This week the Supreme Court agreed to hear a legal challenge to the healthcare reform law, colloquially known as ‘Obamacare”. They have scheduled 5 1/2 hours for oral arguments, dividing the law into four parts, that they will hold over two days. According to a number of articles, this is pretty much unprecedented in modern history. Since 1970 the typical case is allotted one hour for oral arguments, with 30 minutes for each side.
I’m not a lawyer, but I was astounded by these numbers. I realize that the Supreme Court justices spend a lot of time reading written briefs, and probably have internal discussions, but only spending an hour listening to arguments for an issue that has hit the highest court of the nation does not sound like much time to me. If I have a complicated patient in my office, it’s not so unusual that I end up spending an hour on them, and unless they are going on Hospice, they always get a follow-up visit. The Supreme Court gets about 10,000 petitions a year, and only rules on a small fraction of them. Before it gets to that level, many lawyers and judges have already debated the issues, and if the answer was obvious, it would probably have been settled. It seems stingy to me to only giving one hour for oral arguments for cases at that level.
Even 5 1/2 hours doesn’t sound like much. The 12 members of the debt reduction super committee couldn’t come to an agreement on debt reduction after working on the issue for more than 3 months. That’s far more time than the Supreme Court will spend working on the health care law, and I’m not sure that it’s that much less complex than dealing with debt reduction. Of course the justices have the great advantage of not having to worry about getting re-elected.
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