Obamacare in spotlight as Supreme Court shifts
The death of Justice Ginsburg has brought fresh urgency to an issue that had dropped among voter priorities.
WASHINGTON » Less than six weeks before the election, the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has injected fresh urgency into an issue that had dropped down the list of voter priorities this year: the future of the Affordable Care Act.
The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments Nov. 10 in a case, which the Trump administration has filed briefs supporting, that seeks to overturn the law. President Donald Trump’s nomination of Amy Coney Barrett, who has criticized the court’s 2012 decision to uphold it, increases the chance of that happening.
Liberal advocacy groups are using the prospect to whip up new advertisements declaring that
Trump “wants to rush a justice onto the court who will repeal our health care,” as one says. Democrats in Congress have sprung into action with news conferences and pep talks to campaign volunteers
featuring people with preexisting medical conditions who were able to get coverage because of the law. Joe Biden’s campaign, too, made clear upon Ginsburg’s death that it would frame the court fight largely as one about health care.
Even if Democrats have little chance of blocking Barrett’s confirmation, they are hoping to reignite the public passion to protect the law that helped Democrats recapture the House in 2018, a year after Republicans in Congress came close to repealing it. This time, party leaders are quick to point out, the election is coming amid a pandemic that has left many Americans requiring expensive medical care, including for potentially long-term health problems that insurers could refuse to cover if the lawand its protections with people for preexisting conditions were repealed.
“That was the issue that drove the 2018 campaign so substantially; it came right after a very, very clear threat,” said Chris Jennings, a longtime Democratic strategist on health care who is advising Biden’s campaign. “This time, the fear of a takeaway was not as great. But now it’s reengaged and credible.”
The number of uninsured people in theUnited States decreased by 20million from 2010 to 2016 as the ACA went into effect. Its major provisions include allowing states to expand Medicaid to cover more low-income adults, setting up insurance markets where individuals earning less than about $ 51,000 a year can get subsidies to help pay their premiums and barring insurers from placing annual or lifetime limits on howmuch care they would cover. But 42% of Americans still view it unfavorably, according to one recent poll, likely including many middle- class families who earn too much for the law’s financial assistance and find the high level of coverage it requires unaffordable.
Trump, attempting to neutralize the threat to his campaign posed by the preexisting conditions issue one that affects as many as 133 million Americans signed an executive order Thursday declaring it is U. S. policy for people with preexisting health conditions to be protected. But he offered no details on how he planned to assure that while also seeking to invalidate the ACA. His own Justice Department filed a brief in June asking the Supreme Court to overturn the entire law, including its preexisting conditions protections.