U.S. tells high court health law ‘must fall’
President Donald Trump’s administration told the Supreme Court on Thursday that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is invalid, including its protections for people with preexisting conditions.
Filing a brief late Thursday in a case the court is set to hear around the time of the November election, the administration said “the entire [health law] thus must fall” because of a tax law change made by the Republican-controlled Congress in 2017.
The administration is backing efforts by Republican-controlled states to invalidate the 2010 law, which is being defended by 20 other states and the District of Columbia. A federal appeals court found part of the measure unconstitutional and left doubt about the rest.
Democrats hope to turn the lawsuit into a political anvil for Republicans this fall given the rising popularity of the Affordable Care Act, which most Republicans have sought to repeal. Senior congressional Democrats said Thursday that Republicans have no alternative to fully protect people with preexisting conditions or prevent tens of millions from losing their insurance.
The Democrats said it’s especially harmful to try to overturn the law during the pandemic, with tens of millions out of work and at risk of losing their employer health insurance.
“Republicans have universally said they are against the Affordable Care Act,” said House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland. He dismissed Republican arguments that they support protecting preexisting conditions as “empty rhetoric.”
Senate Health Chairman Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican, in 2018 called the lawsuit against the health law “as far-fetched a legal argument as I think I’ve ever heard.”
The fight stems from a provision known as the individual mandate, which originally required people to acquire health insurance or pay a tax penalty.
The high court upheld that provision in 2012, with Chief Justice John Roberts calling it a legitimate use of Congress’ taxing power. A Republican-controlled Congress later joined with Trump to zero-out the tax penalty, leaving the mandate without any practical consequences.
In the filing Thursday, U.S. Solicitor General Noel Francisco said, “The individual mandate no longer can be construed and upheld as a valid exercise of Congress’s taxing power because Congress eliminated the tax.”
The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the mandate was unconstitutional without a tax penalty attached to it. It didn’t decide whether the rest of the law could stand, instead saying a federal trial judge should give that question closer scrutiny. The Democratic-run states, led by California, then went straight to the nation’s highest court.