Image of male nurse pushing senior woman in a wheelchair in nursing facility

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined a request from a conservative California legal group to hear a challenge to the Obama administration’s healthcare reform bill. The group took issue with the bill’s mandate requiring all Americans to purchase health insurance.

The justices said they dismissed the case (Baldwin vs. Sebelius) because it had not been fully legislated in lower courts. When the California group brought the case to a federal court in San Diego, the judge ruled that since the health insurance mandate won’t be in place until 2014, no families or individuals are harmed by it right now, the Wall Street Journal reported. Other lawsuits are pending in lower courts.  Twenty states are seeking to invalidate the reforms.

Some Supreme Court watchers were intrigued to see justices Elena Kagan and Clarence Thomas participate in the decision not to hear the case. Kagan, who worked as solicitor general for President Obama, has sat out other cases because of potential conflicts of interest. Some questioned Thomas’s own conflict of interest given his wife’s activism with an organization that advocates repealing the new healthcare law.