Laws

Of the broadly based laws that have been passed in the United States in the early months of 2010, one of the most high profile and contentious has been the health care reform bill sponsored by President Obama and finally approved by a House vote toward the end of March after it was passed by the Senate in December 2009 and then confronted with a protracted period of negotiation and opposition which in its long course ended up substantially reshaping the law in the hopes that such adjustment might attract support from a wider baser of law makers than were initially committed to supporting and approving the legislative measure. In particular, the effort to have this ambitious program for overhauling the finances and procedures of the already hugely expensive and complex United States health care system has aroused a fierce and unusual degree of opposition from the rightward spectrum of the American political landscape, which in recent elections and political contests has been felt by many observers to be exerting a wide influence on the historically broadly based, “big tent” approach of the Republican Party. Though the laws that deal with the American system for providing medical services have long been a subject for proposed changes in law from both sides of the political aisle and both portions of the United States’ two party-based system. The debate over the best laws to be brought to bear on the difficulties facing the American health care system has, however, become unusually one-sided in terms of the distribution of opposition and support among political partisans of varying stripes of allegiance. One particularly controversial facet of the new issue of contentious health care laws and regulations is the move by some Republican state governments and their allies in Washington to use the principle of states’ rights as a lever against the implementation of the Obama-endorsed medical services law.

Minutes after President Obama reached the long-hoped for goal of signing the health care law, officially referred to as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, officials acting on behalf of thirteen state governments filed suit in a federal court located in Penascola, Florida, contending that the new laws that would now go into effect constituted an “unprecedented encroachment on the sovereignty of the states.” The suit against the health care law was filed by Florida’s attorney general, Bill McCollum with the participation of attorneys general from twelve other states. In an indication of the increasingly polarized and party-based shape being taken over this law question, eleven of the attorneys general were Republican, leaving only one Democratic attorneys general in the group of state officials opposed to the legislation. Elsewhere in the country, suit was also filed by the attorney general of Virginia, Ken Cuccinelli. Another aspect of the state-based opposition to the health care law being mounted by the legislation’s conservative-leaning opponents consists of the moves being taken by three state legislatures to block implementation of the laws in their own health care systems.