On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court began hearing arguments in the case California v. Texas, in which a coalition of Republicans is challenging the legality of the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare. Early parts of this oral argument session suggested that at least two of the court’s conservative justices sounded unconvinced of the supposed need to throw out the entirety of the landmark health care law — and adding two conservative justices in favor of preserving the law to the court’s three liberal justices would give the law the majority support that it needs to survive.
The two conservative justices who expressed skepticism about the Republican case against the entirety of Obamacare included Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the latter of whom is a Trump appointee. Republicans have been arguing that the 2017 elimination of the law’s tax penalty for not having health coverage means that the legal foundation for the whole law has been eliminated. The Supreme Court itself previously concluded that Obamacare’s original financial penalty for not having health care was legal because of the federal government’s legal ability to impose a tax. In this case, the penalty was a tax for not having health coverage.
The Obamacare case has come before the court shortly after the rushed Senate confirmation of Trump’s third pick for the bench, Amy Coney Barrett, who has previously expressed opposition to the monumental health care law.
During oral arguments, Kavanaugh said that he would say that the challenge to Obamacare is “a very straightforward case under our precedents, meaning that we would excise the mandate and leave the rest in place.” (The tax penalty for not having health care was eliminated, but the “mandate” to get health coverage itself was not. Without the pretense of the tax, the government may not have the legal standing to mandate health coverage for all citizens, some have said, and Republicans extend this argument against the law’s whole foundation.) Roberts noted that “Congress left the law intact when it lowered the penalties to zero,” and he said that Congressional preservation of the law “seems to be compelling evidence on the question.”
Broadly, POLITICO noted that many “legal observers believed this case, California v. Texas, to be the weakest of the Supreme Court challenges to Obamacare so far.” It’s the third major challenge to Obamacare that the Supreme Court has heard. Donald Trump has ranted and raved against the law, but he has yet to come up with any meaningfully comprehensive replacement — no matter the fact that his own administration is supporting the challenges to the law at the Supreme Court. Republicans have been attempting to get rid of Obamacare essentially ever since it was enacted, and they’ve failed over and over.
President-elect Joe Biden has discussed a plan to build on Obamacare with the implementation of a “public option” for Americans seeking health coverage. This public option would provide many Americans with the opportunity to get government-backed health coverage, but the plan would not mandate the imposition of such government-backed coverage, and it would largely leave private insurance plans intact. Trump’s claims that Biden aims to do away with private health coverage are false.
