Editorial: Court secures ACA but work remains for Congress
Thursday’s U.S. Supreme Court decision, with a 7-2 majority upholding the Affordable Care Act, wasn’t a huge surprise; at least two of the court’s six conservatives — including Chief Justice John Roberts, the decisive swing vote in the ACA’s first challenge before the court in 2012 — telegraphed their likely positions during oral arguments in November.
With the ACA challenged for a third — and likely, final — time by Republican state attorneys general, the court last week reversed a lower court decision that the ACA, also known as Obamacare, was unconstitutional. The challenge lost on procedural grounds; the states had no legal standing to challenge the law, the majority said. Still the high court’s message to Republican opponents of the ACA, particularly those in Congress, should be clear after three court reviews in less than a decade: If you want to be rid of Obamacare, you’re going to have to do it yourselves.
But opponents in Congress now would have to argue against the ACA’s successes.
The ACA has provided health care coverage to some 20 million more Americans, reducing the number of uninsured from 46.5 million in 2010 to 26.7 million in 2016, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. The number of uninsured ticked up to 28.9 million in 2019 during the Trump administration; thanks to his and fellow Republicans’ efforts to undermine Obamacare when they couldn’t repeal it. But there’s hope that, particularly after federal pandemic relief packages increased subsidies to purchase insurance on the ACA’s exchanges, the percentage of uninsured Americans will resume a downward trend.
https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/editorial-court-secures-aca-but-work-remains-for-congress/