WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court's much-anticipated ruling on health care, expected in late June, may have one surprising outcome: a modest impact on President Barack Obama's re-election bid, even though he is intimately associated with the challenged law.

That wouldn't be the case if anyone other than Mitt Romney was Obama's likeliest Republican challenger this fall. Romney, however, is singularly ill-positioned to capitalize on the issue because he championed a similar health care law as Massachusetts governor in 2006.

It's a political dilemma that some Republicans — chiefly Rick Santorum — have been raising for months. It gained sudden urgency this week, as Romney continues his slow but steady march toward the nomination and the Supreme Court's conservative majority expressed pointed skepticism about the federal health care law's constitutionality on Tuesday.