In oral arguments before the nations’ highest court the conservative judges questions and comment point to them not inclined to cut off support for the nation’s healthcare program , the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare….
This will come as a surprise to some who think that the present court will be working overtime to undo decades of established laws….
This will also bolster Joe Biden’s feeling that ‘packing ‘ the court is unnecessary….
The justices’s are not immune to political realities….
The program has become more popular every year…..
The bulk of the Affordable Care Act, the sprawling 2010 health care law that is President Barack Obama’s defining domestic legacy, appeared likely to survive its latest encounter with the Supreme Court in arguments on Tuesday.
It was not clear whether the court would strike down the so-called individual mandate, which was rendered toothless in 2017 after Congress zeroed out the penalty for failing to obtain insurance.
But at least five justices, including two members of the court’s conservative majority, indicated that they were not inclined to strike down the balance of the law. In legal terms, they said the mandate was severable from the rest of the law.
“It does seem fairly clear that the proper remedy would be to sever the mandate provision and leave the rest of the law in place,” said Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. made a similar point. “Congress left the rest of the law intact when it lowered the penalty to zero,” he said.
Tens of millions of Americans gained insurance coverage under the 2010 law, which includes popular provisions on guaranteed coverage for pre-existing medical conditions, emergency care, prescription drugs and maternity care. Republican state officials, backed by the Trump administration, say that a key provision of the law is unconstitutional, and that this means the whole law must fall.
The law has survived two earlier challenges in the Supreme Court….
Harris just said “each and every vote for Biden” was a vote for Obamacare and expanding it.
Fact check: Not True
Take it from me.
Yeah Bloomberg’s legal analysis clarified the lawsuit and the feelings of the Court. Basically the case is about the individual mandate and the tax code and how it was changed from the original ACA bill. Past cases similar (in regards to one small aspect of the bill) have been striction by the supreme court, but not the whole Bill. Ironically, Kavanaugh and Roberts said that when an entire piece of legislation is before the courts it is best if the courts use a scalple rather than a sledgehammer to destroy the whole statute. In this case the feeling is the issue with the single payer mandate and the revision of it that came after the ACA can be stricten, but nothing else in ACA will be removed. The single payor mandate is already no existent in the bill.
The issue became moot when the mandate was no longer a mandate…
From the tiny sliver that I caught from Justice Barrett’s confirmation hearings at Senate Judiciary,
she might be a textualist or an originalist, but she’s not dead-set against severability and the idea that the courts should pare away as little as possible from what was enacted by the popularly-elected branches of government.
The individual mandate is tricky because (unpleasant as the notion might be in principle) it’s just about the only way to give a sufficient base to support things like coverage of pre-existing conditions. Otherwise, you get into a death spiral where only the sickest get health insurance.
If only Zreebs were here, he could explain the actuarial (as opposed to the jurisprudential) issues better than most of us.