Challenging the individual mandate under the Commerce Clause is a common thread of the health care law challenges. But the suits have raised a host of other issues.
One target is the so-called employer mandate, the requirement that employers of a certain size must provide or pay for some level of health insurance. Judge Hudson didn’t decide the issue in his opinion, and the challenge was rejected in the Liberty University and the Florida cases. “That is just textbook law,” says Timothy Jost, a professor at Washington and Lee University School of Law. “The federal government has been regulating employee benefits, been the only one regulating them, since 1974, so that one is pretty wild.”
