[JURIST] The state of Ohio [official website], along with several universities, filed a lawsuit [complaint, PDF; press release] in the US District Court for the Southern District of Ohio [official website] Monday challenging taxes imposed on the state through the federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) [text, PDF]. The state claims that:

the federal government has assessed and now collected mandatory monetary ‘contributions’ not only from insurance companies and certain private self-insured health care plans, but also directly from State and local governments that provide self-insured health care plans for their employees.

The state is claiming that these taxes are illegal, as Congress limited the application of such taxes so as not to include states, local governments or their instrumentalities. It is also purported in the lawsuit that the federal government is directing portions of the funds into the US Treasury and is thus finding “federal programs unrelated to the specified objects of the tax and its central stated purpose.”

President Barack Obama’s health care reform [JURIST backgrounder] has caused continued debate and legal action since it was passed in 2010. In November the US Supreme Court agreed to rule [JURIST report] on health care subsidies under the law. In August the US Department of Health and Human Services issued proposed rules [JURIST report] to revise which for-profit businesses and non-profit organizations are exempt from the contraception mandate of the ACA. In March the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit decided [JURIST report] in favor of the Obama administration by declining to review the contraception mandate.