Supreme Court tosses lawsuit challenging Obamacare

Source: Politico | June 17, 2021 | Susannah Luthi andJosh Gerstein

The justices found that a group of red states lacked legal standing to bring a challenge that could have upended the health care law.

The Supreme Court on Thursday threw out a lawsuit threatening the entirety of the Affordable Care Act, finding that Republican-led states behind the case did not have legal ground to challenge the landmark health care law.

The 7-2 decision, which preserves health insurance for millions and the law’s popular protections for preexisting conditions, may serve as the final chapter in the decade-long legal assault on the Affordable Care Act, arriving as President Joe Biden seeks to build on the law’s coverage provisions. It’s also the final blow to former President Donald Trump’s pledge to rip up his predecessor’s signature health care law, after his administration had supported the red states who brought the lawsuit.

“With millions of people relying on the Affordable Care Act for coverage, it remains, as ever, a BFD. And it’s here to stay,” Biden wrote on Twitter, invoking his profane hot-mic comment at a signing ceremony for the law in March 2010.

The opinion by Justice Stephen Breyer was joined by the court’s two other liberal justices and all but two conservatives, including Trump appointees Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. By finding that the red states and individual plaintiffs couldn’t contest a change to the law, the conservative justices were essentially shielded from grappling with larger questions about whether Obamacare was no longer constitutional.

“[W]e conclude that the plaintiffs in this suit failed to show a concrete, particularized injury fairly traceable to the defendants’ conduct in enforcing the specific statutory provision they attack as unconstitutional,” Breyer wrote.

Justice Clarence Thomas in a concurring opinion agreed, adding: “Although this Court has erred twice before in cases involving the Affordable Care Act, it does not err today.”

The red states challenging the law, led by Texas, argued that Obamacare’s so-called individual mandate became unconstitutional after Congress zeroed out the law’s penalty for not having health insurance in a 2017 tax cut package. They said the entire law should fall because the mandate to purchase insurance, which remains on the books, was central to the law’s functioning.

However, the states failed to show how they were hurt by a mandate that had been rendered ineffective, the Supreme Court said.

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  • Consistent June 17, 2021 at 2:40 pm #49323

    EVERYDAY June 17, 2021 at 10:41 pm #49331

    So we’re stuck with Obamacare…till government-run health care is forced upon us.

    Consistent June 19, 2021 at 5:28 pm #49348

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