White House: ‘Obamacare’ intact despite court ruling

Justices likely to decide; Trump calls for new law

WASHINGTON – While President Donald Trump hailed as “great news for America” a federal judge’s ruling striking down aspects of the Affordable Care Act, the White House rushed to assure Americans the program will remain in place while the lawsuit is appealed.

On Twitter, Trump labeled the ACA an “UNCONSTITUTIONAL disaster!” and called on Republican and Democratic congressional leaders to pass a “STRONG law that provides GREAT healthcare.”

In a separate statement late Friday, the White House said: “We expect this ruling will be appealed to the Supreme Court. Pending the appeal process, the law remains in place.”

With the ruling having no immediate effect, consumers were still able to buy 2019 coverage on federal or state marketplaces through Saturday, the federal enrollment period’s deadline. The deadline in some states is in January.

If the ruling is upheld on appeal, though, the program’s subsidies would no longer be available. Medicaid, which provides insurance coverage to millions

of low income and working-class Americans, could also be in jeopardy.

The lawsuit was brought by 20 Republican-led states. After Trump ordered the Justice Department to stop defending the health care law – President Barack’s Obama signature legislative achievement – a coalition of ACA-supporting states took up the defense.

The Justice Department had urged the judge not to rule in the midst of the health law’s open enrollment season or risk a chaotic situation.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi, who is virtually assured of becoming House speaker in January, said it was “absurd” that the judge declared portions of the health law unconstitutional. She pledged to intervene in the appeals process when Democrats take control of the House next month.

“Republicans are fully responsible for this cruel decision and for the fear they have struck into millions of families across America who are now in danger of losing their health coverage,” she said in a statement.

Attorney General Ken Paxton of Texas, who initiated the lawsuit, applauded the decision, saying in a statement: “Today’s ruling enjoining Obamacare halts an unconstitutional exertion of federal power over the American health care system.”

In a signal of the shifting public opinion in favor of the 2010 law, Trump stressed in his latest tweet that any new program should include one of the most popular aspects of “Obamacare,” a ban on health insurers denying coverage to people based on pre-existing conditions. Many GOP candidates took care to champion the pre-existing conditions aspect of the law during the midterm elections.

In his 55-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor in the Northern District of Texas agreed withRepublicans that it was unconstitutional to mandate that individuals buy health insurance or be taxed for not complying. The GOP tax-cut bill Congress passed last year, he said, knocked the constitutional foundation out from under the health care law by eliminating the penalty for not having coverage.

“The court today finds the individual mandate is no longer fairly readable as an exercise of Congress’s tax power and continues to be unsustainable under Congress’s interstate commerce power,” O’Connor, a George W. Bush appointee, wrote. “The court therefore finds the individual mandate, unmoored from a tax, is unconstitutional.”

The ruling likely will be appealed by California and other states to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, which is dominated 11-5 by Republican presidents’ nominees.

The expected lengthy court fight likely would end up at the U.S. Supreme Court, which has twice voted to uphold other challenges to the ACA.

In 2012, the court upheld the law’s mandate that individuals buy insurance as a tax, and in 2015 it upheld tax credits for low-income recipients in federal as well as state insurance exchanges.

If the Texas decision is upheld “it would throw the individual insurance market and the whole health care system into complete chaos,” Larry Levitt, a senior vice president of the Kaiser Family Foundation for health care policy, wrote in a Friday Twitter post.

“But,” he added, “the case still has a long legal road to travel before that’s an immediate threat.”

The foundation, a nonpartisan research organization, has estimated that 52 million adults from 18 to 64, or 27 percent of that age group, would be denied coverage under the practices that were in effect in most states before the ACA was passed.

A central question in the case is whether Congress intended for the individual mandate and coverage for preexisting conditions to be inseparable, as the Obama administration argued in 2012. Five years later, Congress specified that eliminating the penalty should not jeopardize the rest of the law.

The annual penalty for those who refuse to get health insurance is $695 or 2.5 percent of income, whichever is greater.