Supreme Court Upholds Affordable Care Act; FCA And AKS Provisions Remain Standing

The Supreme Court this morning announced that the so-called “individual mandate,” the centerpiece of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), which requires most individuals to maintain a minimum level of health insurance, is a constitutional exercise of Congress’s power to tax. Separately, the Court held that a provision of PPACA that would penalize States that elected not to participate in the expansion of the Medicaid program by withdrawing their existing federal Medicaid funding is unconstitutional. However, the Court concluded that this violation can be cured by severing this provision from the rest of the law, leaving the remainder of PPACA standing.

Thus, those False Claims Act and Anti-Kickback Statute-related amendments enacted as part of PPACA, briefly listed here, remain standing: (1) the amendment to the AKS establishing that claims “resulting from” AKS violations that are submitted to the federal healthcare programs give rise to FCA liability (PPACA § 4204(f)(1)); (2) the further AKS amendment, clarifying that knowledge of and specific intent to violate the AKS are not necessary to establish a violation (PPACA § 6402(f)(2)); (3) amendments to the FCA’s “public disclosure bar” provision that convert it from a jurisdictional bar to an affirmative defense that can be raised by a defendant in a motion to dismiss but rejected by the government, precluding judicial resolution of the issue, and significantly limiting the types of disclosures that can give rise to the defense (PPACA § 10104(j)(2)); (4) requiring recipients of “overpayments” to report and return them, and making the failure to do so the basis of a “reverse false claim” cause of action under the FCA (PPACA § 6402(a)); and (5) creating additional civil monetary penalties that may be applied to conduct that violates the FCA (PPACA §§ 6402(d)(2), 6408(a)).