Affordable Care Act survives challenge
By a 7-2 vote, the United States Supreme Court rejects the third major challenge to the health care law known as “Obamacare.”
The Supreme Court preserved insurance coverage for millions of Americans Thursday, rejecting the third major challenge to the national health care law known as “Obamacare.”
The justices, by a 7-2 vote, left the entire Affordable Care Act intact in ruling that Texas, other Republican-led states and two individuals had no right to bring their lawsuit in federal court. The Biden administration says 31 million people have health insurance because of the law.
The law’s major provisions include protections for people with existing health conditions, a range of no-cost preventive services, expansion of the Medicaid program that insures lower-income people and health insurance markets offering subsidized plans.
“The Affordable Care Act remains the law of the land,” President Joe Biden said, saluting the ruling and calling for building on the healthcare law that was enacted when he was vice president.
Also left in place is the law’s now-toothless requirement that people have health insurance or pay a penalty. Congress rendered that provision irrelevant in 2017 when it reduced the penalty to zero.
The elimination of the penalty had become the hook that Texas and other GOP-led states, as well as the Trump administration, used to attack the entire law. They argued that without the mandate, a pillar of the law when it was passed in 2010, the rest of the law should fall, too.
And with a more conservative Supreme Court that includes three Trump appointees, opponents of Obamacare hoped a majority of the justices would finally kill off the law they have been fighting for more than a decade.
But the third major attack on the law at the Supreme
Court ended the way the first two did, with a majority of the court rebuffing efforts to gut the law or get rid of it altogether.
Trump’s three appointees to the Supreme Court — Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh — split their votes. Kavanaugh and Barrett joined the majority. Gorsuch was in dissent, signing on to an opinion from Justice Samuel Alito.
Justice Stephen Breyer wrote for the court that the states and people who filed a federal lawsuit “have failed to show that they have standing to attack as unconstitutional the Act’s minimum essential coverage provision.”
In dissent, Alito wrote, “Today’s decision is the third installment in our epic Affordable Care Act trilogy, and it follows the same pattern as installments one and two. In all three episodes, with the Affordable Care Act facing a serious threat, the Court has pulled off an improbable rescue.” Alito was a dissenter in the two earlier cases in 2012 and 2015, as well.
Like Alito, Justice Clarence Thomas was in dissent in the two earlier cases, but he joined Thursday’s majority, writing, “Although this Court has erred twice before in cases involving the Affordable Care Act, it does not err today.”
Because it dismissed the case for the plaintiff ’s lack of legal standing — the ability to sue — the court didn’t actually rule on whether the individual mandate is unconstitutional now that there is no penalty for forgoing insurance. Lower courts had struck down the mandate, in rulings that were wiped away by the Supreme Court decision.
With the latest ruling, the ACA is “here to stay for the foreseeable future,” said Larry Levitt, an executive vice president for the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation, which studies health care.
“Democrats are in charge and they have made reinvigorating and building on the ACA a key priority,” Levitt said. “Republicans don’t seem to have much enthusiasm for continuing to try to overturn the law.”