constitutionality.

Kaiser Health News: Scoreboard: Tracking Health Law Court Challenges
All over the country, lawsuits challenging the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act are working their way through the federal courts. KHN is tracking the status of 22 cases, below, and will update those and other new cases on this page (Vaida, 3/2).

Politico Pro: State Gridlock On The ACA
Does Alaska have to implement the health reform law? Depends who you ask. The Alaska State Senate now says that the state must. A new legal analysis, authored by the state's Legislative Affairs Agency, concludes that a ruling in federal court in Florida does not impede action in Alaska. Rather, the state would only be bound by a decision from the country's highest court. "Only a decision of the U.S. Supreme Court is binding outside of the circuit where a decision is issued," Dennis Bailey, Legislative Counsel to the Alaska State Senate, wrote in a Feb. 25 analysis of the Florida decision (Kliff, 3/3).

CQ HealthBeat: Health Care Overhaul Supporter Predicts Chief Justice Roberts Will Uphold Law
A leading legal supporter of the health care law predicted Wednesday that the Supreme Court will rule in favor of the law's constitutionality "at least six to three" and that Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. will write the opinion. "My prediction is this will not be that close," Walter Dellinger, a former acting solicitor general in the Clinton administration, said at an Oxford-style debate on the individual mandate sponsored by the Brookings Institution. Dellinger is chairman of the appellate practice at O'Melveny & Myers. The debate pitted Dellinger and Simon Lazarus, public policy counsel to the National Senior Citizens Law Center, against David B. Rivkin Jr., a partner in the Washington office of Baker Hostetler who's challenging the law in a multistate suit based in Florida, and Ilya Somin, an associate professor at George Mason University School of Law (Norman, 3/2).