Obamacare faces Supes
PRESIDENT OBAMA’S legacy and reelection — not to mention health coverage for 30 million Americans — hang in the balance this week when Obamacare faces the Supreme test.
The President’s signature health care law’s appearance before the Supreme Court is being called the Super Bowl of constitutional law: The most critical legal decision in a lifetime.
The key battle in three days of oral arguments is whether Obamacare’s heart — the mandate that every American buy health insurance — is constitutional.
Court watchers say HHS vs. Florida will be remembered as a landmark case along with Roe vs. Wade and Brown vs. Board of Education.
Chief Justice John Roberts rejected pleas to allow television cameras, so the circus will set up outside the building.
Demonstrators on all sides will gather before dawn as TV reporters stake out their liveshot spots and radio talk shows set up several dozen mobile booths.
The politically fraught decision could easily sway the November election. Republicans have made overturning the Affordable Care Act their main goal, and Obama will look weak if his main accomplishment is gutted. The justices will rule at the end of June — in plenty of time to roil the party conventions.
Although the court is divided along sharp ideological lines, it’s not clear how the justices will rule. The court’s aura of legitimacy has taken a beating in recent years and a Bloomberg News poll found 75% of Americans expect the justices to rule based on politics, not the law.
The court has one possible out: On Monday, they will consider whether an arcane 1867 federal law requires them to hold off on making any decision until after 2015, when the first fines for failing to get coverage kick in.
Either way, the court intends to sweat both sides during the three days of arguments, the most time set aside for a single law in nearly 50 years.
The Obama administration is so confident of victory it pushed the court to take it up in an election year.
“We’re confident that it’s going to be upheld,” Obama senior advisor David Plouffe told ABC’S “This Week.”
The law Obama signed in March 2010 puts an extra $600 in the pockets of 5 million seniors for prescription drugs, bars insurance companies from rejecting customers with preexisting conditions and allows parents to add 2 million children between 21 and 26 to their own health insurance. The controversial individual mandate that fines people who don’t buy health insurance is meant to spread costs and ensure no one gets a free ride. Without it, the cost of covering preexisting conditions would explode and likely sink the program, both sides agree.
But critics call it an unacceptable encroachment on liberty — the more strident call it “socialism” — and 26 states sued to overturn the law.
“The 800-pound gorilla in the room is the degree to which individuals can be made to purchase a particular product,” said Robert Alt, a senior legal fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation.
“The government so far has not come up with a credible answer that if government can make you buy insurance, what are the limits of what it can make you buy,” said Alt.
Ironically, Obama campaigned against the mandate — he wanted a more progressive single-payer system — and his likely GOP challenger, former Mass. Gov. Mitt Romney, campaigned for it and proudly signed one into law in 2006. Now they have reversed positions.