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The new health care reform bill has passed it's first legal challenge:

A federal judge in Michigan on Thursday dismissed one of more than 15 legal challenges to the new health care law, becoming the first to rule that the law is constitutional.

But this legal challenge is far from over:

Two other cases with higher profiles, one in Florida and one in Virginia, are headed toward hearings on the issues that were decided in Michigan. The central question, which may ultimately fall to the Supreme Court, is whether the Commerce Clause of the Constitution gives Congress the authority to require citizens to obtain a commercial product, namely health insurance.

Here's the key section of the ruling:

The health care market is unlike other markets. No one can guarantee his or her health, or ensure that he or she will never participate in the health care market. Indeed, the opposite is nearly always true. The question is how participants in the health care market pay for medical expenses – through insurance, or through an attempt to pay out of pocket with a backstop of uncompensated care funded by third parties. This phenomenon of costshifting is what makes the health care market unique. Far from "inactivity," by choosing to forgo insurance plaintiffs are making an economic decision to try to pay for health care services later, out of pocket, rather than now through the purchase of insurance, collectively shifting billions of dollars, $43 billion in 2008, onto other market participants.

The "Opinionator" at the NY Times has been following the online debate following the ruling. For instance, Jonathan Cohn at The New Republic writes:

The premise of Steeh's legal argument seems to be a notion about policy -- that it's not possible to regulate the insurance industry, in a way that would make coverage available to all people, without compelling every person to get coverage. On that count, I would argue, Steeh is correct.

So what does this mean for the repeal movement? My limited understanding, informed by a few casual conversations with some law professors, is that Steeh's decision is consistent with the traditional understanding of the Commerce Clause -- that the only way to throw out the mandate would be to reexamine conventional assumptions about the Commerce Clause. That would be a fairly radical move. But Steeh is a Clinton appointee. As those other suits go forward in other states, culminating perhaps in a Supreme Court case, we're going to hear from some judges who are more conservative -- in some cases, a lot more conservative. Radical reinterpretation of the Commerce Clause may be something they're willing to try.

The debate rages on at the Opinionator page, so run on over there to see how this plays out. It's pretty clear, though, that this is all headed towards the Supreme Court, not unlike when Social Security was challenged by the Republican party back in the days of FDR.

We all know how that challenge was decided.

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