TALLAHASSEE — A federal judge in Pensacola who struck down the health care act of 2010 as unconstitutional issued a stay Thursday of his earlier ruling, effectively ordering the 26 states that challenged it - including Florida - to continue to implement the law while the White House appeals.U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson also issued a caveat - for his stay to remain in effect, President Obama's administration must file an appeal and request an expedited review of the lawsuit from the Court of Appeals or the Supreme Court within seven days.
Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, leading the multi-state lawsuit challenging the sweeping federal law, said the U.S. Northern District of Florida judge's ruling means Florida must resume implementation of the law, which Gov. Rick Scott halted after Vinson's Jan. 31 ruling.
"Whatever states are required to do under the law they have to continue to do now," a lawyer in Bondi's office said, adding that Vinson's stay is indefinite until a higher court rules otherwise, providing that the U.S. Department of Justice meets Vinson's deadline for filing an appeal.
But a Scott spokesman gave no indication whether the governor would comply with the order.
"The ruling appears to be a temporary stay that gives the Department of Justice seven days to expeditiously appeal," said Brian Hughes. "While that time elapses, until we see what the Department of Justice does, nothing has changed."
U.S. Justice Department spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler said in a statement that the government would promptly comply with Vinson's directive and seek an expedited review.
"We appreciate the court's recognition of the enormous disruption that would have resulted if implementation of the Affordable Care Act was abruptly halted. We welcome the court's granting of a stay to allow the current programs and consumer protections, including tax credits to small business and millions of dollars in federal grants to help states with health care costs, to continue pending our appeal in the Eleventh Circuit," she said.
Supporters of the health care law applauded Vinson's Thursday ruling, calling it a reversal of his previous decision and a green light for states, insurance companies and consumers to move ahead with the changes.
"This was an overreach and it's been corrected. In the end, the path for implementation of the act is much clearer now than it was before," said Simon Lazarus, an attorney with the National Senior Citizens Law Center.
In Thursday's 20-page order, Vinson chided the Obama administration for still not having filed an appeal and repeatedly affirmed his decision that the law's "individual mandate" requiring all taxpayers to purchase health insurance is unconstitutional. He struck down the entire law because he found there was no way to sever the "individual mandate" portion from the rest of it.
"The sooner this issue is finally decided by the Supreme Court, the better off the entire nation will be. And yet, it has been more than one month from the entry of my order and judgment and still the defendants have not filed their notice of appeal," Vinson wrote.
The administration did not actually seek a stay in its Feb. 17 motion for a clarification. Instead, it asked Vinson if he really intended to stop the rollout of the law pending appeals. The confusion stemmed from Vinson's decision not to include an injunction halting implementation with his original order.
His order Thursday made it clear that his earlier ruling was a de facto injunction that he had expected the federal government to observe, but "to save time in this time-is-of-the-essence case," he wrote that he would treat the administration's motion for a clarification as a motion for a stay.
After the January ruling, three Republican governors, including Scott, declared that the law was dead.
"We are not going to spend a lot of time and money with regard to trying to get ready to implement that until we know exactly what is going to happen," Scott told reporters last month.
But other states involved in the lawsuit continued to move ahead with the law.
Vinson's order Thursday also conceded that the higher courts could overturn his original decision, although that could take years.
"I cannot say that the defendants do not have a likelihood of success on appeal. They do. And so do the plaintiffs," Vinson wrote.
If the law is upheld on appeal, and Florida has not implemented the changes it requires to Medicaid, then the state risks losing matching federal funds for the state-federal program, lawyers on both sides of the case, including Bondi's staff, agreed.
"States who don't get their act together to implement the requirement to set up exchanges, or who don't prepare adequately for the modifications in Medicaid, there's just no basis for that in law or in any kind of practical guess as to what's going to happen," Lazarus said.
