Stop attack on the Affordable Care Act
The Supreme Court heard arguments last week in a lawsuit seeking to throw out the entire Affordable Care Act because Congress made it less coercive in 2017 than it was when the law was passed in 2010. Fortunately, some justices hinted the act may stand the challenge.
Still, it’s a ridiculous abuse of the court system, made even worse by the very real harm it could do to millions of Americans who rely on the ACA for health coverage today, with the COVID-19 pandemic hitting a record number of cases in this country.
Although the high court often deals with vitally important legal questions, rarely are the stakes as high or as immediate as the ones raised by California v. Texas.
The policies covering some 20 million low- and moderate-income Americans hang in the balance, as well as the protections the law provides all Americans with preexisting health problems who aren’t insured by their employer.
The Supreme Court should make short work of this misbegotten lawsuit. And the oral arguments, both conservative and liberal justices voiced great skepticism about the arguments made by the plaintiffs — 18 Republican attorneys general and two self-employed Texans who complained about the costs the law imposed upon them.
The case is just the latest in a long line of challenges to the 2010 law commonly known as Obamacare, two of which led to
Supreme Court rulings that preserved the ACA.
According to the court’s majority, Congress would not ordinarily have the power to order individuals to buy coverage, but because the insurance mandate was enforced with a tax penalty, it fell within Congress’ power to tax. After the Republican-controlled Congress reduced that tax penalty to $0 in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the states fired a new shot at the ACA, saying the individual mandate had been rendered unconstitutional.
But as several justices noted, one seemingly insurmountable problem with the lawsuit is that zeroing out the penalty turned the mandate into a mere suggestion, incapable of forcing anyone to buy insurance or causing anyone harm. How can Congress overstep its constitutional authority when it's not asserting any actual power?
The Trump administration not only declined to defend the law, it sought to have the ACA tossed out
in its entirety. The appeal was brought instead by top Democratic officials in California and 19 other states, who have asked the justices to uphold the ACA.
Texas and company have argued that the mandate was the centerpiece of the law's efforts to expand coverage, and that Congress would not have passed any part of the ACA if it knew the coverage provisions were off the table.
The Republican attorneys general of Ohio and Montana argued in their friend-of-thecourt brief, the justices don’t have any power under the Constitution to interfere with the constitutional provisions of the ACA even if they find the mandate unconstitutional.
Rather than trying to determine what lawmakers intended, the brief argues, the high court should leave in place all of the constitutional provisions that still work without the mandate. In this case, that would be the rest of the law. And although that wouldn’t be the perfect outcome for a case that never should have reached the Supreme Court, it would still be a good one.