Lt. Gov. Peter Kinder expects Supreme Court will settle health care legal challenge

Lt. Gov. Peter Kinder expects his lawsuit challenging the new health care law to be "knocking on the door" of the U.S. Supreme Court as early as next year.

Kinder, who spoke at a Monday meeting of the Rotary Club of Cape Girardeau, said a judge gave the U.S. government until Jan. 18 to respond to his lawsuit, which was filed in July at the Rush H. Limbaugh Sr. U.S. Courthouse. But he thinks whatever happens at the trial level, the case will make its way past the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals and on to the U.S. Supreme Court.

"They're going to ultimately decide the constitutionality of the law," said Kinder, a Republican. "It's a classic case where the Supreme Court says 'We're going to resolve the difference.' Hopefully, we'll be knocking on the door of the Supreme Court by 2012."

As done in other lawsuits that challenge so-called "Obamacare," Kinder expects that government lawyers will submit a motion to dismiss the suit. But Kinder said the new federal health care law is overreaching and that it isn't constitutional to force people to buy health insurance.

"This law gives power to the government that the king of England did not have over us, his subjects," Kinder said, referring to King George's rule of the pre-Revolution American colonists.

Not everyone agrees that the health care law is disastrous. Cape Girardeau lawyer John Cook, a Democrat who has debated Kinder in the past, said a return to the health care system as it was would put a huge financial burden on the country's middle class. While the country's poorest and richest got along fine under the old system, Cook said, the middle class "was being squeezed to death" by the increasing cost of insurance premiums.

"The middle class gets killed if we go back," Cook said.

The next step for Kinder happens Jan. 18, when the government is expected to respond to Kinder's lawsuit, which he filed in his capacity as an advocate for senior citizens and as a private taxpayer, he said. Regardless of the court's decision at trial -- which he hopes happens by late spring -- Kinder believes the losing side will appeal.

In two similar cases outside Missouri, the government's motion to dismiss has been granted. In cases in Florida and Virginia, judges denied motions to dismiss and held hearings on the merits of the lawsuits. In Virginia, a judge ruled that the health care law was unconstitutional. Kinder said a similar hearing is scheduled in Florida later this month. In all, 20 states have filed suits to block the law.

Kinder, who is considering a run for governor, said he feels strongly about the illegality of the law.

"It is coercive in the extreme," he said.

It has never happened before that the federal government, as a condition of living and breathing in the United States, has had the power to compel someone to buy health insurance and fine them for not doing so, Kinder said.

"This is new," he said. "No Congress, no president has ever presumed to have that power."

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