Supreme Court upholds Obamacare after latest Republican challenge

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW:

• The Supreme Court ruled 7-2 on Thursday against a claim by Texas and other Republican states that a recent change in the law made the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional.
• Justice Stephen Breyer said the states that challenged the law failed to provide proof they were harmed by the law’s individual mandate provision.
• Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett voted with the majority in rejecting the Republican chalenge.

The Supreme Court ruled 7-2 on Thursday against Texas and other Republican-led states seeking to strike down Obamacare in the law’s latest test before the nation’s highest court.

The court reversed an appeals court ruling that had struck down the law’s individual mandate provision. Chief Justice John Roberts and fellow conservative Justices Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett joined Justice Stephen Breyer’s opinion, as did Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

Breyer said Texas and the other states that challenged the law failed to show they were harmed by it.

“Neither the individual nor the state plaintiffs have shown that the injury they will suffer or have suffered is ‘fairly traceable’ to the ‘allegedly unlawful conduct’ of which they complain,” Breyer wrote.

The decision marks the third time that Obamacare, officially known as the Affordable Care Act, has survived a challenge before the Supreme Court since former President Barack Obama signed the landmark legislation into law in 2010.

Defenders of Obamacare worried that the Supreme Court – with its 6-3 majority of Republican-appointed justices – would scrap the law, a crucial element of the nation’s healthcare system.

President Joe Biden, who served as Obama’s vice president when the law was signed, praised Thursday’s ruling as a “major victory” for millions of Americans who were at risk of losing their health care in the midst of the Covid pandemic if the law was overturned.

Biden also vowed to expand Obamacare, a central promise of his presidential campaign.

“After more than a decade of attacks on the Affordable Care Act through the Congress and the courts, today’s decision – the third major challenge to the law that the U.S. Supreme Court has rejected – it is time move forward and keep building on this landmark law,” Biden said in a statement.

“Today’s decision affirms that the Affordable Care Act is stronger than ever, delivers for the American people, and gets us closer to fulfilling our moral obligation to ensure that, here in America, health care is a right and not a privilege,” he said.

Obama said the Supreme Court’s ruling makes clear that the law will endure, and the principle of universal healthcare coverage has been established.

Two of former President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court picks, Kavanaugh and Barrett, joined the court’s overwhelming majority in rejecting the latest Republican effort to overturn the law. Democrats had warned during Barrett’s confirmation hearings that she was likely to cast a vote in the case that would jeopardize Obamacare.

Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch, both conservatives, dissented from the court’s majority opinion.

Texas and more than a dozen other Republican-led states then filed suit, arguing that that change to the law rendered it unconstitutional.

Source: CNBC