By Rochelle Bobroff, Directing Attorney, Herbert Semmel Federal Rights Project, National Senior Citizens Law Center
Today the Supreme Court granted certiorari to address the question whether Medicaid beneficiaries have the same right to obtain federal court preemption of state laws in conflict with federal Medicaid requirements, as big businesses have to challenge state consumer protection laws that allegedly conflict with federal statutes. All courts of appeals that have considered this question have held that there was no basis for treating
a preemption claim protecting low-income people's interests differently from a preemption claim on behalf of business interests. The Solicitor General recommended that certiorari be denied. Nevertheless, the Supreme Court granted cert in three consolidated cases, which are styled Maxwell-Jolly v. Independent Living Center of Southern California, California Pharmacists Assn, and Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital. I am among counsel representing the Independent Living Center.
Medicaid beneficiaries were unable to get their prescription medications filled when the state of California passed a law slashing reimbursement rates, first by 10 percent and then by 5 percent, in an effort to save the state money. The reimbursement rates were below retailers' costs, and therefore some pharmacies were unwilling to provide the medications to low-income individuals with disabilities. Even though beneficiaries had Medicaid coverage for their prescriptions, many were still unable to get the medications they needed, due to the low reimbursement rates. The beneficiaries filed suit claiming that the state law was preempted by the federal Medicaid statute. The Ninth Circuit held that indeed the state law conflicted with federal law, and therefore an injunction properly halted enforcement of the state law. The federal government has denied the state's proposed plan amendment to implement the rate cut.
Oral arguments in the first legal challenge to the recent wave of state and local anti-immigrant laws to reach the Supreme Court will be held this Wednesday. The case, 
The U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments Wednesday in a case challenging an Arizona law that regulates the hiring of undocumented immigrants. The case raises the question: Should states be in the business of regulating immigration?
ainous Switzerland could discriminate against other European countries' milk products by enacting the facially neutral law that it will only buy milk from cows that graze in meadows above 9,000 feet.) Perhaps that is inevitable in a case that involves preemption doctrine, state contract principles of unconscionability, and forced arbitration. But as complicated as the legal argument in AT&T v. Concepcion may have been in the Court today, it was perhaps just as impenetrable as what is at the core of the case: the lengthy, legalese-heavy, fine print that many of us never read in our cell phone contracts (or employment contracts, health insurance agreements, or other contracts that consumers are effectively forced to sign these days in order to obtain goods and services). And in many of those contracts-as in the contract the Concepcions signed with AT&T-the fine print will require that all disputes be resolved through arbitration, not through the court system, while banning class actions. Accordingly, the Court in Concepcion could decide whether individuals can band together to hold big corporations accountable for misconduct-including discrimination in the workplace and widespread consumer fraud in the marketplace-or whether corporations can get away with wrongdoing so long as they do it on an individually small scale, making individual claims too small to pursue.
On November 3, the Supreme Court heard