Republicans are still trying to steal your health insurance – By Ryan Cooper (The Week) / Dec 30 2019
Republicans failed to repeal ObamaCare in 2017 by a single vote in the Senate. But they are still trying to drive a stake through its heart in secret — using yet another tendentious legal Calvinball case to try to get the courts to strike it down as unconstitutional.
With a recent decision from the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, there are some signs that it might actually happen. As the 2020 election campaign picks up, it’s worth remembering that the Republican Party is dead set on taking millions of Americans’ health insurance away, or failing that, making it as expensive and terrible as possible, by any means they can dream up.
First, the legal background. The suit is Texas vs. United States, filed by a number of right-wing state attorneys general. It is very obviously a backfilled pretext trying to get through judicial activism what the Republican Congress could not pass. Here’s how the logic goes. Back in 2012, the Supreme Court ruled that ObamaCare could stand in part by reinterpreting its individual mandate to buy insurance as a tax. Then, in 2017, Congress passed a tax cut for the rich that also got rid of the individual mandate tax — leaving a legal requirement with no teeth.
So the suit argues the mandate must be struck down since you can’t have a tax that collects no money — and because, when Congress was designing ObamaCare, most agreed that the individual mandate was a key part of the law, the whole thing needs to go. (The Trump administration has also refused to defend the law.)
As Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern explain, on the legal merits this argument is absolutely preposterous. The suit argues that Congress repealed ObamaCare in secret with the 2017 tax bill despite voting against an explicit repeal that very same year. And when Congress was designing the ACA, they included the individual mandate because all the liberal wonks agreed you needed one to stave off the dreaded cost death spiral within the ObamaCare exchanges. The Supreme Court has previously held that a law can stand with an unconstitutional portion removed so long as it is “fully operative” without it — and not only does it turn out that you don’t actually need the individual mandate to keep the exchanges functioning, there are tons of parts of ObamaCare that have nothing to do with the mandate or exchanges at all, like the Medicaid expansion or allowing children to stay on their parents’ insurance until age 26.
Continue to article: https://www.theweek.com/articles/886344/republicans-are-still-trying-steal-health-insurance
