Supreme Court term starts with Medicaid case

Associated Press

WASHINGTON

The Supreme Court began its new term Monday by weighing who gets to object when a state makes Medicaid cuts — and soon is likely to plunge into a far- bigger health dispute. That’s the challenge to President Barack Obama’s historic health-care overhaul.

For now, patients and providers are squaring off against California and the Obama administration to argue they should have the right to sue in federal court when a state cuts its payment rates in the Medicaid program for poor Americans. The state and federal governments argue the U.S. Health and Human Services Department, not a federal judge, gets to make the call.

There was no consensus apparent among the justices.

Before opening-day arguments began, the court rejected more than 1,800 appeals that had piled up during the justices’ three-month summer break, including one from California jail officials who forced a Muslim woman to remove her head scarf and another from fried-chicken giant KFC Corp. objecting to taxes it has to pay in Iowa.

Chief Justice John Roberts also congratulated Antonin Scalia on 25 years on the court, noting that Scalia listened to his first argument as a justice on the first Monday in October in 1986. “The place has not been the same since,” Justice Roberts said.

The term opened with high anticipation because the justices seem likely to take up the health-care overhaul now that both the administration and opponents of the law have filed Supreme Court appeals. The justices could decide as early as mid-November whether to hear the case, a timetable that probably would mean a high-court hearing in the spring and a decision by late June.

Monday’s case does not directly implicate the overhaul, although the expansion of Medicaid is a key element in the law’s aim of extending coverage to more than 30 million Americans who are without health insurance. Medicaid costs are shared by the federal and state governments.