Obamacare unlikely to get new hearing
Will Obamacare get a fifth major hearing in the nation’s highest court? Probably not — but never say never when it comes to the nation’s controversial health-care law.
There’s a new legal challenge raising the possibility — albeit a slight one — that the Supreme Court could hear a reprise of the first major Affordable Care Act lawsuit from six years ago. Twenty conservative, ACAopposing states, led by Texas, have filed suit in federal court arguing the entire law is invalid because the reason the court found it constitutional — its penalty for lacking health coverage — will go away in January under the tax overhaul passed by Congress.
The case went relatively unnoticed until last week, when the Trump administration made legal waves saying it won’t defend the ACA against this new challenge. Such a posture is rare but not unprecedented (recall that the Obama administration refused in 2011 to defend the federal law banning the recognition of same-sex marriage because it considered the legislation unconstitutional).
If you consider recent history, it’s probably about time for another dramatic, Obamacare-flavored Supreme Court case. Just about every other year since Congress has passed the ACA, the Supreme Court has heard a challenge to the sweeping health-care law.
There was the 2012 NFIB v. Sebelius decision, which upheld the law’s individual mandate to buy coverage. Two years later, the court eased contraception coverage requirements for certain corporations.
Then, in 2015, there was the infamous King v. Burwell ruling in which the court said insurance subsidies could be provided even in states relying on the federal Healthcare.gov website instead of running their own marketplaces. The following year, the court heard a challenge to an “accommodation” for nonprofit employers that objected to covering birth control, although it ultimately punted that decision.
How serious, really, is this latest challenge from Texas and Co.? We can’t say with 100 percent certainty, especially considering that no one took the King case very seriously at first. But it’s hard to imagine the Supreme Court is itching to reconsider the same old questions of A) whether it’s constitutional for the government to require people to buy health insurance and B) whether the rest of the law can stay in effect without the individual mandate.