Gov. Paul LePage thinks his administration’s bid to trim Maine’s Medicaid rolls even more than it already has is destined to be settled by the nine justices of the U.S. Supreme Court. But he’s mistaken in thinking his administration is raising a compelling legal challenge to a federal law.
“I thought from the first time this would end up on [Chief Justice John] Roberts’ lap,” LePage told the Maine Public Broadcasting Network on Tuesday, the day after a three-judge panel from the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously ruled against his administration’s efforts to eliminate Medicaid coverage for about 6,000 low-income 19- and 20-year-olds. “This has to be decided at the Supreme Court, and we are just going through the process.”
But the odds of the Supreme Court hearing this case are stacked against LePage.
To start, the court receives about 10,000 petitions each year from parties seeking oral arguments before the court. The justices typically accept 75-80, according to the court’s website. That’s less than 1 percent.
Then, there needs to be a compelling reason for the court to hear the case. The Supreme Court often selects cases that could have national significance or that would allow the court to resolve conflicting legal decisions issued by the country’s 12 Circuit courts.
LePage’s case doesn’t meet those criteria. For one, there’s basically no conflict to settle. Other than the administration and its lawyers, there appear to be few with any legal credentials who believe LePage’s case passes legal muster. Even among Republican governors resisting Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, LePage is the only one arguing that a provision of the federal law known as “maintenance of effort,” which requires states to maintain existing coverage levels for children until 2019, is invalid.
In the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals case, eight different organizations filed “friend of the court” briefs taking the side of the federal government. No one filed a “friend of the court” brief on the LePage administration’s behalf.
For more than two years, the Republican governor, his appointees and his lawyers have argued that Maine has no obligation to maintain Medicaid coverage levels that were in place in 2010, when Congress passed the Affordable Care Act.
The Supreme Court’s 2012 decision on the Affordable Care Act made the law’s Medicaid expansion effectively optional by removing the federal government’s enforcement mechanism — the ability to withhold all Medicaid funds from noncompliant states. The LePage administration has taken that ruling as a signal that the federal government can’t force the state to maintain specified coverage levels.
But the federal government for decades has awarded states Medicaid funds only when they agree to follow certain conditions. And the maintenance of effort provision simply follows that allowable tradition, the 1st Circuit judges found.
“It is simply an unexceptional ‘alter[ation] … [of] the boundaries’ of the categories of individuals covered under the old program, completely analogous to the many past alterations of the program that [the Supreme Court’s 2012 case] expressly found constitutional,” the three judges wrote.
There’s no doubt opponents of various provisions of the Affordable Care Act have succeeded in bringing existential challenges to the law before the Supreme Court. But the court agreed to hear those cases after (in the 2012 case) numerous states challenged the law and (in the case on subsidies the Supreme Court will hear this term and in the 2012 case) after Circuit courts issued conflicting decisions.
If LePage wants to be responsible for bringing the next major Obamacare challenge before the court, he needs a case that has a shred of legal credibility. The origin of this case is in the administration’s desire to save money — cutting coverage for 6,000 19- and 20-year-olds save the state $3.7 million. But in continuing to press the matter and advance his spurious legal claims, LePage is simply wasting the state’s time and money.
