House Speaker John Boehner says he wants the authority to sue the Obama administration when the administration fails to implement provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (PPACA) and PPACA's sister act, the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010 (HCERA). Boehner, R-Ohio, has released a draft resolution that would give him the authority to start or intervene in one or more PPACA-related or HCERA-related suits in the federal courts.
PPACA called for the government to start requiring many employers with the equivalent of 50 or more full-time employees to start providing "minimum essential coverage" in 2014 or else pay a penalty. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services decided instead to enforce the PPACA employer mandate provision for employers with 100 or more employees in 2015, and to let most affected employers with 50 to 99 full-time equivalents wait until 2016 to comply.
"The president changed the health care law without a vote of Congress, effectively creating his own law by literally waiving the employer mandate and the penalties for failing to comply with it," Boehner said in a statement about the resolution. "That's not the way our system government was designed to work."
