The US Supreme Court on Thursday dismissed a major challenge to a US health care law introduced by the administration of former US president Barack Obama, turning aside an effort by Republican-led states to throw out the law that provides insurance coverage for millions of Americans.
The Supreme Court justices, with a vote of a seven to two, left the entire Affordable Care Act (ACA) intact in ruling that Texas, other Republican Party-led states and two individuals had no right to bring their lawsuit in federal court. The administration of US President Joe Biden says 31 million people have health insurance because of the law popularly known as “Obamacare.”
The law’s major provisions include protections for people with pre-existing health conditions, a range of no-cost preventive services and the expansion of the Medicaid program that insures lower-income people, including those who work in jobs that do not pay much or provide health insurance. Also left in place is the law’s now-toothless requirement that people have health insurance or pay a penalty.
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The US Congress rendered that provision irrelevant in 2017 when it reduced the penalty to zero.
The elimination of the penalty had become the hook that Texas and other Republican-led states, as well as the administration of former US president Donald Trump, used to attack the entire law. They argued that without the mandate, a pillar of the law when it was passed in 2010, the rest of the law should fall, too.
And with a more conservative Supreme Court that includes three Trump appointees, opponents of Obamacare hoped that a majority of the justices would kill off the law they have been fighting against for more than a decade.
However, the third major attack on the law at the Supreme Court ended the way the first two did, with a majority of the court rebuffing efforts to gut the law or get rid of it altogether.
Trump’s three appointees to the court, Supreme Court justices Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, split their votes. Kavanaugh and Barrett joined the majority. Gorsuch was in dissent, signing on to an opinion from Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito.
Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer wrote for the court that the states and people who filed the federal lawsuit “have failed to show that they have standing to attack as unconstitutional the Act’s minimum essential coverage provision.”
In dissent, Alito wrote: “Today’s decision is the third installment in our epic Affordable Care Act trilogy, and it follows the same pattern as installments one and two. In all three episodes, with the Affordable Care Act facing a serious threat, the Court has pulled off an improbable rescue.”
Alito was a dissenter in the two earlier cases, as well.
Larry Levitt, an executive vice president of the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation, said that the healthcare law is “here to stay for the foreseeable future.”
“Democrats are in charge and they have made reinvigorating and building on the ACA a key priority,” Levitt said. “Republicans don’t seem to have much enthusiasm for continuing to try to overturn the law.”
Republicans US lawmakers have been pressing their argument to invalidate the law even though congressional efforts to rip out the entire law “root and branch,” as US Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell called it, have failed.
The closest they came was in July 2017 when then-US Senator John McCain, who died the following year, delivered a dramatic thumbs-down vote to a repeal effort by fellow Republicans.
In December 2016, just before Obama left office and Trump swept in calling the ACA a “disaster,” 46 percent of Americans had an unfavorable view of the law, while 43 percent approved, a Kaiser Family Foundation poll showed.
Those ratings flipped, and by early this year, 54 percent had a favorable view, while disapproval had fallen to 39 percent, foundation data showed.
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