https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/17/us/obamacare-supreme-court.html WASHINGTON — The Affordable Care Act on Thursday survived a third major challenge as the Supreme Court turned aside the latest effort by Republicans to kill the health care law. The law, President Barack Obama’s defining domestic legacy, has been the subject of relentless Republican hostility. But attempts to repeal it failed, as did two earlier Supreme Court challenges, in 2012 and 2015. With the passing years, the law gained popularity and was woven into the fabric of the health care system. On Thursday, in what Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. called, in dissent, “the third installment in our epic Affordable Care Act trilogy,” the Supreme Court again sustained the law. Its future now seems secure. The margin of victory was wider than in the earlier cases, with six members of the court joining Justice Stephen G. Breyer’s modest and technical majority opinion, one that said only that the 18 Republican-led states and two individuals who brought the case had not suffered the sort of direct injury that gave them standing to sue. portrayed her as a grave threat to the health care law. The court did not reach the larger issues in the case: whether the bulk of the law could stand without a provision that initially required most Americans to obtain insurance or pay a penalty. Congress in 2017 eliminated the penalty for failing to obtain coverage because it could no longer be justified as a tax. They went on to say that this meant the rest of the law must also fall. The challenge was largely successful in the lower courts. A federal judge in Texas ruled that the entire law was invalid, but he postponed the effects of his ruling until the case could be appealed. In 2019, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in New Orleans, agreed that the mandate was unconstitutional but declined to rule on the fate of the remainder of the health law, asking the lower court to reconsider the question in more detail. Justice Breyer did not address most of the arguments that were the basis of those decisions, focusing instead on whether the plaintiffs were entitled to sue at all. The two individuals, he wrote, suffered no harm from a toothless provision that in effect merely urged them to obtain health insurance. Similarly, he wrote, the states did not sustain injuries tied directly to the elimination of the penalty that had been part of the individual mandate. The states argued that the revised mandate would cause more people to take advantage of state-sponsored insurance programs. Justice Breyer rejected that theory. “The state plaintiffs have failed to show,” he wrote, “that the challenged minimum essential coverage provision, without any prospect of penalty, will harm them by leading more individuals to enroll in these programs.” California v. Texas, No. 19-840, saying the mandate was now unconstitutional and could not be severed from much of the rest of the law. Had Justice Alito’s view prevailed, the nation’s health care system would have experienced an earthquake. Affordable Care Act would have expanded the ranks of the uninsured in the United States by about 21 million people — a nearly 70 percent increase — according to recent estimates from the Urban Institute. The biggest loss of coverage would have been among low-income adults who became eligible for Medicaid under the law after most states expanded the program to include them. But millions of Americans would also have lost private insurance, including young adults whom the law allowed to stay on their parents’ plans until they turned 26 and families whose income was modest enough to qualify for subsidies that help pay their monthly premiums. A ruling against the law would also have doomed its protections for Americans with past or current health problems — or pre-existing conditions. The protections bans insurers from denying them coverage or charging them more for it.
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That's right….. Trump spent his entire political life trying to kill Obamacare , just for the sake of spite , but it was his incompetence that actually saved it. Trump and Mitch McConnell inadvertently saved Obamacare from its latest Supreme Court challenge The Supreme Court this week shot down yet another lawsuit aiming to overturn the landmark Affordable Care Act -- and the law survived this time thanks to the actions of former President Donald Trump and Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY). As NPR reports, the court ruled that the latest lawsuit against the ACA lacked standing because the states suing to overturn the law suffered no financial harm now that the penalty for failing to buy health insurance has been reduced to $0. "To have standing, a plaintiff must 'allege personal injury fairly traceable to the defendant's allegedly unlawful conduct and likely to be redressed by the requested relief,' " the majority wrote in their decision. "No plaintiff has shown such an injury 'fairly traceable' to the 'allegedly unlawful conduct' challenged here." The reason that the mandate penalty was placed at $0 was because of the 2017 Republican tax cut package that the GOP passed via budget reconciliation, which effectively eliminated the mandate to buy health insurance while still keeping subsidies to help Americans pay for insurance plans. Despite the fact that Trump's own actions caused the lawsuit's failure, his Justice Department nonetheless threw its weight behind the lawsuit without seemingly understanding that the president had planted the seeds of its demise.