Congress can fix Obamacare’s legal woes

The following is from a Bloomberg News editorial:

“Everybody I know in the Senate — everybody — is in favor of maintaining coverage for preexisting conditions,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch Mcconnell said in June. “All Republicans support people with pre-existing conditions, and if they don’t, they will after I speak to them. I am in total support,” President Trump tweeted in October.

This was during the midterm election campaign, when the Republicans were pedaling backward to convince America that they’d no intention of taking away the protections of the Affordable Care Act. Ignore the efforts in Congress to repeal the law, they told voters; don’t worry about the Justice Department joining a legal challenge to ACA, asking to strike down coverage of people with pre-existing conditions at no extra cost.

The assurances were worthless. A court has not only thrown out protections for pre-existing conditions; it has ruled the ACA as a whole unconstitutional. All because last year Congress zeroed out the tax penalty for failing to buy health insurance — the so-called individual mandate.

It’s maddening that the ACA’S legal troubles could be easily resolved. Congress needs only to restore the individual mandate’s tax penalties. Lawmakers could just as easily restore it. Waiting and hoping for higher courts to overturn the new ruling risks throwing the U.S. health-insurance system into chaos. Congress needs to put the ACA back on firm legal ground.

If Mcconnell and Trump were telling the truth during the campaign about protecting people with pre-existing conditions, they won’t hesitate to help fix this problem.