In the process, however, two of the three judges on the panel volunteered that they would have upheld the law, known as the Affordable Care Act, if they had been able to rule on the substance of the cases.
The rulings, by the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, vacated lower court decisions — one for and one against the law.
In late June, a three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in Cincinnati ruled 2-to-1 in favor of the law’s requirement that, starting in 2014, most Americans must obtain health insurance. In August, the Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Atlanta ruled against that provision, known as the individual mandate, also by 2-to-1.
Still other cases continue to progress through the appellate process. The Supreme Court has yet to signal whether it will accept one or more of the cases.
The Fourth Circuit confronted two opposing lower-court decisions. One, in a case filed by Virginia’s attorney general, Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, had overturned the law’s insurance requirement. The other, in a case filed by Liberty University, a Christian college in Lynchburg, Va., upheld the same provision, which is considered central to the act.
In a unanimous opinion written by Judge Diana Gribbon Motz, the Fourth Circuit panel concluded that Mr. Cuccinelli did not have standing to sue because Virginia’s case relied on a state law intended to undermine the federal act. Unlike in the Liberty case, which included individual plaintiffs who might someday be directly affected by the mandate, Mr. Cuccinelli structured his complaint as a conflict between state and federal law.
The Virginia Health Care Freedom Act, enacted one day after Mr. Obama signed the Affordable Care Act, declares that no Virginia resident “shall be required to obtain or maintain a policy of individual insurance coverage.”
But Judge Motz wrote that states cannot grant themselves standing to challenge federal laws simply by passing legislation that declares those laws invalid. A state, she wrote, does not “acquire some special stake in the relationship between its citizens and the federal government merely by memorializing its litigation position in a statute.” Mr. Cuccinelli said Thursday that he would appeal to the Supreme Court.
In the Liberty case, Judge Motz wrote for a 2-to-1 majority in rejecting the appeal on entirely different grounds. In that case, she wrote that Liberty could not seek to strike down the individual mandate before it took effect because doing so would, in effect, usurp the government’s right to collect a tax.
That, she said, would run afoul of the long-established federal Anti-Injunction Act, which bars litigation seeking to restrain the assessment or collection of a tax.
The question of whether the law’s penalties constitute a tax has been considered in a number of the court challenges because the Constitution grants Congress broad authority to levy taxes to support the nation’s general welfare. On Thursday, the Fourth Circuit panel ruled that while the health care act refers frequently to penalties, the fines for noncompliance are in fact taxes.
The dismissal of the appeal on the tax question blocked the panel from fully considering the constitutionality of the individual mandate. But Judge Motz’s colleagues offered personal opinions.
Judge James A. Wynn Jr. wrote in a concurring opinion that he would have upheld the act based on Congress’s authority under its taxing powers. Judge Andre M. Davis, who dissented from the conclusion that the federal courts did not have jurisdiction, wrote that he would have upheld the mandate under Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce.
All three randomly selected judges on the panel were appointed by Democratic presidents, including two by Mr. Obama himself.